My favourite story about Pournelle is the synchronicity between "Footfall" and SDI. Footfall is probably one of the very best novels of the alien invasion genre. At one point, the president of the United States calls a conference of SciFi writers to look for ideas on how to defeat the alien invaders. Shortly afterwards (in real life), Reagan calls a conference of SciFi writers to come up with ideas for the Strategic Defence Initiative. Pournelle was part of that group (and his work for NASA would certainly have leant credibility), and although SDI was a bit of a pipe-dream it did seem credible to the Soviet Union of the time, and.. well, perestroika, glasnost and the rest is history..
Robert Tinney was the cover artist. I did for a short time have a print of the pirate ship with a floppy disk sail until some idiot threw it away. A brilliant artist.
Keyboards were almost a religion with Pournelle. I sort-of agreed with him - a proper big SHIFT key next to the Z, a big reverse-shaped L RETURN key and a decent sized backspace key. I remember he was also keen on having the ESC key next to 1 which I think is not such a good idea, and CTRL next to A can have some unexpected side effects these days. I never used a Northgate keyboard, but Gateway 2000 and TeleVideo used some of the same principles and were the best keyboards I ever used.
No, he was always right wing and his political points of view didn't align with my own, but they were well thought out and worth considering nonetheless.
Exactly. Brexiteers either haven't figured this out or are in denials. Want to go to Spain? You'll need a visa. France? Visa. Ireland? Well, if you are travelling overland a visa and an amoured car.
Being a bit of a greybeard, I do remember the Openmoko project and blogged about it earlier this month. Launched at roughly the same time the iPhone first came to market, Openmoko took an utterly different approach. Today we might look at the Neo1973 and subsequent devices as being failed smartphone projects, but when looking back I realised that they were really fully-featured hackable computers. So, perhaps the Openmoko project in part foreshadowed devices such as the Raspberry Pi (launched 5 years later). The advantage that the Pi has over what Openmoko was trying to do is that it was simpler and cheaper. You weren't restricted by a crappy little resistive touchscreen with the Pi, just just plugged in a monitor, network cable, USB input devices and OS on an SD card and you were ready. The fundamental principles are pretty much the same.
I have looked at ReactOS from time-to-time over the years in various buggy alphas. Although I admire the idea, it seems ultimately pointless. A free open-source alternative to Windows already exists, and it is called Linux.
Yes but surely if excess insulin was produced in response to the diet soda, then the subject would be prone to hypoglycaemia?
The connection could simply be that people who drink sugary drinks all the time die of obesity- and diabetes-related complications before they get a stroke or dementia.
I was an editor there.. in fact I still am, and over my years I achieved editall status.
It was a great idea when it was created, but over time the landscape of the web changed. DMOZ was founded before Wikipedia and even Google, back in the days that finding stuff was *hard*. DMOZ editors would curate lists of sites that would give a good overview of the topic, but it turns out that Wikipedia's approach to topic curation was better in the long run (and I think that many DMOZ editors are also Wikipedia editors). Directories also died a death as search engines got better, and in the end DMOZ was only really important for SEO purposes.
A long outage at the end of 2006 didn't help at all, and many editors didn't come back after that. Every time I log in I am horrified at the enormous backlog of submissions. For a long time, DMOZ was a great and useful resource. I don't think it has been the case for a while though, but the data it curated is still of value and it would be good if it could be preserved somehow.
Cyanogen OS isn't quite the same thing as CyanogenMod. The OS is a commercial product that manufacturers can buy for your smartphone product (e.g. OnePlus One, Wileyfox). It's a rather nice Android offering, but Cyanogen Inc borked it.. especially their relationship with OnePlus.
As for CyanogenMod.. well,/. readers probably know what that is. Not always the most stable of offerings, but most Android devices (and even HP's WebOS ones) can run it which is a big plus. The Android world is a better place for CyanogenMod and to be honest it should have been a better place with Cyanogen OS. But I'm not really sure that one organisation should try to do both..
Jerry Doyle - Died 2016, aged 60
Michael O'Hare - Died 2012, aged 60
Jeff Conaway - Died 2011, aged 60
Andreas Katsulas - Died 2006, aged 59
Richard Biggs - Died 2004, aged 44
Tim Choate - Died 2004, aged 49 ..thank you all, wherever you are.
If it's Windows-compatible enough to run the sea of Windows-based malware then it will definitely be a bad thing. And given that a lot of endpoint protection apps can be picky about the platforms they run on, then it's just possible that these things could get infected without any adequate protection.
That having been said, I've played with ReactOS before. It looks quite good. But I can't really see why you would want to use it compared to (say) Ubuntu or CentOS which are very polished and usable these days.
Yeah, I know some places use a "," instead of a decimal point. That's why it's a good idea if dealing with an international audience to use a space separator for thousands. But using a full-stop as a thousand separator and a comma for the decimal point is just whacky. Not as whacky as writing dates in MM-DD-YYYY format, but close. Perhaps one party really did think that the transaction was just twelve-and-a-half euro.
AT&T Bell Labs invented Unix. Yeah, I know that's not quite the same AT&T as we see today (Bell Labs is part of Alcatel-Lucent-Nokia) but nonetheless today's AT&T is a direct descendant of the AT&T of the 1970s the developed Unix for it's own use. Heck, so they should be using Unix rather than Linux.. but they don't actually own it any more.
Curiously enough, I am just running an analysis of several thousand domains hosted by Eurobyte. My preliminary data on about 7500 domains currently or historically hosted by this block is that 35% of them are tagged by Google as being malicious in some way. I'm guessing that most of the others are also malicious, but they haven't been tagged.
Eurobyte operate a fairly big block rented from Webazilla, which is 46.30.40.0/21.. and I recommend that you block traffic to that entire lot. But a lot of Webazilla's other customer are pretty shitty too. I don't think you miss much if you blocked traffic to the entire AS35415.
It's a kinda interesting conundrum. Obviously Simonds have a complaint against CHM Constructions but if their lawyers have advised them to do this, then I think they need better lawyers.
Blocking access to the site from Australia probably won't make a whole lot of difference, because the real reputational damage might arise elsewhere. Simonds need to get the site shut down or amended.
The most obvious way to do this would be to file a DMCA complaint. "But wait," you say,"neither party is in the US!" True - but chmconstructions.com is hosted in the US, and all the major search engines are *also* hosted in the US, do they *do* have to comply with a DMCA complaint. In my opinion, there is sufficient copied material on the Indian site to justify a DMCA complaint. And you don't even need to get lawyered up for that.
The other way to do it is to hire a law firm in INDIA and threaten legal action over there. Indian lawyers are not expensive, but in my personal experience in a similar case.. they are of highly variable quality. Probably better than the Ozzie lawyers Simonds hired though. But if you actually want to *do* something about the problem, then India is the place to go.
The cow-spotted boxes were marketing genius. Also I seem to remember cow-spotted mouse mats. The AnyKey programmable keyboard was.. interesting too.
Gateway boxes were sporadically available in the UK in the early to mid 1990s, imported from the US via a grey imported. They were a much higher quality than anything else we had, especially in terms of industrial design. The first Gateway box I had (I 386SX I think) lingered for years, but people often commented on how nice it looked ("Is that new?" "Errr.. no"). A few years later Gateway started shipping directly to the UK, for a while at least.
I don't think that they ever reached their full potential. But I guess the cow thing might have stuck in my head.
I imagine a scene in a Newbury boardroom in the 1980s:
"You're going to spell it HOW?"
"With an 'F'. Not a 'PH'.
"Oh COME ON, people will keep spelling it the wrong way!"
"Honestly, we think they'll work it out after a few decades or so.."
I don't give a damn about homoeopathy. I care rather more about his attitude towards Britain' nuclear weapons programme. His threat to not renew the UK's SLBM system is a significant threat to European defence.
Slashdot Mirror
Amen to that. After screwing up Cyanogenmod they should perhaps name themselves FCKWTS.
My favourite story about Pournelle is the synchronicity between "Footfall" and SDI. Footfall is probably one of the very best novels of the alien invasion genre. At one point, the president of the United States calls a conference of SciFi writers to look for ideas on how to defeat the alien invaders. Shortly afterwards (in real life), Reagan calls a conference of SciFi writers to come up with ideas for the Strategic Defence Initiative. Pournelle was part of that group (and his work for NASA would certainly have leant credibility), and although SDI was a bit of a pipe-dream it did seem credible to the Soviet Union of the time, and.. well, perestroika, glasnost and the rest is history..
Robert Tinney was the cover artist. Brilliant.
Robert Tinney was the cover artist. I did for a short time have a print of the pirate ship with a floppy disk sail until some idiot threw it away. A brilliant artist.
Keyboards were almost a religion with Pournelle. I sort-of agreed with him - a proper big SHIFT key next to the Z, a big reverse-shaped L RETURN key and a decent sized backspace key. I remember he was also keen on having the ESC key next to 1 which I think is not such a good idea, and CTRL next to A can have some unexpected side effects these days. I never used a Northgate keyboard, but Gateway 2000 and TeleVideo used some of the same principles and were the best keyboards I ever used.
No, he was always right wing and his political points of view didn't align with my own, but they were well thought out and worth considering nonetheless.
Exactly. Brexiteers either haven't figured this out or are in denials. Want to go to Spain? You'll need a visa. France? Visa. Ireland? Well, if you are travelling overland a visa and an amoured car.
Being a bit of a greybeard, I do remember the Openmoko project and blogged about it earlier this month. Launched at roughly the same time the iPhone first came to market, Openmoko took an utterly different approach. Today we might look at the Neo1973 and subsequent devices as being failed smartphone projects, but when looking back I realised that they were really fully-featured hackable computers. So, perhaps the Openmoko project in part foreshadowed devices such as the Raspberry Pi (launched 5 years later). The advantage that the Pi has over what Openmoko was trying to do is that it was simpler and cheaper. You weren't restricted by a crappy little resistive touchscreen with the Pi, just just plugged in a monitor, network cable, USB input devices and OS on an SD card and you were ready. The fundamental principles are pretty much the same.
I looked at it and though the same thing. Remind me, how did Prenda Law end up for it's principals?
I have looked at ReactOS from time-to-time over the years in various buggy alphas. Although I admire the idea, it seems ultimately pointless. A free open-source alternative to Windows already exists, and it is called Linux.
The connection could simply be that people who drink sugary drinks all the time die of obesity- and diabetes-related complications before they get a stroke or dementia.
It was a great idea when it was created, but over time the landscape of the web changed. DMOZ was founded before Wikipedia and even Google, back in the days that finding stuff was *hard*. DMOZ editors would curate lists of sites that would give a good overview of the topic, but it turns out that Wikipedia's approach to topic curation was better in the long run (and I think that many DMOZ editors are also Wikipedia editors). Directories also died a death as search engines got better, and in the end DMOZ was only really important for SEO purposes.
A long outage at the end of 2006 didn't help at all, and many editors didn't come back after that. Every time I log in I am horrified at the enormous backlog of submissions. For a long time, DMOZ was a great and useful resource. I don't think it has been the case for a while though, but the data it curated is still of value and it would be good if it could be preserved somehow.
As for CyanogenMod.. well, /. readers probably know what that is. Not always the most stable of offerings, but most Android devices (and even HP's WebOS ones) can run it which is a big plus. The Android world is a better place for CyanogenMod and to be honest it should have been a better place with Cyanogen OS. But I'm not really sure that one organisation should try to do both..
"My network. My rules."
Sounds a bit overhyped to me, "You won't believe what happened when they connected to an untrusted network!"
Jerry Doyle - Died 2016, aged 60
..thank you all, wherever you are.
Michael O'Hare - Died 2012, aged 60
Jeff Conaway - Died 2011, aged 60
Andreas Katsulas - Died 2006, aged 59
Richard Biggs - Died 2004, aged 44
Tim Choate - Died 2004, aged 49
That having been said, I've played with ReactOS before. It looks quite good. But I can't really see why you would want to use it compared to (say) Ubuntu or CentOS which are very polished and usable these days.
Yeah, I know some places use a "," instead of a decimal point. That's why it's a good idea if dealing with an international audience to use a space separator for thousands. But using a full-stop as a thousand separator and a comma for the decimal point is just whacky. Not as whacky as writing dates in MM-DD-YYYY format, but close. Perhaps one party really did think that the transaction was just twelve-and-a-half euro.
AT&T Bell Labs invented Unix. Yeah, I know that's not quite the same AT&T as we see today (Bell Labs is part of Alcatel-Lucent-Nokia) but nonetheless today's AT&T is a direct descendant of the AT&T of the 1970s the developed Unix for it's own use. Heck, so they should be using Unix rather than Linux.. but they don't actually own it any more.
Eurobyte operate a fairly big block rented from Webazilla, which is 46.30.40.0/21.. and I recommend that you block traffic to that entire lot. But a lot of Webazilla's other customer are pretty shitty too. I don't think you miss much if you blocked traffic to the entire AS35415.
Blocking access to the site from Australia probably won't make a whole lot of difference, because the real reputational damage might arise elsewhere. Simonds need to get the site shut down or amended.
The most obvious way to do this would be to file a DMCA complaint. "But wait," you say ,"neither party is in the US!" True - but chmconstructions.com is hosted in the US, and all the major search engines are *also* hosted in the US, do they *do* have to comply with a DMCA complaint. In my opinion, there is sufficient copied material on the Indian site to justify a DMCA complaint. And you don't even need to get lawyered up for that.
The other way to do it is to hire a law firm in INDIA and threaten legal action over there. Indian lawyers are not expensive, but in my personal experience in a similar case.. they are of highly variable quality. Probably better than the Ozzie lawyers Simonds hired though. But if you actually want to *do* something about the problem, then India is the place to go.
Gateway boxes were sporadically available in the UK in the early to mid 1990s, imported from the US via a grey imported. They were a much higher quality than anything else we had, especially in terms of industrial design. The first Gateway box I had (I 386SX I think) lingered for years, but people often commented on how nice it looked ("Is that new?" "Errr.. no"). A few years later Gateway started shipping directly to the UK, for a while at least.
I don't think that they ever reached their full potential. But I guess the cow thing might have stuck in my head.
DynaMOO.
"You're going to spell it HOW?"
"With an 'F'. Not a 'PH'.
"Oh COME ON, people will keep spelling it the wrong way!"
"Honestly, we think they'll work it out after a few decades or so.."
I don't give a damn about homoeopathy. I care rather more about his attitude towards Britain' nuclear weapons programme. His threat to not renew the UK's SLBM system is a significant threat to European defence.