Well, this is the first time I saw this article. I can't believe they made a virtual machine to handle cpu init only! I found this very insightful into Microsoft.
I used to have conspiracy theories that when MS was going to release a build, they ran an obfuscation script to inject random code. Like copying values around in memory, values that were never used for anything, etcetera, as reverse engineering-quelling techniques.
After using Unixes for a while I began to think that it would be just too much work to reverse engineer Windows, so such techniques were just unnecessary. If you can't buy Windows or run CE for your platform, just use another toolkit and OS.
Reading the amount of work they did to break running normal x86 binaries on their custom PC, the conspiracy theories are coming back.
I also think it's insightful that, instead of say more OpenGL optimizations or more security work, they paid engineers to develop these obfuscation techniques. What does that tell you about them?
Their still grudgingly trying to sell black boxes, whether software or hardware, that buyers will be helpless to work with without them. How can you still think that will work?
When people are using Nokia devices with Linux or whatever the future holds, Bill 'Monty Burns' Gates will still be refusing to get entangled in building or selling anything that he doesn't have total lock-in on. And the tar pit will swell up around him, and he'll join the other dinosaurs.
this page is unusable shit. When I make a page it's ugly, but at least you can figure out that the links are the blue words. Crap. How do I know my latitude and longitude? Great. I think I'll make a tool that makes you put your exact weight in micrograms in, or some other thing that nobody knows or gives a fuck about. Okay, so I had some tallboys. And then some scotch. Sue me.
Okay, Chris is not the best journalist in the world, but he had a show on TechTV. I don't think you did. Yes he is a geek, but this is Slashdot, so ??? He was excited about his Sony toy and his Apple toys. They are cool. Maybe you should try them? You sound like a stick in the mud. You're mind has been captured by the Borg. Unplug from the matrix! Say no to the fascist machine! AWAKE!
..."told them up front there was a 5% chance they wouldn't be coming back"... It's probably more like a 5% chance that they WILL be coming back. Who cares? I'll go. "Gentlemen, we need to know where we stand from a position of status. What do we got left on the ship that is good?" Gene Krantz
I vote for the Frog name. I agree that Mandrake is a great newbie distro, but it is also a full fledged Unix for your computer. As people learn they can admin servers running Mandrake, and write Perl scripts on Mandrake. It is very popular in Europe. I really wish the Midnight Flying Frogs edition would be released. Corporations are taking the dorkness out of Unix. Blah. Yellowdog doesn't even have fortune any more.
" I have to say that my subjective impression of Mandrake is that it is just odd." "Score:3, Informative" Huh? What does switching to an annual release cycle (better for those who use the community version) have to do with being odd? I have to say that nodehopper is a dipshit. This is exactly as informative as his saying that Mandrake is odd. I ran the IT for an organization with 150 users with Mandrake Linux, what is his point? Yes, it uses Perl in place of shell scripts in lots of places. And it is different from other distributions in many ways. I've used the distros you mention and others. I find Turbolinux especially different. So? And an interim release does not mean ME, it means a snapshot to give users an update to stabilize on while the first annual release is developed. I'm glad he uses Suse. Who gives a shit?
He gave the impression that he is a non-technical Microsoft Weenie just like the rest of them. A lying idiot. A spin doctor, who says nothing. Vapid: the state of anything spoken by anybody from Microsoft in an interview. Saying that Linux machines require registration and click throughs and tracking is bull shit. I think it is neither a good nor a bad interview. I'm glad Roblimo didn't suck his dick too much. But what is the point? The fucker just spews the same shit as all of the other MS clones. Toeing the party line. He is a cock sucker with no backbone, a jelly fish, a squid. Linux is for independent thinkers, and he is not one. He is Corporate Man and he is only allowed to say Corporate Speak. FUCK YOU. Eat shit and die.
The email system is not at fault here, but PC'S INFECTED WITH THIS FLAW. Are these Linux PCs? Macs? MICROSOFT STRIKES AGAIN. Don't take best practices and security seriously? Get fucked. Enjoy.
That's a good reason to use an mbox somewhere. Then whenever your online accounts start to get full, you do an IMAP flush or pop nokeep with fetchmail and pull everything into a spool. Then your online accounts have plenty of space, but you have all of your mails on a hard disk. You can then easily copy it anywhere and read it with emacs or notepad if you like. Your mail is then preserved for yourself, or your survivors. I do this about quarterly, I have an old OpenBSD box at home that I dump anything I want to keep onto. I have a little script that pulls down all of my mail from all of my accounts using fetchmail. Whenever I want to back up or move the mail somewhere else, it takes two mutt commands to mark all as read and dump it in your mbox from the spool.
I am American, and after clawing my way up into middle management in IT, told my employer how much they sucked, and at age 32 took a student IT job and went back to school at Ohio State. I am thoroughly enjoying being in a large college, and enjoy finally getting to hang out with some seriously knowledgable hackers. I'm surprised how few of them I've met though, at one of the biggest campuses in the world. I am really struggling with the Math, frankly last quarter was my first full time quarter since 1992, and I got a D in my Math class. I have to retake it, but that doesn't even bother me very much. It's not like it matters, I'll have a chance to learn the material better and pull up my GPA, while people who are 18 would get pretty depressed about such a thing. I am pretty much starting from square 1, since my AS in Electronics was so long ago. So I'm not in a hurry. I know that life can be really long if you are in a job that you hate, so it's better to take your time with school in hopes that you will get the future that you want. Having said that I recently bid on a Linux Admin contract job... The hardest part for me is shuffling bills around to credit cards and student loan debt. I am used to paying my bills and having a few hundred bucks a month cushion. Now I do not make enough money from my student job to pay all my expenses, so I have to shuffle. Frankly it's also wonderful to walk around and see the glossy lipped rich 19 year old chicks in their Britney pants. Or like the other day, wearing only a towel. Gives you a nice perspective on life. Now after a short while you get pretty callous to the whole thing, but you still pretty much daily encounter some creature that makes you do a double take in shock, disbelief, and wonder. Beautiful beautiful things. The number of possibilities for both study and career at a large university are pretty staggering too. There are more opportunities there than anywhere I've ever come across. So you may regret staying in your job, but you will not regret at least giving an American grad school a little time. It will be good for your soul if nothing else. It's good for mine.
Not a big fiction reader, but have consumed a few of your works this year.
You and I are similar in age I would guess, though I'm a little too young to have used paper tape. I bought a Commodore around '81 or so.
You are obviously interested in computing machine history, and are comfortable with the idioms of shells, ttys, and UNIX. At least you showed some insight in such things as Randy Waterhouse decrypting the punch cards by hiding his C++ code using X, job control, etcetera.
Also, the cryptography concepts presented in Cryptonomicon were my first more advanced exposures to crypto theory, and I found them fascinating. I recently have been trying to solve a problem using something similar to Turing's bicycle chain theories.
So, two questions:
Do you still study things like Perl and C?
Do you do any cryptography coding and tinkering?
Keep writing, and may I also cast a vote for more modern or futuristic material. Also the WWII threads in Cryptonomicon I found particularly rich, both the storytelling and the historical depth. I could read another 1,000 pages.
I'm not a devourer of sci-fi, but I have read a few of your works, including Cryptonomicon.
I really enjoyed Shaftoe's thread in the story, and the whole wacky Misinformation Squad the WWII characters ended up in. I felt that you really portrayed the guts of our veterans in Shaftoe. Lots of people die in war, and Shaftoe seemed to be the romantic character who never hesitated to do his duty, and do everything with all the heart and gusto he had, though he was doomed to never enjoy what most of us take for granted. And spew some damn colorful language while he did so.
What was your inspiration for Shaftoe's character and that thread of the story?
Don't confuse releasing a database with changing to a complete open source philosophy. CA is a huge Windows company, with backup, spam, antivirus, messaging, etcetera products that are competing at the top in each market on the Windows platform.
They are not Us. They are a big company who is waiting to fuck anything that moves.
Are we forgetting that their CEO recently was forced out and they are having some serious post-dot-com issues?
CA does have some nice cross-platform products, but they are not leaving Windows behind any time soon.
They have lots of people working for them, and I'm sure they have the usual population of Linux and Open Source users and believers. I'm not getting a hard on about them releasing this database. It's good news, it's free publicity, it's buying a little karma with the "Linux Open Source Social Movement". We are a cheap fuckin date, I'll tell ya.
Hi, being someone who has re-read Levy's "Hackers" a couple times and is a fan of Unix history, couldn't help but notice your last name. Are you, in fact, related to Richard (Ricky) Greenblatt of MIT, "Hackers", TMRC, TX-0, Kluge Room, PDP-1, Spacewar fame? I did check your CA bio, which didn't hint of any such thing. I don't remember if he ever had a family. I like the Blatt-isms, such as "If hackers are born, then they're going to get made, and if they're made into it, they were born." Just curious, Lincoln
Oh, ahh, my side. Sniff. I cried laughing. Damn funny.
Seriously, this seems like a great way to piss off the southern hemisphere. And while we're at it, let's throw some diesel on the fire! Duh. "Let's see if we can rile 'em up a little bit. He's pissed off now alright, Crikey!".
Dah Fuhrer doesn't let you switch to Linux and then talk about why it's so much better? Are your paperz not in orrderr?
I suppose Microsoft is against free speech as well as software now? You should buy a shrink-wrapped licensed copy of speech from an authorized vendor, and not just copy speech from your friends? Bill, Get a Grip.
And to think that this all because people copied the Altair BASIC paper tape. Jeez, Gates.
Okay, I'm just going to have to keep changing my license key in the registry to "Fuck off, Gates, I'm in a meeting." like always. God, I love doing that.
I'm glad I joined the FSF recently, at least maybe we can keep speech free.
I'm sorry, I have dropped out of the tech support biz for a while, and my MS frustration has been waning nicely. But the news lately is getting my blood up again. MS Antivirus, are you fucking serious? And now no public anti-MS sentiment? The only reason a politician would speak out against anything is if they know that what they say will be popular. He said what he knew the people would agree with, and by and large people have been scratching their heads and saying, "Makes sense." ever since he did. MS had better get used to the fact that people are tired of the monopoly, but mostly the licensing and registration issues, shitty support, and viruses. There is a huge backlash and it is obviously growing. And suing people who are frustrated and sick of the way you do business will not warm hearts or create the gooey "community" that they say they want to grow. Please! MS is not even trying to make us believe that they want a nice community. They don't care, they don't understand it, and they will continue to see their user base hemorrhage because of it. As far as their support, I'm sure there are people who are smart and don't mind dealing with MS tech support, but I found dealing with them one of the most stupid aggravating experiences of my life. Free Unix systems with loads of documentation and misc@ mailing lists are much easier to solve problems on, if you are willing to work things out for yourself and not cry until MS stuffs a pacifier in your face. A pacifier in the form of a hotfix that is not freely available, or at least not without going through their information gathering process that is thinly veiled as tech support. Why make users jump through hoops to get fixes to your broken fucking software? I know admins are overworked and don't have time to dot the i's. Just patch it, next problem. But that's the pitiful band-aid syndrome that tech support is full of. Instead of pulling out things by the goddamn root and doing it right, it's always patch and band-aid. And the business people don't fucking understand the difference, or care.
That's right, I quit my tech support job and have been working at a dry cleaners. I just do my job and come home tired and ready to relax. I don't spend the weekend guzzling scotch and hating life because my job is so fucking stupid. I have even rewritten my Python game a couple times since then, since I have some mental energy again and am not staring into space in a depressed state. Six years of Windows tech support drove me to professional laundry.
So it's back to school to get my BSEE. I'll design circuits and write assembler and fuck tech support. I did it when I got my AS in electronics, I'll do it again. And this time there is no way in HELL that I will settle for a tech support job. I'll do laundry first.
You can't take away Linux, and you can't make people not bitch in public about your shitty products and business practices. You better ignore it and go on, instead of stirring the embers with a stick, Dipshits. Peckerwoods.
Nothing gets the kinks out and helps get fresh insight like a long cycling trip or a day in the sun walking around Mid Ohio Sports Car Course. The smell of hot oil, rubber, and racing fuel. Engines tweaked to within a millimeter of their lives. Yeah, baby.
And then when you go home and sit in front of Emacs, long-standing mental blocks are often cleared.
Some of us live with our girlfriends, so we don't have to walk around outside looking for sex... Hmm, I think I've always done it inside. What kind of people go outside when they want to have sex? Are you from Arkansas? Baaa.
This is really just a port of my quakeiii.el emacs LISP macro to IF. That's right, IT'S EXTENSIBLE. System Requirements: device that offers vt100 terminal emulation by Any Means Necessary look for the Altair assembler tape and EZTERM add-on board Q4 2004!
Screw the IT industry! IT is a boot that connects with your groin again and again. I am in a job that I hate and have no credibility because I am honest and these poor business people have been bulls!@#ted for so long they don't know which end is up. Time keeps vindicating me though:)
I used to play in bands and sold guitars for a living. I am currently making more money than I ever have, and I DON'T CARE. I am seriously considering going back into music, money be damned. That is after five years in IT.
Life is too short to sit in a windowless cubicle and click through error messages on Windows machines all f!@#ing day!
I agree that the ports of Linux vary hugely in functionality. The Debian team seems to mainly spearhead the work with the buildd systems. The whole darn tree has to build on all targets. It keeps the toolchain people honest. Of course this is only true for the Debian target platforms, not every platform that some obsessed^H^Hdetermined hacker has tried to bootstrap the kernel on.
As a tinkerer with old hardware, I have seen that Linux support is way behind on the 68k Macintoshes. The 2.4 and 2.6 kernels *would not even build* for a long, long time. That's right, all you could do was run Potato with it's 2.2 kernel. Ugh, SCSI on the 53c9x was broken so badly that the machine would hang if you tried to install from a cd to your hard disk, or even copy files. NetBSD ran very well, and even had DMA SCSI. It only had a monochrome X server, but trust me, you didn't want to run much X software on a 25MHz Motorola with 16MB RAM. Xterms and dillo work fine. Some people with bad mutha Amigas running at 60MHz with tons of RAM run KDE though...
I understand that the 2.4 tree has been cleaned up a lot in the last six months, but it's obvious that the NetBSD tree is cleaner and easier to maintain cross-platform. I mean, on Linux ld was broken for several versions. How do you do any work when the linker is broken?
This isn't a slam, everyone in the 68k community has famously shared code for this completely undocumented (no thanks, Steve Jobs) platform. If you've done much reading on Apple, you know how wacky their systems are...
And Alan Cox was the one to port Linux in '97, three or four years behind Net- and OpenBSD's development.
In some ways I think the exponential growth of code in Linux can make it very difficult to manage compared to the spare trees at NetBSD and OpenBSD. I am not an OS programmer, but I've spent some time with the code trying to figure things out. Linux is very much a moving target, it can be exhausting. However, the huge number of carpenters hammering away standing on the structure others have already built gives Linux a big advantage as far as core functionality and maturity on popular hardware. But when there is a complete interrupt handling layer re-write or SCSI, the less popular architecture code that is broken just gets/*'ed in hopes that someday someone will care and take the time to figure it out...
Small isn't everything obviously, I was recently checking out NewOS whose tree tarball fits on a floppy disk:) Of course there isn't much there, it's mostly some assembler bootstrap code and a shell, etcetera.
"Once school is completed I'll make at least twice what I did working on cars." HAHAHAHA!
Exactly. WAKE UP FROM THE DREAM!
If you want to fix computers, go for it. You can have my job. I'm tired of sitting here waiting for Windows to decide if it's going to puke or just loop unresponsively forever and hating life. My company always decides to go for the lowest common denominator when making any decisions (rather than a customizable Perl on Unix solution, we would rather buy CA and XP and play with pretty colored blocks because we're morons, and we WILL NEVER CHANGE!!!).
>The IT world is a boot, folks, and it impacts on your nether regions again and again and again...
Hah, you ain't just whistlin' "Dixie"...
I got an A.S. in Electronics, and like a dumbass, instead of refusing to do anything other than assembler programming for microcontrollers in a lab or manufacturing environment, I took the first job I was offered in my home town, fixing cash registers. Five or six years and several jobs later (selling guitars, restaurant work, Radio Shack, high-rise maintenance) I decided that I was going to get a programming job, so I audited two COBOL classes to cash in on Y2k per my company's IS manager's advice.
Again, like a dumbass, I settled for fixing and selling PCs after a year of job hunting. Now five or six years later I have worked my way up to sysadmin at a prominent law firm. I work downtown in Dah Big City (compared to where I'm from) and I have my own office.
I'm divorced, and I'm shacked up with my girlfriend in a nice duplex in a cool old neighborhood. The bike trail is at the end of my street and is 25 miles round trip, it splits the city North-South. I quit smoking and started cycling most nights after work.
The problem is, I'm still fixing f!@#ing Windows problems, even though I have set up and run several Unix servers, and worked in a Solaris environment for two years. So I finally have things pretty good, but I'm sick of doing this work.
I tried taking night classes to work towards an EE degree, but it will take all of my evenings and most of my vacation/fun money for at least five or six years. I'm 32, I spent my 20's putting my ex-wife through college out in the boonies. I can't see spending my 30's on that frigging hamster wheel. I want to have some fun before I die.
If I could figure out how to go to school and have some more free time to get out of my windowless office, I would be off like a shot. But how do you do that? I make $17 an hour, which ain't a lot, but it's enough to make a decent living and do things.
Now you bastards are talking about how much you hate your programming jobs that pay $40 an hour. Makes me want to start selling guitars again and play in bands and forget the whole business. There's a lot of good lookin' girls around campus here in Dah Big City:)
Isn't this the same as local broadcast tv? If you don't watch the commercials, you are 'stealing'? I was talking to some lawyers about this (I'm their sysadmin) and they had never even heard or thought about this...
If business lawyers have never even heard of these insane 'you must watch advertising' schemes, they must be crap.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, this is the first time I saw this article. I can't believe they made a virtual machine to handle cpu init only! I found this very insightful into Microsoft.
I used to have conspiracy theories that when MS was going to release a build, they ran an obfuscation script to inject random code. Like copying values around in memory, values that were never used for anything, etcetera, as reverse engineering-quelling techniques.
After using Unixes for a while I began to think that it would be just too much work to reverse engineer Windows, so such techniques were just unnecessary. If you can't buy Windows or run CE for your platform, just use another toolkit and OS.
Reading the amount of work they did to break running normal x86 binaries on their custom PC, the conspiracy theories are coming back.
I also think it's insightful that, instead of say more OpenGL optimizations or more security work, they paid engineers to develop these obfuscation techniques. What does that tell you about them?
Their still grudgingly trying to sell black boxes, whether software or hardware, that buyers will be helpless to work with without them. How can you still think that will work?
When people are using Nokia devices with Linux or whatever the future holds, Bill 'Monty Burns' Gates will still be refusing to get entangled in building or selling anything that he doesn't have total lock-in on. And the tar pit will swell up around him, and he'll join the other dinosaurs.
this page is unusable shit. When I make a page it's ugly, but at least you can figure out that the links are the blue words. Crap. How do I know my latitude and longitude? Great.
I think I'll make a tool that makes you put your exact weight in micrograms in, or some other thing that nobody knows or gives a fuck about.
Okay, so I had some tallboys. And then some scotch. Sue me.
Okay, Chris is not the best journalist in the world, but he had a show on TechTV. I don't think you did.
Yes he is a geek, but this is Slashdot, so ???
He was excited about his Sony toy and his Apple toys. They are cool. Maybe you should try them? You sound like a stick in the mud. You're mind has been captured by the Borg. Unplug from the matrix! Say no to the fascist machine! AWAKE!
..."told them up front there was a 5% chance they wouldn't be coming back"...
It's probably more like a 5% chance that they WILL be coming back. Who cares? I'll go.
"Gentlemen, we need to know where we stand from a position of status. What do we got left on the ship that is good?" Gene Krantz
I vote for the Frog name.
I agree that Mandrake is a great newbie distro, but it is also a full fledged Unix for your computer. As people learn they can admin servers running Mandrake, and write Perl scripts on Mandrake.
It is very popular in Europe.
I really wish the Midnight Flying Frogs edition would be released. Corporations are taking the dorkness out of Unix. Blah. Yellowdog doesn't even have fortune any more.
" I have to say that my subjective impression of Mandrake is that it is just odd."
"Score:3, Informative"
Huh?
What does switching to an annual release cycle (better for those who use the community version) have to do with being odd?
I have to say that nodehopper is a dipshit. This is exactly as informative as his saying that Mandrake is odd.
I ran the IT for an organization with 150 users with Mandrake Linux, what is his point?
Yes, it uses Perl in place of shell scripts in lots of places. And it is different from other distributions in many ways. I've used the distros you mention and others. I find Turbolinux especially different. So?
And an interim release does not mean ME, it means a snapshot to give users an update to stabilize on while the first annual release is developed.
I'm glad he uses Suse. Who gives a shit?
He gave the impression that he is a non-technical Microsoft Weenie just like the rest of them. A lying idiot. A spin doctor, who says nothing. Vapid: the state of anything spoken by anybody from Microsoft in an interview.
Saying that Linux machines require registration and click throughs and tracking is bull shit.
I think it is neither a good nor a bad interview. I'm glad Roblimo didn't suck his dick too much.
But what is the point? The fucker just spews the same shit as all of the other MS clones. Toeing the party line. He is a cock sucker with no backbone, a jelly fish, a squid.
Linux is for independent thinkers, and he is not one. He is Corporate Man and he is only allowed to say Corporate Speak. FUCK YOU. Eat shit and die.
The email system is not at fault here, but PC'S INFECTED WITH THIS FLAW. Are these Linux PCs? Macs? MICROSOFT STRIKES AGAIN. Don't take best practices and security seriously? Get fucked. Enjoy.
That's a good reason to use an mbox somewhere. Then whenever your online accounts start to get full, you do an IMAP flush or pop nokeep with fetchmail and pull everything into a spool. Then your online accounts have plenty of space, but you have all of your mails on a hard disk. You can then easily copy it anywhere and read it with emacs or notepad if you like.
Your mail is then preserved for yourself, or your survivors.
I do this about quarterly, I have an old OpenBSD box at home that I dump anything I want to keep onto. I have a little script that pulls down all of my mail from all of my accounts using fetchmail. Whenever I want to back up or move the mail somewhere else, it takes two mutt commands to mark all as read and dump it in your mbox from the spool.
Hi Alan, when are you going to post again to your diary? Telsa is AWOL too. Hope the holidays were good.
I am American, and after clawing my way up into middle management in IT, told my employer how much they sucked, and at age 32 took a student IT job and went back to school at Ohio State. I am thoroughly enjoying being in a large college, and enjoy finally getting to hang out with some seriously knowledgable hackers. I'm surprised how few of them I've met though, at one of the biggest campuses in the world.
I am really struggling with the Math, frankly last quarter was my first full time quarter since 1992, and I got a D in my Math class. I have to retake it, but that doesn't even bother me very much. It's not like it matters, I'll have a chance to learn the material better and pull up my GPA, while people who are 18 would get pretty depressed about such a thing. I am pretty much starting from square 1, since my AS in Electronics was so long ago. So I'm not in a hurry. I know that life can be really long if you are in a job that you hate, so it's better to take your time with school in hopes that you will get the future that you want.
Having said that I recently bid on a Linux Admin contract job...
The hardest part for me is shuffling bills around to credit cards and student loan debt. I am used to paying my bills and having a few hundred bucks a month cushion. Now I do not make enough money from my student job to pay all my expenses, so I have to shuffle.
Frankly it's also wonderful to walk around and see the glossy lipped rich 19 year old chicks in their Britney pants. Or like the other day, wearing only a towel. Gives you a nice perspective on life. Now after a short while you get pretty callous to the whole thing, but you still pretty much daily encounter some creature that makes you do a double take in shock, disbelief, and wonder. Beautiful beautiful things.
The number of possibilities for both study and career at a large university are pretty staggering too. There are more opportunities there than anywhere I've ever come across.
So you may regret staying in your job, but you will not regret at least giving an American grad school a little time. It will be good for your soul if nothing else. It's good for mine.
Hi Neal!
Not a big fiction reader, but have consumed a few of your works this year.
You and I are similar in age I would guess, though I'm a little too young to have used paper tape. I bought a Commodore around '81 or so.
You are obviously interested in computing machine history, and are comfortable with the idioms of shells, ttys, and UNIX. At least you showed some insight in such things as Randy Waterhouse decrypting the punch cards by hiding his C++ code using X, job control, etcetera.
Also, the cryptography concepts presented in Cryptonomicon were my first more advanced exposures to crypto theory, and I found them fascinating. I recently have been trying to solve a problem using something similar to Turing's bicycle chain theories.
So, two questions:
Do you still study things like Perl and C?
Do you do any cryptography coding and tinkering?
Keep writing, and may I also cast a vote for more modern or futuristic material. Also the WWII threads in Cryptonomicon I found particularly rich, both the storytelling and the historical depth. I could read another 1,000 pages.
Hi Neal!
I'm not a devourer of sci-fi, but I have read a few of your works, including Cryptonomicon.
I really enjoyed Shaftoe's thread in the story, and the whole wacky Misinformation Squad the WWII characters ended up in. I felt that you really portrayed the guts of our veterans in Shaftoe. Lots of people die in war, and Shaftoe seemed to be the romantic character who never hesitated to do his duty, and do everything with all the heart and gusto he had, though he was doomed to never enjoy what most of us take for granted. And spew some damn colorful language while he did so.
What was your inspiration for Shaftoe's character and that thread of the story?
The last record a few months ago was set on NetBSD. It's a game of leapfrog.
Don't confuse releasing a database with changing to a complete open source philosophy. CA is a huge Windows company, with backup, spam, antivirus, messaging, etcetera products that are competing at the top in each market on the Windows platform.
They are not Us. They are a big company who is waiting to fuck anything that moves.
Are we forgetting that their CEO recently was forced out and they are having some serious post-dot-com issues?
CA does have some nice cross-platform products, but they are not leaving Windows behind any time soon.
They have lots of people working for them, and I'm sure they have the usual population of Linux and Open Source users and believers. I'm not getting a hard on about them releasing this database. It's good news, it's free publicity, it's buying a little karma with the "Linux Open Source Social Movement". We are a cheap fuckin date, I'll tell ya.
Hi, being someone who has re-read Levy's "Hackers" a couple times and is a fan of Unix history, couldn't help but notice your last name. Are you, in fact, related to Richard (Ricky) Greenblatt of MIT, "Hackers", TMRC, TX-0, Kluge Room, PDP-1, Spacewar fame? I did check your CA bio, which didn't hint of any such thing. I don't remember if he ever had a family.
I like the Blatt-isms, such as "If hackers are born, then they're going to get made, and if they're made into it, they were born."
Just curious, Lincoln
Oh, ahh, my side. Sniff. I cried laughing. Damn funny.
Seriously, this seems like a great way to piss off the southern hemisphere. And while we're at it, let's throw some diesel on the fire! Duh. "Let's see if we can rile 'em up a little bit. He's pissed off now alright, Crikey!".
Dah Fuhrer doesn't let you switch to Linux and then talk about why it's so much better? Are your paperz not in orrderr?
I suppose Microsoft is against free speech as well as software now? You should buy a shrink-wrapped licensed copy of speech from an authorized vendor, and not just copy speech from your friends? Bill, Get a Grip.
And to think that this all because people copied the Altair BASIC paper tape. Jeez, Gates.
Okay, I'm just going to have to keep changing my license key in the registry to "Fuck off, Gates, I'm in a meeting." like always. God, I love doing that.
I'm glad I joined the FSF recently, at least maybe we can keep speech free.
I'm sorry, I have dropped out of the tech support biz for a while, and my MS frustration has been waning nicely. But the news lately is getting my blood up again. MS Antivirus, are you fucking serious? And now no public anti-MS sentiment? The only reason a politician would speak out against anything is if they know that what they say will be popular. He said what he knew the people would agree with, and by and large people have been scratching their heads and saying, "Makes sense." ever since he did. MS had better get used to the fact that people are tired of the monopoly, but mostly the licensing and registration issues, shitty support, and viruses. There is a huge backlash and it is obviously growing. And suing people who are frustrated and sick of the way you do business will not warm hearts or create the gooey "community" that they say they want to grow. Please! MS is not even trying to make us believe that they want a nice community. They don't care, they don't understand it, and they will continue to see their user base hemorrhage because of it.
As far as their support, I'm sure there are people who are smart and don't mind dealing with MS tech support, but I found dealing with them one of the most stupid aggravating experiences of my life. Free Unix systems with loads of documentation and misc@ mailing lists are much easier to solve problems on, if you are willing to work things out for yourself and not cry until MS stuffs a pacifier in your face. A pacifier in the form of a hotfix that is not freely available, or at least not without going through their information gathering process that is thinly veiled as tech support. Why make users jump through hoops to get fixes to your broken fucking software? I know admins are overworked and don't have time to dot the i's. Just patch it, next problem. But that's the pitiful band-aid syndrome that tech support is full of. Instead of pulling out things by the goddamn root and doing it right, it's always patch and band-aid. And the business people don't fucking understand the difference, or care.
That's right, I quit my tech support job and have been working at a dry cleaners. I just do my job and come home tired and ready to relax. I don't spend the weekend guzzling scotch and hating life because my job is so fucking stupid. I have even rewritten my Python game a couple times since then, since I have some mental energy again and am not staring into space in a depressed state. Six years of Windows tech support drove me to professional laundry.
So it's back to school to get my BSEE. I'll design circuits and write assembler and fuck tech support. I did it when I got my AS in electronics, I'll do it again. And this time there is no way in HELL that I will settle for a tech support job. I'll do laundry first.
You can't take away Linux, and you can't make people not bitch in public about your shitty products and business practices. You better ignore it and go on, instead of stirring the embers with a stick, Dipshits. Peckerwoods.
Nothing gets the kinks out and helps get fresh insight like a long cycling trip or a day in the sun walking around Mid Ohio Sports Car Course. The smell of hot oil, rubber, and racing fuel. Engines tweaked to within a millimeter of their lives. Yeah, baby.
And then when you go home and sit in front of Emacs, long-standing mental blocks are often cleared.
Some of us live with our girlfriends, so we don't have to walk around outside looking for sex... Hmm, I think I've always done it inside. What kind of people go outside when they want to have sex? Are you from Arkansas? Baaa.
This is really just a port of my quakeiii.el emacs LISP macro to IF. That's right, IT'S EXTENSIBLE.
System Requirements:
device that offers vt100 terminal emulation by Any Means Necessary
look for the Altair assembler tape and EZTERM add-on board Q4 2004!
Screw the IT industry! IT is a boot that connects with your groin again and again. I am in a job that I hate and have no credibility because I am honest and these poor business people have been bulls!@#ted for so long they don't know which end is up. Time keeps vindicating me though :)
I used to play in bands and sold guitars for a living. I am currently making more money than I ever have, and I DON'T CARE. I am seriously considering going back into music, money be damned. That is after five years in IT.
Life is too short to sit in a windowless cubicle and click through error messages on Windows machines all f!@#ing day!
Run, boy! What do you want to do with yourself?
I WANNA ROCK!!!
I agree that the ports of Linux vary hugely in functionality. The Debian team seems to mainly spearhead the work with the buildd systems. The whole darn tree has to build on all targets. It keeps the toolchain people honest. Of course this is only true for the Debian target platforms, not every platform that some obsessed^H^Hdetermined hacker has tried to bootstrap the kernel on.
/*'ed in hopes that someday someone will care and take the time to figure it out...
:) Of course there isn't much there, it's mostly some assembler bootstrap code and a shell, etcetera.
As a tinkerer with old hardware, I have seen that Linux support is way behind on the 68k Macintoshes. The 2.4 and 2.6 kernels *would not even build* for a long, long time. That's right, all you could do was run Potato with it's 2.2 kernel. Ugh, SCSI on the 53c9x was broken so badly that the machine would hang if you tried to install from a cd to your hard disk, or even copy files. NetBSD ran very well, and even had DMA SCSI. It only had a monochrome X server, but trust me, you didn't want to run much X software on a 25MHz Motorola with 16MB RAM. Xterms and dillo work fine. Some people with bad mutha Amigas running at 60MHz with tons of RAM run KDE though...
I understand that the 2.4 tree has been cleaned up a lot in the last six months, but it's obvious that the NetBSD tree is cleaner and easier to maintain cross-platform. I mean, on Linux ld was broken for several versions. How do you do any work when the linker is broken?
This isn't a slam, everyone in the 68k community has famously shared code for this completely undocumented (no thanks, Steve Jobs) platform. If you've done much reading on Apple, you know how wacky their systems are...
And Alan Cox was the one to port Linux in '97, three or four years behind Net- and OpenBSD's development.
In some ways I think the exponential growth of code in Linux can make it very difficult to manage compared to the spare trees at NetBSD and OpenBSD. I am not an OS programmer, but I've spent some time with the code trying to figure things out. Linux is very much a moving target, it can be exhausting. However, the huge number of carpenters hammering away standing on the structure others have already built gives Linux a big advantage as far as core functionality and maturity on popular hardware. But when there is a complete interrupt handling layer re-write or SCSI, the less popular architecture code that is broken just gets
Small isn't everything obviously, I was recently checking out NewOS whose tree tarball fits on a floppy disk
Rambling now, sorry...
"Once school is completed I'll make at least twice what I did working on cars."
HAHAHAHA!
Exactly. WAKE UP FROM THE DREAM!
If you want to fix computers, go for it. You can have my job. I'm tired of sitting here waiting for Windows to decide if it's going to puke or just loop unresponsively forever and hating life. My company always decides to go for the lowest common denominator when making any decisions (rather than a customizable Perl on Unix solution, we would rather buy CA and XP and play with pretty colored blocks because we're morons, and we WILL NEVER CHANGE!!!).
It must be time for me to change jobs.
fdisk3hs
>The IT world is a boot, folks, and it impacts on your nether regions again and again and again...
:)
Hah, you ain't just whistlin' "Dixie"...
I got an A.S. in Electronics, and like a dumbass, instead of refusing to do anything other than assembler programming for microcontrollers in a lab or manufacturing environment, I took the first job I was offered in my home town, fixing cash registers. Five or six years and several jobs later (selling guitars, restaurant work, Radio Shack, high-rise maintenance) I decided that I was going to get a programming job, so I audited two COBOL classes to cash in on Y2k per my company's IS manager's advice.
Again, like a dumbass, I settled for fixing and selling PCs after a year of job hunting. Now five or six years later I have worked my way up to sysadmin at a prominent law firm. I work downtown in Dah Big City (compared to where I'm from) and I have my own office.
I'm divorced, and I'm shacked up with my girlfriend in a nice duplex in a cool old neighborhood. The bike trail is at the end of my street and is 25 miles round trip, it splits the city North-South. I quit smoking and started cycling most nights after work.
The problem is, I'm still fixing f!@#ing Windows problems, even though I have set up and run several Unix servers, and worked in a Solaris environment for two years. So I finally have things pretty good, but I'm sick of doing this work.
I tried taking night classes to work towards an EE degree, but it will take all of my evenings and most of my vacation/fun money for at least five or six years. I'm 32, I spent my 20's putting my ex-wife through college out in the boonies. I can't see spending my 30's on that frigging hamster wheel. I want to have some fun before I die.
If I could figure out how to go to school and have some more free time to get out of my windowless office, I would be off like a shot. But how do you do that? I make $17 an hour, which ain't a lot, but it's enough to make a decent living and do things.
Now you bastards are talking about how much you hate your programming jobs that pay $40 an hour. Makes me want to start selling guitars again and play in bands and forget the whole business. There's a lot of good lookin' girls around campus here in Dah Big City
fdisk3hs
Isn't this the same as local broadcast tv? If you don't watch the commercials, you are 'stealing'? I was talking to some lawyers about this (I'm their sysadmin) and they had never even heard or thought about this...
If business lawyers have never even heard of these insane 'you must watch advertising' schemes, they must be crap.
Since I am running an iBook and an old 68K Mac for a file server...
Solaris PPC would be cool... I wonder if it would be hard for them to part thanks to OpenFirmware?
Where were they in 2002 when I worked in a Sun shop? Argh.
BTW, the software was always free. You just had to buy the media kit or download...