> Was this game really that good, or do we just remember it as being great. I loved the game in the 80s, but I don't think it would hold my interest for a minute today.
Yes, it really was that good. I've played the NES version in the past year (2-player only; I don't have the Nintendo 4-controller adaptor doohickey), and it's still *fun*, which is more than I can say for 90% of the modern games I've played.
One of the things that makes MULE great is that the graphics hardware was so cheezy back then, the game designer *had* to concentrate on making the game interesting on a `cerebral' level, instead of appealing to the senses and thrilling the player with amazing-looking graphics.
Think of the difference between reading a good book and seeing a movie. Actually I suppose the analogy would be better made between a good comic book and a movie... both have visual elements, but the movie can blow your mind with effects to the point where you don't even notice if there are huge holes in the plot. You're too busy reacting on a primal/sensual level for your brain to be active.
Some people like movies better than books for the same reason I like books better, and some like modern games better than MULE for the same reason I like MULE better... so I guess the answer to `was this game really that great' depends entirely on which type of person you are. If you thought it was great then, you probably still will think it's great. If you thought it was boring then, I guess you'll still think that.
If you loved the game when it was new, I suggest you get it running again (even if only in an emulator) and find at least one other person who loved it then. Odds are the old magic will still be there.
In the interests of being totally honest though, I'm an old guy, and I like old games. I haven't really been `into' any game that's come out since probably Street Fighter II, although I'll play anything multiplayer with my friends. For single-player games, though, I'll stick with early 1980s `classics'. Your tastes are probably pretty different from mine, so maybe you'll hate MULE if you play it again tomorrow. *shrug*, at least give it a shot.
> The entire point is trying to bring Perl to the masses and get as many people together as possible from all uses of perl or even possibly using perl, to sit and talk about perl, with money not being a limit, a real community conference.
If it's `for the masses', why did they schedule it for Monday the 16th through Wednesday the 18th, when most of the masses I know will be at work?
I love perl, and I live within driving distance of this thing, and I could afford $85... but I can't get my employer to pay for it (we're primarily a Java shop. Bleah, but it pays the bills), and I can't take 3 days off at the beginning of the week. Sucks to be me.
Ah well. From what I can see on their web site, nobody I ever heard of is going to be there. I would skip one day of work to see Larry Wall, Randall Schwartz, or somebody else whose books I own give a talk, but this may be nothing so interesting.
Has anyone reading this ever been to one of these YAPC things? Are they interesting, informative, worth taking off work for, etc?
I've got a perfectly good Pentium-90 firewall/NAT box running Slackware 7.0 with kernel 2.2.13. It's been in use for a long time as-is (the kernel image itself is dated 04-10-2000), and runs sshd, but no other services (well, a fake identd, which is a 3-line perl hack, but the identd port's limited to the IP addresses of a few IRC servers, and nothing else).
I have had to upgrade openssh and openssl a few times, but otherwise I don't worry about that box.
One day I will replace it with something a little faster, and probably running Net or Open BSD, but there's no hurry.
Trivia: In the kernel config, to this day, you still see a `bugfix for CMD640 IDE chipset'.. my old P90 router actually has a CMD640 in it. However, it has only a single SCSI drive, plugged into the onboard (really!) SCSI controller. It's actually a pretty high-end board for its time period: Intel NX chipset, dual CPU support up to Pentium 120 (or maybe 133?), onboard NIC (not functional in Linux 2.2 though) and SCSI. I've got 80M of SIMMs in there; it would take up to 256M (8 slots @ 32M apiece. I don't believe it supports 64M SIMMs).
The last time I installed any new software on that box was in maybe 2001, when I wanted to temporarily run a QuakeWorld server on it. QuakeForge wouldn't compile with the ancient gcc on there (2.91.66), so I built a 100% static binary on my workstation & scp'ed it over. Ran like a champ for the 4 hours or so we played that day, but I wouldn't keep it up 24/7.
Why don't I upgrade it to Linux 2.4? A better question is why should I? I pulled this box out of a dumpster behind Revco (heh, the BIOS boot screen has a Revco logo on it, too) in 1996 or so, ran a 2.0 kernel on it for a while, upgraded to 2.2 + Slack 7 around the time Slack 7 came out... then got a `real job' and started making enough money I didn't need to use a piece of dumpster crap for a workstation any more, so pressed it into service as a router when I got cable for the first time. It Just Works, and it's likely to keep on Just Working long after my Athlon 2100+ workstation has died the death.
Basically, it's an appliance now. Power it on, and you have a noisier but more secure version of one of those dinky little Linksys routers people are buying now.
> Why is the drive firmware doing this stuff at all - why can't the OS do the job of deciding where to move the disk head and reordering request queues? I thought that was what all the elevator disk scheduling code in OSes was for.
Because of zone sectoring. OSes (and BIOSes) only know how to deal with drives that have the same number of sectors per track for all tracks, but obviously the tracks towards the outside of the drive are physically larger (bigger around) than the inner ones. The drive stores more data (more sectors) on the outer tracks, so as not to waste all that physical media... so the drive is divided into `zones'. An example would be: tracks 0-50 might have 18 sectors per track (zone 0), tracks 51-150 might have 22 (zone 1), etc.
Since the OS/BIOS couldn't deal with differing numbers of sectors per track, the drive lies about its geometry: it takes the total number of sectors, and comes up with a number of heads, cylinders, and sectors/cylinder that multiply out to the actual number of sectors on the drive. You didn't *really* think a 3.5" drive had 255 physical heads, did you?:)
Actually, this description is starting to become obsolete: modern drives use an addressing mode where it just presents a big array of sectors (numbered 0 through however many sectors are on the drive), and the OS doesn't know/care about cylinders or heads.
Either way, since the actual physical layout of the drive is hidden from the OS, it doesn't have enough information to know where to move the disk head, or to reorder requests for efficiency.
It would be possible to design a drive interface that exposes the true geometry to the OS, but:
- It would be 100% incompatible with existing software & firmware
- Firmware for today's drives only needs to know about the specific drive it's made for. An OS has to be general enough to handle any drive you'd want to use, so it would need more complex (bloated) code in its IDE/SCSI/whatever drivers. Alternatively, you'd need a specific driver for each make & model of hard disk (yuck).
I'm willing to bet there would be some performance gain in a system like that, but I doubt it would be worth the effort, and I doubt it would survive in the market (especially if it's competing for marketshare with serial ATA, Fiberchannel, Ultra/320 SCSI, etc.)
Basically, we're stuck with the decisions that were made for us 15-20 years ago (I'm not just talking about IBM & Microsoft: the SCSI standard hides disk geometry too).
> ICQ is not similar to "talk". In fact, "finger" comes closer to being prior art for it. (And "watch finger" comes closer still, although it still lacks the distributed nature which scales the idea up to thousands of hosts and makes the lists truely useful)
Fair enough. Though IRC has `presence indicators' as well. Yes, I know ICQ != IRC, but the idea of keeping track of `who's online' is similar in concept, if not in implementation.
Er, I forgot what we were talking about, actually......
> Things like Instant Messaging and weighted search results are of such obviously high usefulness that they would be invented, regardless of the inventor thinking he would be able to get patent protection.
That was the original point, all this quibbling over UNIX commands has me distracted...
What you say makes sense, but the current corporate mindset seems to be `patent everything, let the courts sort it out'. The authors of ICQ had at least as good a chance of getting a patent as any silly one-click shopping `inventors'.
Hm. Not sure where I'm going with this, actually, so I'm done.
Mirabilis didn't invent the concept of `instant messaging'. ICQ does the same thing as the UNIX `talk' command, which according to my man page, has been around since 4.2BSD (which came out in 1983).
I see this a lot: somebody takes a common idea and figures out a way to do it over TCP/IP (or as they say, `On that Innerweb thingy'), and suddenly it's a new `technology'.
I see the future: this post will degenerate into a deeply bitter and off-topic rant.. so I will shut up now.
It depends... does the patent cover the specific pattern of pixels Apple uses, or does it cover the concept of a trashcan icon?
Not being a patent lawyer, I don't have any idea.. but Apple has had a trashcan icon for what, 20 years now, and just now decided they needed a patent on it? Is that legit? Especially considering there's been a trashcan icon in KDE for a while now... can the estate of the Wright brothers apply for a patent on `device for airborne transportation' next week?
Also, does this patent cover the `dumpster' icon on my Irix desktop?
If the patent is actually just on the specific pixel pattern Apple uses for an icon, why didn't they just copyright the image? Kind of like Nintendo did with their logo (in order to boot, a Game Boy Advance ROM must contain a Nintendo logo.. the exact bit pattern must be present.. but since the logo is copyrighted, you can't legally distribute homebrew GBA games containing it)
The paper mentions injecting escape sequences into log files which are being tail -f'ed... and that there's nothing new about terminal exploits.
When I first heard about this (a couple of years back) I started using less +F for tailing logs. less will convert the escape character into the token ESC (in bold or inverse video), avoiding any escape-sequence exploits.. and also adds the benefits of being able to scroll back and search, which would make it worth using even if there were no such thing as a terminal exploit.
If you're going to leave it running for a long time, you might want to also look into the -b and -B options, to limit the amount of buffer space it will allocate: something like `less -b1024 -B +F/var/log/apache/common.log' would limit less to 1024K (1M) of buffer, which means old data will eventually be discarded, but keeps less from malloc'ing all your core. As always, Read The Fine Manual for details:)
I just checked: the `more' command on my Linux and Solaris boxen seems to pass escape sequences through, so you really do want `less' (or alias less=more, if you're used to typing `some_command|more'), not to mention `more' has no equivalent to `less +F' or `tail -f'.
- Athlon 2100+ in a `full tower' case, with 6 drives - SGI Indy with one drive - Sun Sparcstation 20, one drive - Sun Sparcstation 10, one drive - Crappy celeron whitebox, 2 drives
So of course the Athlon makes more noise than all the rest of them together. Not long ago, I removed all the drives from the Athlon box.. it's *still* louder than all the rest of those clunkers put together! (Yes, there are case fans, but only because it *needs* them).
I somehow doubt that any P4 box I could build would be any quieter though.. seems like my best bet is going to be to move all those boxes to some other room, and use just my laptop (also an Atlhon, 1200MHz).. oh wait, it makes a ton of noise too, but (more annoyingly) the fan only runs when it decides it needs to... give me a steady whine any day, the random stop & start is more irritating (even though it's a lot quieter than the desktop box).
Spent the night at the parents' over x-mas... I found I actually couldn't sleep without the soothing hum of all those drives & fans. I used to joke about that, but had no idea it was true.
Has anyone experienced permanent hearing loss due to excessive fan/drive noise? I don't want to go deaf... but if the solution is to throw out all my boxes & replace them with $3000 macs, I guess I'm screwed..
I still have the first computer I ever owned.. an Atari 400 with 16K of RAM and a 1.79MHz 6502 CPU. Also I may still have the first modem I ever owned, which was 300 baud, but one o' them new-fangled direct-connect ones (without the acoustic couplers).
I never set out to be an antique computer collector, but I do have an awful lot of old machines from the 1980's (most Atari, Commodore, TI, and Apple, but some weirdball ones too... remember the Mattell Aquarius?)
It's not much fun to just collect them & leave them sitting in a closet, to me you don't really own a machine unless you can write code for it. Unfortunately, a lot of those old boxes, I have no storage for.. No, they didn't come with hard drives, and the floppy drive was usually an expensive add-on, and made from lowest-bidder parts (therefore unlikely to still be working today, even if you have one).
My favorite weird old architecture to code for has got to be the Atari 2600. 1.2MHz 6502, 128 bytes of RAM total, to be split between variables and stack (most games use litle or no stack though), no OS or BIOS, no video memory, no I/O except the front panel switches, the joysticks, the paddles, and the cartridge slot.. no R/W line was routed to the cart slot, so you couldn't (easily) use it to add RAM, only ROM (usually 4K, but as much as you want via bankswitching).
Just lately (in the past couple of years), I've actively started collecting UNIX boxes (Sparc, Alpha, SGI, etc.)... these are still useful (a throw-away SparcStation 10 with a 40MHz CPU, 64M of RAM, 2G SCSI drive, and Solaris 2.6 makes a dandy DNS & dhcp server for your LAN, and will be a lot more reliable than a 486 PC from the same time period).
Anyone have or know where I can get an old version of DEC UNIX to run on my Alpha?
You can find the good IBM keyboards at thrift stores, swap meets, hamfests, used computer dealers, computer salvage yards.. usually for under $5 (hell, usually for under $2).
The good ones are called the `IBM Model M', and they have real springs under the keys. More info at http://modelm.org
I personally own about 50 or 60 of these, but you can't have any of them (they're my lifetime supply of keyboards. Yes, you can use a PS/2 => USB adaptor with them, so they should work on new hardware for many years to come). I've managed to break only one Model M in my life... well actually my old boss did, he dumped a 16oz. Starbuck's coffee with extra cream & sugar directly into it, and I didn't find out about it until it had had time to congeal.. probably I could have salvaged it by running it through the dishwasher, but it was starting to draw flies, so I decided it was dead...
> The only time you need swift certain action on the part of the government is in an emergency, which are rare.
This explains why the US is constantly in a state of `war on something'. Used to be drugs, now it's terrorism... as long as you can extend the emergency situation indefinitely, you can keep acting switfly and certainly. And if anyone says `the emergency has passed', well, just watch CNN. For whatever reason, CNN has a vested interest in convincing us there's a continual state of emergency. Maybe it's just good for ratings, or maybe it's something more sinister, I dunno...
Now, to say something on topic (this is still about the, er, clit thing). According to the guy's web site, he's removed the source code... but a few lines below that is a working download link for the source.
To anyone having trouble compiling this on *NIX: There's no top-level Makefile, do something like this:
mkdir openclit cd openclit tar xvfj../openclit.tar.bz2 cd lib make cd../clit12 make cp clit2/usr/local/bin
Now whether or not it works, I couldn't tell you, as I don't have any of these MS reader format files to try it on.
Warning: the tarball doesn't create its own directory (this irritates me to no end, but *shrug* you get what you pay for)
How do you keep them from breaking, when you sit down? All the business-card-sized CDs I've ever seen were impossible to actually carry in your wallet. A company I worked for once had several hundred of the old LinuxCare version of the BBC, and after a month or two we had over 50 broken ones lying around (the rest got given away to customers, most of whom also broke them).
Is your BBC made of some new space-age, butt-proof material? Or do you carry your wallet in your front pocket? Or do you mean `CD wallet'? I'd carry one of these if I knew how to do it without breaking it... as it is, I carry 3 or 4 install CDs for major Linux distributions in my laptop bag.
Hm, from the post: > The 2.0 release of the LNX-BBC (and, thus, the FSF membership card)....
Don't tell me RMS isn't going to make us call it the GNU/LNX-BBC (or maybe GLNX-BBC?).
You're right.. I hadn't even looked at the price. Anyway, my post was mostly hypothetical, I wasn't actually about to buy one of these. Most likely I will hang on to the p3/600 forever, like I do everything else, in case I find a use for it.
http://www.ocia.net/reviews/8500/liquid9.jpg...this device is compatible with modern Intel and AMD CPUs. What I want to know is, will it work with my old slot 1 Pentium 3? My modern AMD CPU doesn't need to be overclocked (it's fast enough for me at 1753MHz), but my P3/600 running at 800MHz (or 1GHz even) would be sweet indeed... and unlike the new CPU, I don't mind taking the chance of blowing up the old one attempting to overclock it, since I've gotten a couple years of use out of it already, and it's `retired' now.
* Does anyone else think it's ridiculous for a web designer to use a JPEG image to represent a block of text? Especially with such a tiny font size? The capital letter E in that image is 8x9 pixels, which is hard to see even for me, using a 21" monitor at 1440x1080. If I were using 1600x1200, I wouldn't even bother trying to read it, just click along to some other site... Also, if it weren't an image, I would have been able to copy & paste the text into this post. Of course, this rant complaining about it represents more keystrokes than it would take to type the text I wanted to paste.:)
... > Which is why you run wired (use gigabit ethernet if you got it-spanks wireless any day)
Does gigabit ethernet use unshielded twisted pair?
Any wire that transmits a signal, transmits some of it into the air. It might take some seriously sensitive equipment to pick up (think of the van from the movie `Sneakers'), but I'm willing to bet the expense of such equipment is trivial for a medium-sized governemt or international corporation (or `terrorist' group, or the Freemasons, or whoever it is that makes you want to wear a tinfoil hat).
I'm no expert on radio, but wouldn't higher speed data (like gig ethernet) use higher frequencies, and would that make it easier or harder to pick up in the hypothetical signals intelligence van? (Or would it not affect it either way? I really don't know analog too well)
Would using shielded cabling keep some of the `leakage' from happening? Of course, fiber would be the way to go, for the truly paranoid. No EMF radiation, and takes some pretty specialized (fairly expensive?) equipment to `tap' even if you're crawling around in somebody's ceiling/basement.
Sorry, that asked too many questions, I'm in ramble mode..
Yeah, all that sounds 1337 and all, but have you ever actually tried to use such things to do more than casual websurfing or similar?
Even if you make the bottom screen touch-sensitive so you can `type' on it, it would be a pain in the ass (and the fingers) to type even so much as this short/. post on.
Besides, as other posters point out, what's the point in having dual displays, if one of them is just going to be used to display a fake keyboard or arcade controls or whatever?
(BTW, speaking as one who plays emulated arcade games on a PC, I need buttons I can bang on when playing Galaga or Gyruss, just like in the arcade. What sort of LCD panel could take that abuse?)
This thing looks like a misguided attempt to impose a familiar metaphor (2 pages side-by-side like a regular paper book) on a new medium, where it doesn't fit at all. I can't see any benefit at all in using this even as a book reader that displays 2 pages.
On the other hand, having 2 displays *and* a keyboard can be amazingly useful. I bet if you were willing to learn to use a Twiddler (one-handed chording keyboard) this thing would be usable. Unfortunately, the Twiddler only comes in one size, and some of us have big hands...
> What Doom did for gaming in a positive way > (fast rendering engines) it did as much or > more in a negative way (dark, repetitive, > single-minded (mindless) activity).
You can't blame Doom for the mindlessness trend in video games. Space Invaders was just as mindless, 10+ years before, and just as popular in its day.
> Imagine a game, where there are hundreds of > planets to explore.
My workstation at work had an AGP SiS 6326 when I first started my current job. It worked more or less OK with XFree86 4.1.0 and later 4.2.0, but the SiS driver doesn't offer much 2D acceleration (not sure how much of this is a deficiency of the card, and how much the driver). It's slightly faster than VESA framebuffer, and unlike the framebuffer driver, you can crank up the refresh rate and resolution (I think I was running 1152x864 at around 80Hz). There's even an experimental DRI (3D accel) module for the SiS cards, though it's useless as the driver only allows use of 4M of video RAM (not even glxgears can run with only 4M, and quake wouldn't even try to use it)
If you're stuck with a SiS card, your best bet is XFree86 4.2.0 (which Redhat 7.3 has, so it should be OK)
The *one* nice feature about the SiS is that its XFree86 4.1.0 and 4.2.0 drivers support rotation.. so you can flip your monitor on its side and run it in `portrait' mode (though you can't flip back to landscape mode without editing XF86Config and restarting X). This is unbelievably cool for web browsing and reading PDF docs that have the aspect ratio of standard printer paper.
To stay slightly on topic here.. The 6.x versions of Redhat would detect the card and configure X for you, but until you edited XF86Config by hand and added a line like this:
Option "xaa_no_color_exp"
...the card was unusable (e.g. fonts came out as solid black blocks without this line)
Hm, that's still not all that on-topic.. but since RH7.3 ships with XFree86 4.2.0, you won't need to do this (only applies in 3.3.x). Like I said above, the card is usable, but not great, in 4.2.0. Get a Real Card as soon as possible.
> In the movie (and trailer) aunt May said, "You do too much. You're > not Superman, you know." If all he's got going for him is his super > powers, then isn't that exactly what he is, just another superman?
Unlike Superman though, he could be wounded, or even killed. Nobody really sympathesizes with a truly invincible hero... which is why there's so much Kryptonite around, in the Superman universe.
I agree though, that this movie downplayed the `technological genius' side of Peter Parker's character... but then, from what I remember of the comic book (and it's been a long time), Peter didn't act like a genius all the time. He was human, he made mistakes.. he was just a regular guy who happened to get super powers by accident, and wasn't all that happy about it. That part of his character came out pretty well in this Hollywood-ized version of the story.
>With Debian, you don't even have to run the
>installer when the new release comes out: do
>apt-get dist-upgrade
Right, that was my point. With Debian, even more so than other Linuces, he should only ever have to run the installer once...
Even on Slackware, I've got boxes at home where I installed 7.0 when it came out (year and a half ago?), and upgraded them by building everything from source (kernel, gcc, binutils, fileutils, et al), without ever needing to run the installer. I'd hate to have to do that for a whole network's worth of servers though... which is why I keep a `reference' system around to serve as a master image. Basically I rolled my own solution to the same problems apt was designed to solve (and I'll admit my code is nowhere near as nice as apt, but I'd rather Keep It Simple because I'm Stupid:)
>They'll come to expect free software all the
>time. Not as a political statement. Not as a
>anti-corporate philosophy. But because they are
>cheap bastards. No offense. (None taken)
They already do. To Joe Sixpack, most of his software is already free (as in beer), he just downloads it from a warez site, or gets his buddy to burn him a copy.
Joe Sixpack isn't going to pick legal but harder-to-use software over illegal but easy-to-use software, I think. And trying to explain the virtues of `Free as in speech' is a waste of time (Joe Sixpack watches wrestling, not the History Channel. Joe Sixpack reads Maxim, not Nietzche (which I probably have spelled wrong)).
>Then, in a couple years, when ol' Bill rolls out
>his next Windows XS. Joe six-pack will think:
>"What? He expects me to pay?"
He already thinks that. Joe Sixpack is the type that will let his buddy installed a `hacked' version of XP, with the expiration code stripped out or whatever. Even though this is a risky move (in a technical sense, if not a legal one), he will do it anyway, then proceed to bash Microsoft (*) when the OS dies & takes all his data with it.
(*) Not that I'm making MS out to be the good guys here, but if you're going to bash MS, at least bash them for things that are actually their fault!
> The only reason I don't use Debian is because the install sucks.
I thought the whole point of debian/dpkg was to update the system so it never needs to be reinstalled? Sure, the installer is a pain, but you're only supposed to have to run it once per box...
Or you could run the installer once, then use an NFS-root floppy and a perl script to `image' all the other boxes you need to install it on. At work we've standardized on Slackware (because it's easy to adapt to your needs and it doesn't try to second-guess you), and I only have to run the installer once whenever a new release comes out.. Which is good, because Slack's installer is way less user friendly than Debian's:)
Just because long names are possible, doesn't make them much fun to deal with. Even GUI-only users would get annoyed if the pathnames are so long that they won't fit in the column they're being displayed in (for some reason, most GUI file managers have the tendency to just put a few dots in a case like that, rather than have the line items break on spaces like HTML table items might do)
Yes, I use a shell with file & path name completion, but that wouldn't help me any if I were hard-coding the path in a shell script, for example...
Also, such names would get so long that when two sysadmins are talking about them, they'd end up abbreviating them anyway (``Hey, Bob, run the ifconfig command. It's in progs slash SAU on these new Annoyux boxes''). At least the abbreviations we already have are well-known.
* I picked ifconfig as an example because it's (almost?) always in/sbin in Linux distributions, yet a normal user still has a use for it (it'll tell any user what interfaces there are & what addresses they have, not just root)
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> Was this game really that good, or do we just remember it as being great. I loved the game in the 80s, but I don't think it would hold my interest for a minute today.
Yes, it really was that good. I've played the NES version in the past year (2-player only; I don't have the Nintendo 4-controller adaptor doohickey), and it's still *fun*, which is more than I can say for 90% of the modern games I've played.
One of the things that makes MULE great is that the graphics hardware was so cheezy back then, the game designer *had* to concentrate on making the game interesting on a `cerebral' level, instead of appealing to the senses and thrilling the player with amazing-looking graphics.
Think of the difference between reading a good book and seeing a movie. Actually I suppose the analogy would be better made between a good comic book and a movie... both have visual elements, but the movie can blow your mind with effects to the point where you don't even notice if there are huge holes in the plot. You're too busy reacting on a primal/sensual level for your brain to be active.
Some people like movies better than books for the same reason I like books better, and some like modern games better than MULE for the same reason I like MULE better... so I guess the answer to `was this game really that great' depends entirely on which type of person you are. If you thought it was great then, you probably still will think it's great. If you thought it was boring then, I guess you'll still think that.
If you loved the game when it was new, I suggest you get it running again (even if only in an emulator) and find at least one other person who loved it then. Odds are the old magic will still be there.
In the interests of being totally honest though, I'm an old guy, and I like old games. I haven't really been `into' any game that's come out since probably Street Fighter II, although I'll play anything multiplayer with my friends. For single-player games, though, I'll stick with early 1980s `classics'. Your tastes are probably pretty different from mine, so maybe you'll hate MULE if you play it again tomorrow. *shrug*, at least give it a shot.
> The entire point is trying to bring Perl to the masses and get as many people together as possible from all uses of perl or even possibly using perl, to sit and talk about perl, with money not being a limit, a real community conference.
If it's `for the masses', why did they schedule it for Monday the 16th through Wednesday the 18th, when most of the masses I know will be at work?
I love perl, and I live within driving distance of this thing, and I could afford $85... but I can't get my employer to pay for it (we're primarily a Java shop. Bleah, but it pays the bills), and I can't take 3 days off at the beginning of the week. Sucks to be me.
Ah well. From what I can see on their web site, nobody I ever heard of is going to be there. I would skip one day of work to see Larry Wall, Randall Schwartz, or somebody else whose books I own give a talk, but this may be nothing so interesting.
Has anyone reading this ever been to one of these YAPC things? Are they interesting, informative, worth taking off work for, etc?
I'll just chime in...
I've got a perfectly good Pentium-90 firewall/NAT box running Slackware 7.0 with kernel 2.2.13. It's been in use for a long time as-is (the kernel image itself is dated 04-10-2000), and runs sshd, but no other services (well, a fake identd, which is a 3-line perl hack, but the identd port's limited to the IP addresses of a few IRC servers, and nothing else).
I have had to upgrade openssh and openssl a few times, but otherwise I don't worry about that box.
One day I will replace it with something a little faster, and probably running Net or Open BSD, but there's no hurry.
Trivia: In the kernel config, to this day, you still see a `bugfix for CMD640 IDE chipset'.. my old P90 router actually has a CMD640 in it. However, it has only a single SCSI drive, plugged into the onboard (really!) SCSI controller. It's actually a pretty high-end board for its time period: Intel NX chipset, dual CPU support up to Pentium 120 (or maybe 133?), onboard NIC (not functional in Linux 2.2 though) and SCSI. I've got 80M of SIMMs in there; it would take up to 256M (8 slots @ 32M apiece. I don't believe it supports 64M SIMMs).
The last time I installed any new software on that box was in maybe 2001, when I wanted to temporarily run a QuakeWorld server on it. QuakeForge wouldn't compile with the ancient gcc on there (2.91.66), so I built a 100% static binary on my workstation & scp'ed it over. Ran like a champ for the 4 hours or so we played that day, but I wouldn't keep it up 24/7.
Why don't I upgrade it to Linux 2.4? A better question is why should I? I pulled this box out of a dumpster behind Revco (heh, the BIOS boot screen has a Revco logo on it, too) in 1996 or so, ran a 2.0 kernel on it for a while, upgraded to 2.2 + Slack 7 around the time Slack 7 came out... then got a `real job' and started making enough money I didn't need to use a piece of dumpster crap for a workstation any more, so pressed it into service as a router when I got cable for the first time. It Just Works, and it's likely to keep on Just Working long after my Athlon 2100+ workstation has died the death.
Basically, it's an appliance now. Power it on, and you have a noisier but more secure version of one of those dinky little Linksys routers people are buying now.
> Why is the drive firmware doing this stuff at all - why can't the OS do the job of deciding where to move the disk head and reordering request queues? I thought that was what all the elevator disk scheduling code in OSes was for.
:)
Because of zone sectoring. OSes (and BIOSes) only know how to deal with drives that have the same number of sectors per track for all tracks, but obviously the tracks towards the outside of the drive are physically larger (bigger around) than the inner ones. The drive stores more data (more sectors) on the outer tracks, so as not to waste all that physical media... so the drive is divided into `zones'. An example would be: tracks 0-50 might have 18 sectors per track (zone 0), tracks 51-150 might have 22 (zone 1), etc.
Since the OS/BIOS couldn't deal with differing numbers of sectors per track, the drive lies about its geometry: it takes the total number of sectors, and comes up with a number of heads, cylinders, and sectors/cylinder that multiply out to the actual number of sectors on the drive. You didn't *really* think a 3.5" drive had 255 physical heads, did you?
Actually, this description is starting to become obsolete: modern drives use an addressing mode where it just presents a big array of sectors (numbered 0 through however many sectors are on the drive), and the OS doesn't know/care about cylinders or heads.
Either way, since the actual physical layout of the drive is hidden from the OS, it doesn't have enough information to know where to move the disk head, or to reorder requests for efficiency.
It would be possible to design a drive interface that exposes the true geometry to the OS, but:
- It would be 100% incompatible with existing software & firmware
- Firmware for today's drives only needs to know about the specific drive it's made for. An OS has to be general enough to handle any drive you'd want to use, so it would need more complex (bloated) code in its IDE/SCSI/whatever drivers. Alternatively, you'd need a specific driver for each make & model of hard disk (yuck).
I'm willing to bet there would be some performance gain in a system like that, but I doubt it would be worth the effort, and I doubt it would survive in the market (especially if it's competing for marketshare with serial ATA, Fiberchannel, Ultra/320 SCSI, etc.)
Basically, we're stuck with the decisions that were made for us 15-20 years ago (I'm not just talking about IBM & Microsoft: the SCSI standard hides disk geometry too).
> ICQ is not similar to "talk". In fact, "finger" comes closer to being prior art for it. (And "watch finger" comes closer still, although it still lacks the distributed nature which scales the idea up to thousands of hosts and makes the lists truely useful)
...
Fair enough. Though IRC has `presence indicators' as well. Yes, I know ICQ != IRC, but the idea of keeping track of `who's online' is similar in concept, if not in implementation.
Er, I forgot what we were talking about, actually...
> Things like Instant Messaging and weighted search results are of such obviously high usefulness that they would be invented, regardless of the inventor thinking he would be able to get patent protection.
That was the original point, all this quibbling over UNIX commands has me distracted...
What you say makes sense, but the current corporate mindset seems to be `patent everything, let the courts sort it out'. The authors of ICQ had at least as good a chance of getting a patent as any silly one-click shopping `inventors'.
Hm. Not sure where I'm going with this, actually, so I'm done.
Mildly OT nitpick:
Mirabilis didn't invent the concept of `instant messaging'. ICQ does the same thing as the UNIX `talk' command, which according to my man page, has been around since 4.2BSD (which came out in 1983).
I see this a lot: somebody takes a common idea and figures out a way to do it over TCP/IP (or as they say, `On that Innerweb thingy'), and suddenly it's a new `technology'.
I see the future: this post will degenerate into a deeply bitter and off-topic rant.. so I will shut up now.
It depends... does the patent cover the specific pattern of pixels Apple uses, or does it cover the concept of a trashcan icon?
Not being a patent lawyer, I don't have any idea.. but Apple has had a trashcan icon for what, 20 years now, and just now decided they needed a patent on it? Is that legit? Especially considering there's been a trashcan icon in KDE for a while now... can the estate of the Wright brothers apply for a patent on `device for airborne transportation' next week?
Also, does this patent cover the `dumpster' icon on my Irix desktop?
If the patent is actually just on the specific pixel pattern Apple uses for an icon, why didn't they just copyright the image? Kind of like Nintendo did with their logo (in order to boot, a Game Boy Advance ROM must contain a Nintendo logo.. the exact bit pattern must be present.. but since the logo is copyrighted, you can't legally distribute homebrew GBA games containing it)
The paper mentions injecting escape sequences into log files which are being tail -f'ed... and that there's nothing new about terminal exploits.
/var/log/apache/common.log' would limit less to 1024K (1M) of buffer, which means old data will eventually be discarded, but keeps less from malloc'ing all your core. As always, Read The Fine Manual for details :)
When I first heard about this (a couple of years back) I started using less +F for tailing logs. less will convert the escape character into the token ESC (in bold or inverse video), avoiding any escape-sequence exploits.. and also adds the benefits of being able to scroll back and search, which would make it worth using even if there were no such thing as a terminal exploit.
If you're going to leave it running for a long time, you might want to also look into the -b and -B options, to limit the amount of buffer space it will allocate: something like `less -b1024 -B +F
I just checked: the `more' command on my Linux and Solaris boxen seems to pass escape sequences through, so you really do want `less' (or alias less=more, if you're used to typing `some_command|more'), not to mention `more' has no equivalent to `less +F' or `tail -f'.
Hope this helps someone...
2 things come to mind:
1 - Are the PX, IX, and R bricks compatible with Lego bricks? (Anyone else thinking of 8-CPU NUMA Mindstorms?)
2 - Did they call them bricks so their marketing guys can say it's `built like a brick shithouse'?
We now return you to your regularly scheduled discussion...
At this moment in my bedroom, powered up, are:
- Athlon 2100+ in a `full tower' case, with 6 drives
- SGI Indy with one drive
- Sun Sparcstation 20, one drive
- Sun Sparcstation 10, one drive
- Crappy celeron whitebox, 2 drives
So of course the Athlon makes more noise than all the rest of them together. Not long ago, I removed all the drives from the Athlon box.. it's *still* louder than all the rest of those clunkers put together! (Yes, there are case fans, but only because it *needs* them).
I somehow doubt that any P4 box I could build would be any quieter though.. seems like my best bet is going to be to move all those boxes to some other room, and use just my laptop (also an Atlhon, 1200MHz).. oh wait, it makes a ton of noise too, but (more annoyingly) the fan only runs when it decides it needs to... give me a steady whine any day, the random stop & start is more irritating (even though it's a lot quieter than the desktop box).
Spent the night at the parents' over x-mas... I found I actually couldn't sleep without the soothing hum of all those drives & fans. I used to joke about that, but had no idea it was true.
Has anyone experienced permanent hearing loss due to excessive fan/drive noise? I don't want to go deaf... but if the solution is to throw out all my boxes & replace them with $3000 macs, I guess I'm screwed..
I still have the first computer I ever owned.. an Atari 400 with 16K of RAM and a 1.79MHz 6502 CPU. Also I may still have the first modem I ever owned, which was 300 baud, but one o' them new-fangled direct-connect ones (without the acoustic couplers).
I never set out to be an antique computer collector, but I do have an awful lot of old machines from the 1980's (most Atari, Commodore, TI, and Apple, but some weirdball ones too... remember the Mattell Aquarius?)
It's not much fun to just collect them & leave them sitting in a closet, to me you don't really own a machine unless you can write code for it. Unfortunately, a lot of those old boxes, I have no storage for.. No, they didn't come with hard drives, and the floppy drive was usually an expensive add-on, and made from lowest-bidder parts (therefore unlikely to still be working today, even if you have one).
My favorite weird old architecture to code for has got to be the Atari 2600. 1.2MHz 6502, 128 bytes of RAM total, to be split between variables and stack (most games use litle or no stack though), no OS or BIOS, no video memory, no I/O except the front panel switches, the joysticks, the paddles, and the cartridge slot.. no R/W line was routed to the cart slot, so you couldn't (easily) use it to add RAM, only ROM (usually 4K, but as much as you want via bankswitching).
Just lately (in the past couple of years), I've actively started collecting UNIX boxes (Sparc, Alpha, SGI, etc.)... these are still useful (a throw-away SparcStation 10 with a 40MHz CPU, 64M of RAM, 2G SCSI drive, and Solaris 2.6 makes a dandy DNS & dhcp server for your LAN, and will be a lot more reliable than a 486 PC from the same time period).
Anyone have or know where I can get an old version of DEC UNIX to run on my Alpha?
You can find the good IBM keyboards at thrift stores, swap meets, hamfests, used computer dealers, computer salvage yards.. usually for under $5 (hell, usually for under $2).
The good ones are called the `IBM Model M', and they have real springs under the keys. More info at http://modelm.org
I personally own about 50 or 60 of these, but you can't have any of them (they're my lifetime supply of keyboards. Yes, you can use a PS/2 => USB adaptor with them, so they should work on new hardware for many years to come). I've managed to break only one Model M in my life... well actually my old boss did, he dumped a 16oz. Starbuck's coffee with extra cream & sugar directly into it, and I didn't find out about it until it had had time to congeal.. probably I could have salvaged it by running it through the dishwasher, but it was starting to draw flies, so I decided it was dead...
Just hit the thrift shops, you'll find them...
> The only time you need swift certain action on the part of the government is in an emergency, which are rare.
../openclit.tar.bz2 ../clit12 /usr/local/bin
This explains why the US is constantly in a state of `war on something'. Used to be drugs, now it's terrorism... as long as you can extend the emergency situation indefinitely, you can keep acting switfly and certainly. And if anyone says `the emergency has passed', well, just watch CNN. For whatever reason, CNN has a vested interest in convincing us there's a continual state of emergency. Maybe it's just good for ratings, or maybe it's something more sinister, I dunno...
Now, to say something on topic (this is still about the, er, clit thing). According to the guy's web site, he's removed the source code... but a few lines below that is a working download link for the source.
To anyone having trouble compiling this on *NIX: There's no top-level Makefile, do something like this:
mkdir openclit
cd openclit
tar xvfj
cd lib
make
cd
make
cp clit2
Now whether or not it works, I couldn't tell you, as I don't have any of these MS reader format files to try it on.
Warning: the tarball doesn't create its own directory (this irritates me to no end, but *shrug* you get what you pay for)
How do you keep them from breaking, when you sit down? All the business-card-sized CDs I've ever seen were impossible to actually carry in your wallet. A company I worked for once had several hundred of the old LinuxCare version of the BBC, and after a month or two we had over 50 broken ones lying around (the rest got given away to customers, most of whom also broke them).
....
Is your BBC made of some new space-age, butt-proof material? Or do you carry your wallet in your front pocket? Or do you mean `CD wallet'? I'd carry one of these if I knew how to do it without breaking it... as it is, I carry 3 or 4 install CDs for major Linux distributions in my laptop bag.
Hm, from the post:
> The 2.0 release of the LNX-BBC (and, thus, the FSF membership card)
Don't tell me RMS isn't going to make us call it the GNU/LNX-BBC (or maybe GLNX-BBC?).
You're right.. I hadn't even looked at the price. Anyway, my post was mostly hypothetical, I wasn't actually about to buy one of these. Most likely I will hang on to the p3/600 forever, like I do everything else, in case I find a use for it.
According to this image (*):
...this device is compatible with modern Intel and AMD CPUs. What I want to know is, will it work with my old slot 1 Pentium 3? My modern AMD CPU doesn't need to be overclocked (it's fast enough for me at 1753MHz), but my P3/600 running at 800MHz (or 1GHz even) would be sweet indeed... and unlike the new CPU, I don't mind taking the chance of blowing up the old one attempting to overclock it, since I've gotten a couple years of use out of it already, and it's `retired' now.
:)
http://www.ocia.net/reviews/8500/liquid9.jpg
* Does anyone else think it's ridiculous for a web designer to use a JPEG image to represent a block of text? Especially with such a tiny font size? The capital letter E in that image is 8x9 pixels, which is hard to see even for me, using a 21" monitor at 1440x1080. If I were using 1600x1200, I wouldn't even bother trying to read it, just click along to some other site... Also, if it weren't an image, I would have been able to copy & paste the text into this post. Of course, this rant complaining about it represents more keystrokes than it would take to type the text I wanted to paste.
...
> Which is why you run wired (use gigabit ethernet if you got it-spanks wireless any day)
Does gigabit ethernet use unshielded twisted pair?
Any wire that transmits a signal, transmits some of it into the air. It might take some seriously sensitive equipment to pick up (think of the van from the movie `Sneakers'), but I'm willing to bet the expense of such equipment is trivial for a medium-sized governemt or international corporation (or `terrorist' group, or the Freemasons, or whoever it is that makes you want to wear a tinfoil hat).
I'm no expert on radio, but wouldn't higher speed data (like gig ethernet) use higher frequencies, and would that make it easier or harder to pick up in the hypothetical signals intelligence van? (Or would it not affect it either way? I really don't know analog too well)
Would using shielded cabling keep some of the `leakage' from happening? Of course, fiber would be the way to go, for the truly paranoid. No EMF radiation, and takes some pretty specialized (fairly expensive?) equipment to `tap' even if you're crawling around in somebody's ceiling/basement.
Sorry, that asked too many questions, I'm in ramble mode..
Yeah, all that sounds 1337 and all, but have you ever actually tried to use such things to do more than casual websurfing or similar?
/. post on.
Even if you make the bottom screen touch-sensitive so you can `type' on it, it would be a pain in the ass (and the fingers) to type even so much as this short
Besides, as other posters point out, what's the point in having dual displays, if one of them is just going to be used to display a fake keyboard or arcade controls or whatever?
(BTW, speaking as one who plays emulated arcade games on a PC, I need buttons I can bang on when playing Galaga or Gyruss, just like in the arcade. What sort of LCD panel could take that abuse?)
This thing looks like a misguided attempt to impose a familiar metaphor (2 pages side-by-side like a regular paper book) on a new medium, where it doesn't fit at all. I can't see any benefit at all in using this even as a book reader that displays 2 pages.
On the other hand, having 2 displays *and* a keyboard can be amazingly useful. I bet if you were willing to learn to use a Twiddler (one-handed chording keyboard) this thing would be usable. Unfortunately, the Twiddler only comes in one size, and some of us have big hands...
> What Doom did for gaming in a positive way
> (fast rendering engines) it did as much or
> more in a negative way (dark, repetitive,
> single-minded (mindless) activity).
You can't blame Doom for the mindlessness trend in video games. Space Invaders was just as mindless, 10+ years before, and just as popular in its day.
> Imagine a game, where there are hundreds of
> planets to explore.
Star Control II (aka Ur-Qan Masters) anybody?
My workstation at work had an AGP SiS 6326 when I first started my current job. It worked more or less OK with XFree86 4.1.0 and later 4.2.0, but the SiS driver doesn't offer much 2D acceleration (not sure how much of this is a deficiency of the card, and how much the driver). It's slightly faster than VESA framebuffer, and unlike the framebuffer driver, you can crank up the refresh rate and resolution (I think I was running 1152x864 at around 80Hz). There's even an experimental DRI (3D accel) module for the SiS cards, though it's useless as the driver only allows use of 4M of video RAM (not even glxgears can run with only 4M, and quake wouldn't even try to use it)
If you're stuck with a SiS card, your best bet is XFree86 4.2.0 (which Redhat 7.3 has, so it should be OK)
The *one* nice feature about the SiS is that its XFree86 4.1.0 and 4.2.0 drivers support rotation.. so you can flip your monitor on its side and run it in `portrait' mode (though you can't flip back to landscape mode without editing XF86Config and restarting X). This is unbelievably cool for web browsing and reading PDF docs that have the aspect ratio of standard printer paper.
To stay slightly on topic here.. The 6.x versions of Redhat would detect the card and configure X for you, but until you edited XF86Config by hand and added a line like this:
Option "xaa_no_color_exp"
...the card was unusable (e.g. fonts came out as solid black blocks without this line)
Hm, that's still not all that on-topic.. but since RH7.3 ships with XFree86 4.2.0, you won't need to do this (only applies in 3.3.x). Like I said above, the card is usable, but not great, in 4.2.0. Get a Real Card as soon as possible.
> In the movie (and trailer) aunt May said, "You do too much. You're
> not Superman, you know." If all he's got going for him is his super
> powers, then isn't that exactly what he is, just another superman?
Unlike Superman though, he could be wounded, or even killed. Nobody really sympathesizes with a truly invincible hero... which is why there's so much Kryptonite around, in the Superman universe.
I agree though, that this movie downplayed the `technological genius' side of Peter Parker's character... but then, from what I remember of the comic book (and it's been a long time), Peter didn't act like a genius all the time. He was human, he made mistakes.. he was just a regular guy who happened to get super powers by accident, and wasn't all that happy about it. That part of his character came out pretty well in this Hollywood-ized version of the story.
>With Debian, you don't even have to run the
:)
>installer when the new release comes out: do
>apt-get dist-upgrade
Right, that was my point. With Debian, even more so than other Linuces, he should only ever have to run the installer once...
Even on Slackware, I've got boxes at home where I installed 7.0 when it came out (year and a half ago?), and upgraded them by building everything from source (kernel, gcc, binutils, fileutils, et al), without ever needing to run the installer. I'd hate to have to do that for a whole network's worth of servers though... which is why I keep a `reference' system around to serve as a master image. Basically I rolled my own solution to the same problems apt was designed to solve (and I'll admit my code is nowhere near as nice as apt, but I'd rather Keep It Simple because I'm Stupid
>They'll come to expect free software all the
>time. Not as a political statement. Not as a
>anti-corporate philosophy. But because they are
>cheap bastards. No offense. (None taken)
They already do. To Joe Sixpack, most of his software is already free (as in beer), he just downloads it from a warez site, or gets his buddy to burn him a copy.
Joe Sixpack isn't going to pick legal but harder-to-use software over illegal but easy-to-use software, I think. And trying to explain the virtues of `Free as in speech' is a waste of time (Joe Sixpack watches wrestling, not the History Channel. Joe Sixpack reads Maxim, not Nietzche (which I probably have spelled wrong)).
>Then, in a couple years, when ol' Bill rolls out
>his next Windows XS. Joe six-pack will think:
>"What? He expects me to pay?"
He already thinks that. Joe Sixpack is the type that will let his buddy installed a `hacked' version of XP, with the expiration code stripped out or whatever. Even though this is a risky move (in a technical sense, if not a legal one), he will do it anyway, then proceed to bash Microsoft (*) when the OS dies & takes all his data with it.
(*) Not that I'm making MS out to be the good guys here, but if you're going to bash MS, at least bash them for things that are actually their fault!
> The only reason I don't use Debian is because the install sucks.
:)
I thought the whole point of debian/dpkg was to update the system so it never needs to be reinstalled? Sure, the installer is a pain, but you're only supposed to have to run it once per box...
Or you could run the installer once, then use an NFS-root floppy and a perl script to `image' all the other boxes you need to install it on. At work we've standardized on Slackware (because it's easy to adapt to your needs and it doesn't try to second-guess you), and I only have to run the installer once whenever a new release comes out.. Which is good, because Slack's installer is way less user friendly than Debian's
So if I'm trying to run a program that isn't in my path, I have to type: *
/sbin in Linux distributions, yet a normal user still has a use for it (it'll tell any user what interfaces there are & what addresses they have, not just root)
"/Programs/System Administrator Utilities/ifconfig -a"
..instead of:
/sbin/ifconfig -a
Just because long names are possible, doesn't make them much fun to deal with. Even GUI-only users would get annoyed if the pathnames are so long that they won't fit in the column they're being displayed in (for some reason, most GUI file managers have the tendency to just put a few dots in a case like that, rather than have the line items break on spaces like HTML table items might do)
Yes, I use a shell with file & path name completion, but that wouldn't help me any if I were hard-coding the path in a shell script, for example...
Also, such names would get so long that when two sysadmins are talking about them, they'd end up abbreviating them anyway (``Hey, Bob, run the ifconfig command. It's in progs slash SAU on these new Annoyux boxes''). At least the abbreviations we already have are well-known.
* I picked ifconfig as an example because it's (almost?) always in