Yes, I'm an amiga fan, though not a fanatic. I still have mine at home and doubt I'll ever get rid of it.
The amiga CLI was great, much closer to $SHELL than DOS ever was. If you haven't ever used it I think you'd be suprised at how unix-like and powerful it was.
It was an integral part of the Workbench (the Amiga GUI) but novice users didn't have to use it to get things done.
FreeBSD, Linux and others sometimes seem a bit behind the Amiga in some areas - but way ahead in others. Why start from scratch trying to recreate something that should remain a fond memory, when we have such fantastic 'current' OS's to work with and build on?
What I can't recall is why this guy did it in the first place.
This is not a personal attack on nellardo, it just seemed like a good point to enter this topic.
A bunch of Slashdot readers here have posted that this guy did it just for the limelight, that he shouldn't have accepted money for it and that he probably only decided to give it to charity to avoid a backlash against him later.
On Christmas Eve when the story was current, Michael was posting comments to slashdot (including the original announcement that he'd paid the bill). Many of the replies to his post were from people saying that he should "milk microsoft for all they're worth", and similar messages encouraging him to profit fro his actions. He said at the time that he just did it so that he could use Hotmail, and to help all of the other people trying to use it.
Now, 25 days later, some members of this "community" have forgotten all about the actual events, and have turned on the guy.
I personally would like to thank him for doing what he did, even if he kept every cent for himself. That he didn't, and has decided to use this as an opportunity to create goodwill surrounding the linux community as well as to raise money for charity, is to his credit.
Felius
(For more info and to refresh the memories of "regular slashdot readers" who've forgotten this story, read the story at this url: http://slashdot.org/articles/99/ 12/25/114201.shtml in particular comments 90 and 216.)
I'm not a christian, or religious in any way, and I'm frequently pissed off by the hypocracy of organised religions in their lack of tolerance for anything they don't agree with.
However Amphigory's post did not come across to me as excessively preachy (after all, the guy has found something that, for him, has actually improved his life) and it certainly didn't come across as the rantings of some sort of fundamentalist crazy.
Why don't you think before you spout this sort of rubbish? How can any of us maintain any credibility in our pursuit of openmindedness when members of our own community are behaving worse than those we condemn?
I guess this is a bit off-topic, but while we're talking about driving games does anyone know what Sean(sp?) Southern is up to these days? I had so much fun playing the old Lotus and Supercar games, and I last remember seeing his name in the credits for a cool rally game on the PC a few years back. -- make clean; make love --without-war
Actually, RedHat's/etc/rc.d hierarchy thing is a standard SysV way of doing configuration scripts, unlike Slackware's BSDish way (which basically amounts to little more than autoexec.bat).
FreeBSD has also moved away from this 'BSDish' way of doing things - as a system administrator I find it makes it a lot easier to customise the startup procedure on a machine, and move startup scripts between multiple machines for common packages.
I know it's been in FreeBSD release versions for at least 6 months, though I think it's quite a bit longer.
I think most of us are pretty much used to it. We make just as many jokes about arrogant, gun-toting, lawsuit crazed yanks that think everyone wants to be american.:)
Seriously though, vegemite/dingo/whatever jokes don't really have much impact. I think americans should watch more aussie tv to see what we're like (and then apply the same degree of scepticism as you do to your own tv).
F. -- make clean; make love --without-war
Re:Microsoft ALWAYS does this.
on
BO2K cracked
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· Score: 1
I use Linux, OS/2, Solaris, Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows NT, Windows 2000, the BeOS, and even a little Atari ST in my daily computing life. All have merits and weaknesses. I've grown away from a tendency toward fanaticism. It doesn't reflect well on anybody to be obsessed.
Aahhhh.. A soulmate.:)
Really guys, the level of fanaticism indulged in by a very vocal portion of fooOS users looks nutty and immature from the inside - Imagine how it looks to the people you're trying to convert.
If you can't understand what someone sees as the good points of their favourite OS (and they all have them or they wouldn't exist), then you'll have a hard time convincing them of any of the bad points.
Linux distributors are currently breaching the law: (1) they are selling M-rated software on CD without a classification appearing on the CD and (2) they are selling M-rated material to people under 16.
There might be a problem on the first point, but not on the second. There is no penalty for selling M-rated anything to an underage person. An M rating is a 'guidance' type of classification, not a restriction. It's like "Parental guidance recommend, we suggest kids be at least 15".
An MA rating is different, you are required to be 15 by law (to see a movie for example) though in reality there is little enforcement of this that I'm aware of.
However, as stated the censorship legislation only calls for age verification when the user attempts to access R rated material online.
People sprouting the wrong facts simply undermine the case for those of us arguing with the correct facts.
Hear, hear. The situation in Australia is not as bad as some international/. readers seem to think, and I have every confidence that the legislation will be overturned in a flurry of publicity as soon as they try to enforce these ludicrous laws.
Let's find the email addresses of every member and fuctionary of their parliament and send them porn. Let's find every law official and send them porn, let's find everyone and anyone who would be involved with this stupid law and send them porn..
There's not much point sending the government here porn - they're already downloading it as fast as they can.;)
This story was making the rounds of the ISP's here at least a week ago, but only made it into the public arena today..
I happen to live in Tasmania - home of the senator I hold responsible for most of this rubbish. He holds a balance of power and the government rushed the censorship legislation through to get him to agree to tax reform.
The censorship legislation they've enacted is so poorly thought out and unenforcable that it will inevitably be turned over as soon as cases start reaching court, IMHO.
Eventually, even if it doesn't end up in a human form, somebody is going to build a near-human level intelligence robot. If it can pass or come close to passing the Turing test, we can't very well subject it to ownership or forced labor. Most industrial societies have protection against abuse of animals and the mentally handicapped, so to be consistant we would have to protect those robots in the same way.
We'd better hope we find a way of building restrictions into any intelligence we create, because there's no guarentee it will feel as sympathetic toward us.
We may be lucky to even notice that a machine has become intelligent, as our standards for measuring AI intelligence (i.e. the Turing test) are biased toward a human intelligence. I've got a book somewhere at home (Mind and the Machine ?) that has some interesting theories along these lines.
Personally I think that we ought to create robot slaves for us. Most great societies have been built on slave labour, even though we may find the notion abhorrent. Robots designed with this purpose in mind are a natural progression of current development of time saving appliances and industrial machinery, IMHO.
In the US, Canada, Australia & NZ people have the choice of low line rental & per minute charges OR higher line rental and unmetered local calls.
Here in Aus I'm not aware of any option for metered local call charges. All local calls are charged at a flat rate of $0.25, though you can get lower rates if you pay a higher service fee.
You can pick a different provider for distance calls, but afaik you have to stick with Telstra for local calls for now.
This seems like a good idea, but how many people really watch movies on their PC? Or have their PC close enough to their TV to be able to play the movies out to the TV? It seems more of a novelty to me for anyone but space-constrained college students with expensive new computers.
My only DVD player is the decoder card in my home PC. I never watch movies on the monitor, (except when I first got it to show off dvd in a window) and the box is a P200MMX which is too slow for software decoding.
However the card has composite, svideo, stereo and spdif outputs - I can plug it into a stereo and tv, sit back on the couch (computer's in the lounge room) and watch my movies.
You need really high-end dvd equipment before you're going to get a noticeable improvement in quality over this, and I had this card for around $AUS 200 when the cheapest standalone players were only just under $AUS 1000.
There's a lot to be said for hardware decoders, if you're interested in dvd movies. DVD will have plenty of other uses in pc's, but this pc will become my standalone player when the next pc arrives.
I read an article in The Australian (it's a newspaper) about advances in display technology.
They mentioned some research that had produced a flexible plastic that could display an image in a similar way to LCD. The cool thing was that the image would stay there when you cut the power -I'm not sure how quickly the display updated so it might not be suitable for anything that required animation, but 'pages' of static text would be pretty simple to do.
If you coated the back of that with bendy IC's (including flash memory) then you'd have your bendy Palm wallet.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I'm an amiga fan, though not a fanatic. I still have mine at home and doubt I'll ever get rid of it.
The amiga CLI was great, much closer to $SHELL than DOS ever was. If you haven't ever used it I think you'd be suprised at how unix-like and powerful it was.
It was an integral part of the Workbench (the Amiga GUI) but novice users didn't have to use it to get things done.
FreeBSD, Linux and others sometimes seem a bit behind the Amiga in some areas - but way ahead in others. Why start from scratch trying to recreate something that should remain a fond memory, when we have such fantastic 'current' OS's to work with and build on?
John
#include sig.h
This is not a personal attack on nellardo, it just seemed like a good point to enter this topic.
A bunch of Slashdot readers here have posted that this guy did it just for the limelight, that he shouldn't have accepted money for it and that he probably only decided to give it to charity to avoid a backlash against him later.
On Christmas Eve when the story was current, Michael was posting comments to slashdot (including the original announcement that he'd paid the bill). Many of the replies to his post were from people saying that he should "milk microsoft for all they're worth", and similar messages encouraging him to profit fro his actions. He said at the time that he just did it so that he could use Hotmail, and to help all of the other people trying to use it.
Now, 25 days later, some members of this "community" have forgotten all about the actual events, and have turned on the guy.
I personally would like to thank him for doing what he did, even if he kept every cent for himself. That he didn't, and has decided to use this as an opportunity to create goodwill surrounding the linux community as well as to raise money for charity, is to his credit.
Felius
(For more info and to refresh the memories of "regular slashdot readers" who've forgotten this story, read the story at this url:
http://slashdot.org/articles/99/ 12/25/114201.shtml
in particular comments 90 and 216.)
#include sig.h
Come on, this is crazy.
I'm not a christian, or religious in any way, and I'm frequently pissed off by the hypocracy of organised religions in their lack of tolerance for anything they don't agree with.
However Amphigory's post did not come across to me as excessively preachy (after all, the guy has found something that, for him, has actually improved his life) and it certainly didn't come across as the rantings of some sort of fundamentalist crazy.
Why don't you think before you spout this sort of rubbish? How can any of us maintain any credibility in our pursuit of openmindedness when members of our own community are behaving worse than those we condemn?
F.
--
make clean; make love --without-war
I guess this is a bit off-topic, but while we're talking about driving games does anyone know what Sean(sp?) Southern is up to these days? I had so much fun playing the old Lotus and Supercar games, and I last remember seeing his name in the credits for a cool rally game on the PC a few years back.
--
make clean; make love --without-war
Homesite! What a thing of beauty!
This and Eudora Pro 4 are the only applications I really miss now that my workstation is windowless.
I'd buy them both all over again if I could get them for FreeBSD/Linux..
F.
--
make clean; make love --without-war
FreeBSD has also moved away from this 'BSDish' way of doing things - as a system administrator I find it makes it a lot easier to customise the startup procedure on a machine, and move startup scripts between multiple machines for common packages.
I know it's been in FreeBSD release versions for at least 6 months, though I think it's quite a bit longer.
Felius
--
make clean; make love --without-war
I think most of us are pretty much used to it. We make just as many jokes about arrogant, gun-toting, lawsuit crazed yanks that think everyone wants to be american. :)
Seriously though, vegemite/dingo/whatever jokes don't really have much impact. I think americans should watch more aussie tv to see what we're like (and then apply the same degree of scepticism as you do to your own tv).
F.
--
make clean; make love --without-war
Aahhhh.. A soulmate. :)
Really guys, the level of fanaticism indulged in by a very vocal portion of fooOS users looks nutty and immature from the inside - Imagine how it looks to the people you're trying to convert.
If you can't understand what someone sees as the good points of their favourite OS (and they all have them or they wouldn't exist), then you'll have a hard time convincing them of any of the bad points.
F.
--
make clean; make love --without-war
There might be a problem on the first point, but not on the second. There is no penalty for selling M-rated anything to an underage person. An M rating is a 'guidance' type of classification, not a restriction. It's like "Parental guidance recommend, we suggest kids be at least 15".
An MA rating is different, you are required to be 15 by law (to see a movie for example) though in reality there is little enforcement of this that I'm aware of.
However, as stated the censorship legislation only calls for age verification when the user attempts to access R rated material online.
Hear, hear. The situation in Australia is not as bad as some international /. readers seem to think, and I have every confidence that the legislation will be overturned in a flurry of publicity as soon as they try to enforce these ludicrous laws.
--
make clean; make love --without-war
There's not much point sending the government here porn - they're already downloading it as fast as they can. ;)
This story was making the rounds of the ISP's here at least a week ago, but only made it into the public arena today..
I happen to live in Tasmania - home of the senator I hold responsible for most of this rubbish. He holds a balance of power and the government rushed the censorship legislation through to get him to agree to tax reform.
The censorship legislation they've enacted is so poorly thought out and unenforcable that it will inevitably be turned over as soon as cases start reaching court, IMHO.
--
make clean; make love --without-war
We'd better hope we find a way of building restrictions into any intelligence we create, because there's no guarentee it will feel as sympathetic toward us.
We may be lucky to even notice that a machine has become intelligent, as our standards for measuring AI intelligence (i.e. the Turing test) are biased toward a human intelligence. I've got a book somewhere at home (Mind and the Machine ?) that has some interesting theories along these lines.
Personally I think that we ought to create robot slaves for us. Most great societies have been built on slave labour, even though we may find the notion abhorrent. Robots designed with this purpose in mind are a natural progression of current development of time saving appliances and industrial machinery, IMHO.
--
make clean; make love --without-war
Here in Aus I'm not aware of any option for metered local call charges. All local calls are charged at a flat rate of $0.25, though you can get lower rates if you pay a higher service fee.
You can pick a different provider for distance calls, but afaik you have to stick with Telstra for local calls for now.
--
make clean; make love --without-war
My only DVD player is the decoder card in my home PC. I never watch movies on the monitor, (except when I first got it to show off dvd in a window) and the box is a P200MMX which is too slow for software decoding.
However the card has composite, svideo, stereo and spdif outputs - I can plug it into a stereo and tv, sit back on the couch (computer's in the lounge room) and watch my movies.
You need really high-end dvd equipment before you're going to get a noticeable improvement in quality over this, and I had this card for around $AUS 200 when the cheapest standalone players were only just under $AUS 1000.
There's a lot to be said for hardware decoders, if you're interested in dvd movies. DVD will have plenty of other uses in pc's, but this pc will become my standalone player when the next pc arrives.
--
make clean; make love --without-war
Oops, make that encoder.
--
make clean; make love --without-war
Sure, but you just spool the video or audio to disk, and then run it through the hardware decoder.
It's not realtime and you'd need a lot of space, but it would be worth it.
--
make clean; make love --without-war
I read an article in The Australian (it's a newspaper) about advances in display technology.
They mentioned some research that had produced a flexible plastic that could display an image in a similar way to LCD. The cool thing was that the image would stay there when you cut the power -I'm not sure how quickly the display updated so it might not be suitable for anything that required animation, but 'pages' of static text would be pretty simple to do.
If you coated the back of that with bendy IC's (including flash memory) then you'd have your bendy Palm wallet.
Does anyone know any more about this techonolgy?
Felius
--
make clean; make love --without-war
Yeah, I think geeks the world over cringed at that line, but it was only added for the movie.
The book handles it much better - in the movie they added the interface and made the girl the unix-savvy one, for audience purposes.
--
make clean; make love --without-war