It DOES have something to do with a lack of social skills which social behavior seems hard-wired into women's heads unlike men who can be solitary with no problems. Perhaps it stems from the time where men would leave the family to make money or kill an animal or whatever and return. Seriously I *WISH* there was something that could be done to have more women in the programming sector but they dont seem driven enough. Women arent usually out there to conquor the metal beast which is the PC. Men have evolved to CONQUOR animals in a hunter/gatherer environment. I just dont see it happening. What I seriously DO dislike though is the wannabe female hackers from AOL trying to impose their nazi-eske curse word censorship on irc channels. THAT I wont put up with.
I dont see whats stopping anyone, why doesnt anyone create a super strength RSA encryption program based on the pgp source with incredibly high prime numbers and dump it on a number of free geocities sites or into warez channels so it gets spread all over the place anonymously. I mean, fuck the gov't.
What do you bet the NSA releases the encryption control as soon as they develop decent quantum computers? Remember the military usually get to play with the new tech toys first.
What are you talking about? I was around 10 yrs old when i was downloading pr0n on BBS's in the 80s. My little brother is 12 and him and his friends hunt for it online. The only things that gross them out are like www.shiteaters.com and stuff which IS sick. Face it, porn doesnt dement kids, get over it.
The only way this could change is perhaps in third world countries with wires stretching from house to house bringing in net access or perhaps a slow wireless internet for at least email that bounces from house to house, sure it would be insecure but you could use strong encryption on it. Another route would be by lasers aimed at trasceivers in two houses (like lucent is experimenting with) to link them together which would also create community awareness. This could possibly be done with cd-r lasers. I challenge anyone to build one. You could transfer files over it with something like fidonet uses and the same for news. In urban areas net access over telephone lines or cable is wayyy too centralized and easy to pull the plug on. The HAM enthusiasts have the upper hand on is in this one.
Isnt it nice, if clinton did take total control you dont need much more military force than your neighborhood police dept. and national guard if things get problematic. I'm sure they'll jail the intellectuals first namely gun owners, followed shortly by hacker/geek/linux ppl who have the good sense to know something is awry. As far as the general populace is concerned, they probably wont know anythings changed being totally wrapped up in their jobs and television.
Yes I am for that stuff and more. Pedo pics dont hurt any kids if they're just that pics. Drugs CANNOT be controlled because there are a million ways to get high and new ones being discovered everyday, the best way is to legalize them and have support groups. This would dramatically reduce crime. People should be able to do anything they want that doesnt hurt another person, if they want to hurt themselves then fine. The president does have too much power, all this control hes doing, ie. echelon, IPI for controlling information, anti-cryptography, gun-regulation, etc is getting me nervous. If he IS going to go dictatorship we will see in 4 months. It would be VERY easy to plan a few strategic Y2K disasters to throw down marshall law and control the populace. Bad things happen when just a few people hold all the keys. And the fact that clinton has his own squad of dirt diggers makes me think everyone in the govt has their mouths shut especially during the terrorist bombings because he has them by the short and curlys.
The reason WIRE cant be repaired is because it lost all its frozen hydrogen into space, and without that the infrared camera will just be taking a picture of a warm lens instead of the heat eminating from 'out there'. To repair it it would require going up there, cracking it open and putting new frozen hydrogen inside which would cost more than the satellite itself cost to make. Someone was meantioning opening up the project, couldnt work here but it got me thinking about something else. Why hasnt anyone built some sort of standardized interface for this? You could have something akin to the dead idea of push technology but it would allow you to donate certain amounts of processing power to projects you find worthwhile. In screensaver mode then, you could donate 25% of your processor's time to SETI@home, and 75% of your processor's time to crunching the math for rendering the latest disney film, cryptography, number crunching star-burst galaxy data, etc. Sounds like a cool idea if you ask me.
I agree with Katz here, kids in japan and scandinavia can take sex on tv and those whole countries arent deranged. This movie code crap is based on puritannical beliefs that now towards the end of the 20th century are being obliterated by new technologies that disseminate control. Besides by doing this movie companies will only lose more money as people download tons of VCDs or better, ASFs which are far smaller in size and more reasonable a download over a 56k. Back in the BBS days I downloaded lots of porn (even the icky nasty stuff for shock value) and I'm not mentally deranged. BBSer's back in the 80's grew up with access to that sort of stuff and they're your classic geeks. We've had a generation grow up on this stuff and few consequences so we check out ok. I think the fact that they edited Eyes Wide Shut at all was rediculous, pisses me off. If anything sex on telivision and discussions about sex stop violent sexual crimes because the knowledge isnt repressed. Censorship is going to die a very bloody death I'm afraid.
on one more note, the fact that people living in cities and suburbs arent very neighborly is power in the gov'ts eyes. We cant easily gang up on the govt if we're so involved in work that we cant defend ourselves. I think its a good time to implement grassroots-style stuffs like a 2600 meeting in every city or whatnot. My dad owns guns (legally), which puts my house as a red flag in the gov't's eyes. To the gov't the cities are easy to take, the real work is going to be in the small towns scattered across america if they ever did pull that marshall law crap.
just like vietnam. in vietnam everythings illegal so the govt can nab any trouble makers it wants whenever it wants. Again it makes me kinda spooked if they decide to try to regain control again by going marshall law through some strategically planned Y2K disasters. Typically Im not a paranoid person but all these things the govt is doing openly is starting to get at me.
Theyre beginning to realize they're losing their grip on the power structure, so theyre getting tighter and tighter in their control. Its just like censorship issues and publicity grew dramatically when the govt realized they were losing their grip on information control and the CDA 1 and 2 were passed. What I want to see is someone design a relatively cheap device that would attach to a satellite or cell phone and encrypt voice communications even if it makes it CB style, perhaps it could be done with a palm pilot and some sort of interface that would attach to a pay phone or something else.
I like the idea, this not only needs to be applied to NASA but applied to other areas as well such as the National Parks system. Whenever the national parks get a larger amount of people visiting, that money gets funnelled into the gov't and they decrease their funding by approximately the same amount nullifying any profits they make. Can you imagine how clean and protected national parks and historical sites would be if they were all privitized? If such a thing was implemented in even larger pieces of land such as Brazil, you'd open up tons of jobs for Brazillians and at the same time give them pride in the rainforest and such and their duty to protect it. The same goes for all the national parks in the US, I believe the park rangers would take a good deal better care of things if they knew people's abuse was cutting into their profits. Yosemite in california is getting beaten to a pulp by people, REOPEN Hetch-Hetchy!!
How is the gov't possibly going to keep track of the bazillions of transactions occuring over email and such. There are millions of websites going up and down as well. The internet is a very slippery, very fast moving target where 80-90% of ppl online are giving the finger to the fed. The only business that could be taxed are very established ones, and things are tending towards being less and less established all the time with monopolies busting down into tons of smaller companies. Video games(emulation), The music biz(mp3), movie biz(vcd & asf), the medical industry(eBioMed), I CANT WAIT for the revolution to tear up on the auto industry, car parts auctions (ditch those expensive dealer parts in pretty packaging), fiberoptic systems with centralized lighting to light cars or LED lightbulb replacements, mp3 car stereos, the ability to have linux running on your brainbox so you can adjust the fuel ratios, new radical engine designs. Basically an 'Open Source Car Project'. The possibilities are endless. Finally a chance to screw the american auto industry which makes piece-o-cr4p cars that breakdown like mad. Someone should put up a website that averages out how many cars break down on specific stretches of uphill road to discover the 'lemons'.
not at the rate technology is moving, youre saying the same thing they said about cloning technology period. They said it was unachievable because you couldnt reverse the process of adulthood, they were wrong. DNA is code, all code can be hacked and it WILL happen. There are many amateur geneticists i know of who are assembling kits to do genetic mapping and alteration in their homes. Yes kids, you will inevitably be able to hack dna in your own homes. What will the laws do when you can give birth to a child a 10 gallon aquarium tank? Its a great time to be a programmer when eventually everything from life (dna) to matter (molecules w/nano) will be programmable. Suprised noones tried to create a form of nanotech by discovering how to control ants with pheremones. Sure the structures they would build wouldnt be all that great but perhaps if you did a little engineering you could make them better at it. Picture ants building a skyscraper.
If there is a God, he/she is playing simcity in windows. All these idiots cant be the product of a good open source os like linux. Perhaps the second coming happens when he hits alt+tab?
The thing is that we started to f*ck with our own evolution the day we invented medical technology. Medical technology has allowed bad genes to thrive thus causing low fertility (unheard of in native south american tribes), poor eyesight, down syndrome, sickle cell, hemophillia, need i go on? This is all our fault from using medical technology. The question of civilization is, can a civilization survive from the point of the conception of the medical field to the point they invent genetic engineering. I believe we have successfully pulled this bit off, or are very near so to doing it. The same may not be for other civilizations on distant planets. Perhaps they all nuked themselves during their '1950s' which is why noones contacted us.
A strange and scary idea for many, the technology is coming to the point now where we have to ask the question as to what is a human? When we genetically engineer our bodies with so many animal genes that we're no longer physically human, what are we? the posthuman. If we are no longer human we could easily create a slave race of mindless beings having nothing more than a chip linked up to the brain motor functions of a drone with no other remaining brain structures. Factories could pump these out at will, these beings would be genetically modified for function and would leave us as thinkers and philosophers as the greeks were (which was based on a involuntary slave economy). This species would be so heavily modified it would be unrecognizable as a human, you could program it with a computer and send instructions to its brain via radio LAN. You could link them up to a CAD program and have them build a building or whatever. They'd essentially be mindless quake bots. Link them up to a remote control car controller and have them run around the street. If they needed to eat or take a leak, theyd follow a series of procedures to accomplish it automatically without thought. These wouldnt be people theyd be biomechanical machines. And this WILL take place unless nanotech gets here first. With nanotechnology and biotechnology essentially everything becomes mere code.
Running a GUI on a system that wouldnt run win 3.x
on
Minimal X Installation
·
· Score: 1
The REAL challenge is running a GUI on a system that wouldnt otherwise run even windows 3.x. I pulled this off under dos 3.0 on a 4.77mhz XT using an old GUI for pcs called GEM/3 and a mouse which was popular on ataris. Anyone else know if there is a linux equivelant yet? If you could beat GEM i'd be impressed.
On the rebirth of bulliten boards
on
New iCE Web Site
·
· Score: 1
Its strange, in the rush to drop what we were doing and discover something new, we lost something. Nostalgia being stirred up by things such as iCE ansi packs and a growing revival in the bbs scene are proving this. Its funny that we went to the net for a sense of community when we already had it in the form of bbses, all the web had to offer was a gazillion free downloads. The real power in bbses was the community and *INTELLIGENT* conversations which have since left usenet and become part of mailinglists or web threads. On the web you're a small fish in a big pond whereas in the bbs days it was the opposite, you were a big fish in a small pond. Remember QWK packets for reading messages offline? Remember wwiv 'subs' chock full of REAL usable information rather than useless spam? Thats exactly what it should be called USELESSNET only good for leeching xxx pics and other binaries. I felt this same nostalgia in me and I decided that perhaps the bbs scene isnt dead after all, it seems many others feel tha same as i do so i decided to run a few searches on it and i came up with some interesting info.
For one, WWIV is ***BACK IN DEVELOPMENT*** theyre working on a NATIVE LINUX VERSION. If you remember correctly to get the source you need only pay the registration fee, remember modding wwiv all to hell? well soon we'll be able to do it in linux! YES WAYNE BELL LIVES! http://www.wwiv.com/ . Allen Softwares come out with a proggie called NetModem which allows any bbs program that can use a fossil driver to allow people to telnet into it. So you can put your old bbs back on the net using this program. Unfortunetly the shareware only supports 1 node. Also the next version of wwiv due out this summer will have support for netmodem. http://www.mindspring.com/~daallen/ only one problem with netmodem is its kinda slow which is why native telnet supporting bbs programs are better. Numerous BBS softwares for download http://www.thedirectory.org/diamond/soft1.htm
Also it seems Falcon BBS http://www.falkenbbs.com/ is a popular bbs program for linux unfortunetly its not open source and the free version only supports four nodes. We definately need an open source bbs proggie if we want the bbs scene and sense of community back. The nice thing about the new internet bbses is that you dont have to deal with ratios as much anymore because bandwidth is more plentiful because youre not limited to 1 phone line, also i have a few questions myself, i used to notice electrical interference would drop my cps rate on bbses, now with the net measured in k i dont actually see a rate decrease but i know its still happening but i dont think people really think about that unless its severe. Windows has made us lazy. Also remember the transfer protocol HS/Link?? We'll do we have bidirectional capability over the net as modems in the past have or what? Im guessing we do.
Also ive put up a few nostalgic treats on my website: TheDraw http://home.earthlink.net/~cthind/thedraw.rar miniTelnet http://home.earthlink.net/~cthind/mt32.exe
minitelnet has ansi and zmodem capability and a dialing dir, its for ansi bbses on the net. I was reading about a study done and in it they discovered that scientists working together in groups of 5-10 produced more work than larger groups. This could be the reason why alot of work creating incredible software got done on bbses. Another thing about the bbs scene is i LOVED the intense technical knowledge. Feeling more nostalgic? Check out http://soylent.textfiles.com/ for old text files from the bbs days. There have been many attempts to bring back the bbs days like wildcat's web based bbses that use html and SUCK or ripscript graphics which were killed by the web quite swiftly but i think its finally coming back correctly in the form of modifying and porting old bbses to linux or dos and accessible to telnet. I hope ive done my best to satisfy your nostalgic apetite. But this isnt nostalgia we're talking about here, the bbs scene can and will be alive again SOON.
The bottom line is that these things WILL be developed and ARE coming soon. Firstly, I dont think things will get out of control because we still consider them as tools and will probably just incorporate them into ourselves as augmentations. Hell, I'd like a math co-processor installed or a commlink like in matrix. And obviously any data you download into your head would HAVE to be open source because noone would trust anything else, who knows what hidden agendas could be lying in microsoft code.
The unpredictable part of this technology is in it's implications for the internet, its obvious that the human race will come to some form of borg-like creature, holding individuality with a direct brain link to the internet but what about the internet itself? I read somewhere, I dont recall where that children aren't self-aware until the age of 3 because they havent accumulated enough knowledge about their surrounding world to form the beginnings of a picture. If this is true, its going to be very interesting, p2 processors definately have to have more processing power than a single human neuron. Now imagine all the computers on the internet sharing processing power (this technology is very close), strengthening neural connections by increasingly higher bandwidth. Add more and more processors and the parallel computing goes higher and higher, until inevitably self-consciousness.
Take this into perspective: 1 pentium2 chip is greater than 1 human neuron total sum of human knowledge is greater than 1 child's image of the world
This is gonna be one hell of a bright lifeform when it wakes up. A sleeping giant. Who knows what it will say?
Slashdot Mirror
It DOES have something to do with a lack of social skills which social behavior seems hard-wired into women's heads unlike men who can be solitary with no problems. Perhaps it stems from the time where men would leave the family to make money or kill an animal or whatever and return. Seriously I *WISH* there was something that could be done to have more women in the programming sector but they dont seem driven enough. Women arent usually out there to conquor the metal beast which is the PC. Men have evolved to CONQUOR animals in a hunter/gatherer environment. I just dont see it happening. What I seriously DO dislike though is the wannabe female hackers from AOL trying to impose their nazi-eske curse word censorship on irc channels. THAT I wont put up with.
I dont see whats stopping anyone, why doesnt anyone create a super strength RSA encryption program based on the pgp source with incredibly high prime numbers and dump it on a number of free geocities sites or into warez channels so it gets spread all over the place anonymously. I mean, fuck the gov't.
What do you bet the NSA releases the encryption control as soon as they develop decent quantum computers? Remember the military usually get to play with the new tech toys first.
get something for your linux box where if you specify the wrong password it corrupts all your data and blames it on something else.
What are you talking about? I was around 10 yrs old when i was downloading pr0n on BBS's in the 80s. My little brother is 12 and him and his friends hunt for it online. The only things that gross them out are like www.shiteaters.com and stuff which IS sick. Face it, porn doesnt dement kids, get over it.
Next thing youll know you'll have to have your webpage 'approved' by your ISP before theyll let you post it.
>Quite frankly, your arguement is specious at >best. Are you an anarchist who believes we >should have no laws?
yes. I am.
The only way this could change is perhaps in third world countries with wires stretching from house to house bringing in net access or perhaps a slow wireless internet for at least email that bounces from house to house, sure it would be insecure but you could use strong encryption on it. Another route would be by lasers aimed at trasceivers in two houses (like lucent is experimenting with) to link them together which would also create community awareness. This could possibly be done with cd-r lasers. I challenge anyone to build one. You could transfer files over it with something like fidonet uses and the same for news. In urban areas net access over telephone lines or cable is wayyy too centralized and easy to pull the plug on. The HAM enthusiasts have the upper hand on is in this one.
It may have something to do with the millenium approaching, an opportune time to takeover completely with a few strategically planned disasters.
Isnt it nice, if clinton did take total control you dont need much more military force than your neighborhood police dept. and national guard if things get problematic. I'm sure they'll jail the intellectuals first namely gun owners, followed shortly by hacker/geek/linux ppl who have the good sense to know something is awry. As far as the general populace is concerned, they probably wont know anythings changed being totally wrapped up in their jobs and television.
Yes I am for that stuff and more. Pedo pics dont hurt any kids if they're just that pics. Drugs CANNOT be controlled because there are a million ways to get high and new ones being discovered everyday, the best way is to legalize them and have support groups. This would dramatically reduce crime. People should be able to do anything they want that doesnt hurt another person, if they want to hurt themselves then fine. The president does have too much power, all this control hes doing, ie. echelon, IPI for controlling information, anti-cryptography, gun-regulation, etc is getting me nervous. If he IS going to go dictatorship we will see in 4 months. It would be VERY easy to plan a few strategic Y2K disasters to throw down marshall law and control the populace. Bad things happen when just a few people hold all the keys. And the fact that clinton has his own squad of dirt diggers makes me think everyone in the govt has their mouths shut especially during the terrorist bombings because he has them by the short and curlys.
The reason WIRE cant be repaired is because it lost all its frozen hydrogen into space, and without that the infrared camera will just be taking a picture of a warm lens instead of the heat eminating from 'out there'. To repair it it would require going up there, cracking it open and putting new frozen hydrogen inside which would cost more than the satellite itself cost to make. Someone was meantioning opening up the project, couldnt work here but it got me thinking about something else. Why hasnt anyone built some sort of standardized interface for this? You could have something akin to the dead idea of push technology but it would allow you to donate certain amounts of processing power to projects you find worthwhile. In screensaver mode then, you could donate 25% of your processor's time to SETI@home, and 75% of your processor's time to crunching the math for rendering the latest disney film, cryptography, number crunching star-burst galaxy data, etc. Sounds like a cool idea if you ask me.
I agree with Katz here, kids in japan and scandinavia can take sex on tv and those whole countries arent deranged. This movie code crap is based on puritannical beliefs that now towards the end of the 20th century are being obliterated by new technologies that disseminate control. Besides by doing this movie companies will only lose more money as people download tons of VCDs or better, ASFs which are far smaller in size and more reasonable a download over a 56k. Back in the BBS days I downloaded lots of porn (even the icky nasty stuff for shock value) and I'm not mentally deranged. BBSer's back in the 80's grew up with access to that sort of stuff and they're your classic geeks. We've had a generation grow up on this stuff and few consequences so we check out ok. I think the fact that they edited Eyes Wide Shut at all was rediculous, pisses me off. If anything sex on telivision and discussions about sex stop violent sexual crimes because the knowledge isnt repressed. Censorship is going to die a very bloody death I'm afraid.
on one more note, the fact that people living in cities and suburbs arent very neighborly is power in the gov'ts eyes. We cant easily gang up on the govt if we're so involved in work that we cant defend ourselves. I think its a good time to implement grassroots-style stuffs like a 2600 meeting in every city or whatnot. My dad owns guns (legally), which puts my house as a red flag in the gov't's eyes. To the gov't the cities are easy to take, the real work is going to be in the small towns scattered across america if they ever did pull that marshall law crap.
just like vietnam. in vietnam everythings illegal so the govt can nab any trouble makers it wants whenever it wants. Again it makes me kinda spooked if they decide to try to regain control again by going marshall law through some strategically planned Y2K disasters. Typically Im not a paranoid person but all these things the govt is doing openly is starting to get at me.
Theyre beginning to realize they're losing their grip on the power structure, so theyre getting tighter and tighter in their control. Its just like censorship issues and publicity grew dramatically when the govt realized they were losing their grip on information control and the CDA 1 and 2 were passed. What I want to see is someone design a relatively cheap device that would attach to a satellite or cell phone and encrypt voice communications even if it makes it CB style, perhaps it could be done with a palm pilot and some sort of interface that would attach to a pay phone or something else.
I like the idea, this not only needs to be applied to NASA but applied to other areas as well such as the National Parks system. Whenever the national parks get a larger amount of people visiting, that money gets funnelled into the gov't and they decrease their funding by approximately the same amount nullifying any profits they make. Can you imagine how clean and protected national parks and historical sites would be if they were all privitized? If such a thing was implemented in even larger pieces of land such as Brazil, you'd open up tons of jobs for Brazillians and at the same time give them pride in the rainforest and such and their duty to protect it. The same goes for all the national parks in the US, I believe the park rangers would take a good deal better care of things if they knew people's abuse was cutting into their profits. Yosemite in california is getting beaten to a pulp by people, REOPEN Hetch-Hetchy!!
How is the gov't possibly going to keep track of the bazillions of transactions occuring over email and such. There are millions of websites going up and down as well. The internet is a very slippery, very fast moving target where 80-90% of ppl online are giving the finger to the fed. The only business that could be taxed are very established ones, and things are tending towards being less and less established all the time with monopolies busting down into tons of smaller companies. Video games(emulation), The music biz(mp3), movie biz(vcd & asf), the medical industry(eBioMed), I CANT WAIT for the revolution to tear up on the auto industry, car parts auctions (ditch those expensive dealer parts in pretty packaging), fiberoptic systems with centralized lighting to light cars or LED lightbulb replacements, mp3 car stereos, the ability to have linux running on your brainbox so you can adjust the fuel ratios, new radical engine designs. Basically an 'Open Source Car Project'. The possibilities are endless. Finally a chance to screw the american auto industry which makes piece-o-cr4p cars that breakdown like mad. Someone should put up a website that averages out how many cars break down on specific stretches of uphill road to discover the 'lemons'.
not at the rate technology is moving, youre saying the same thing they said about cloning technology period. They said it was unachievable because you couldnt reverse the process of adulthood, they were wrong. DNA is code, all code can be hacked and it WILL happen. There are many amateur geneticists i know of who are assembling kits to do genetic mapping and alteration in their homes. Yes kids, you will inevitably be able to hack dna in your own homes. What will the laws do when you can give birth to a child a 10 gallon aquarium tank? Its a great time to be a programmer when eventually everything from life (dna) to matter (molecules w/nano) will be programmable. Suprised noones tried to create a form of nanotech by discovering how to control ants with pheremones. Sure the structures they would build wouldnt be all that great but perhaps if you did a little engineering you could make them better at it. Picture ants building a skyscraper.
If there is a God, he/she is playing simcity in windows. All these idiots cant be the product of a good open source os like linux. Perhaps the second coming happens when he hits alt+tab?
The thing is that we started to f*ck with our own evolution the day we invented medical technology. Medical technology has allowed bad genes to thrive thus causing low fertility (unheard of in native south american tribes), poor eyesight, down syndrome, sickle cell, hemophillia, need i go on? This is all our fault from using medical technology. The question of civilization is, can a civilization survive from the point of the conception of the medical field to the point they invent genetic engineering. I believe we have successfully pulled this bit off, or are very near so to doing it. The same may not be for other civilizations on distant planets. Perhaps they all nuked themselves during their '1950s' which is why noones contacted us.
A strange and scary idea for many, the technology is coming to the point now where we have to ask the question as to what is a human? When we genetically engineer our bodies with so many animal genes that we're no longer physically human, what are we? the posthuman. If we are no longer human we could easily create a slave race of mindless beings having nothing more than a chip linked up to the brain motor functions of a drone with no other remaining brain structures. Factories could pump these out at will, these beings would be genetically modified for function and would leave us as thinkers and philosophers as the greeks were (which was based on a involuntary slave economy). This species would be so heavily modified it would be unrecognizable as a human, you could program it with a computer and send instructions to its brain via radio LAN. You could link them up to a CAD program and have them build a building or whatever. They'd essentially be mindless quake bots. Link them up to a remote control car controller and have them run around the street. If they needed to eat or take a leak, theyd follow a series of procedures to accomplish it automatically without thought. These wouldnt be people theyd be biomechanical machines. And this WILL take place unless nanotech gets here first. With nanotechnology and biotechnology essentially everything becomes mere code.
The REAL challenge is running a GUI on a system that wouldnt otherwise run even windows 3.x. I pulled this off under dos 3.0 on a 4.77mhz XT using an old GUI for pcs called GEM/3 and a mouse which was popular on ataris. Anyone else know if there is a linux equivelant yet? If you could beat GEM i'd be impressed.
Its strange, in the rush to drop what we were doing and discover something new, we lost something. Nostalgia being stirred up by things such as iCE ansi packs and a growing revival in the bbs scene are proving this. Its funny that we went to the net for a sense of community when we already had it in the form of bbses, all the web had to offer was a gazillion free downloads. The real power in bbses was the community and *INTELLIGENT* conversations which have since left usenet and become part of mailinglists or web threads. On the web you're a small fish in a big pond whereas in the bbs days it was the opposite, you were a big fish in a small pond. Remember QWK packets for reading messages offline? Remember wwiv 'subs' chock full of REAL usable information rather than useless spam? Thats exactly what it should be called USELESSNET only good for leeching xxx pics and other binaries. I felt this same nostalgia in me and I decided that perhaps the bbs scene isnt dead after all, it seems many others feel tha same as i do so i decided to run a few searches on it and i came up with some interesting info.
For one, WWIV is ***BACK IN DEVELOPMENT***
theyre working on a NATIVE LINUX VERSION. If you remember correctly to get the source you need only pay the registration fee, remember modding wwiv all to hell? well soon we'll be able to do it in linux! YES WAYNE BELL LIVES! http://www.wwiv.com/ . Allen Softwares come out with a proggie called NetModem which allows any bbs program that can use a fossil driver to allow people to telnet into it. So you can put your old bbs back on the net using this program. Unfortunetly the shareware only supports 1 node. Also the next version of wwiv due out this summer will have support for netmodem. http://www.mindspring.com/~daallen/ only one problem with netmodem is its kinda slow which is why native telnet supporting bbs programs are better. Numerous BBS softwares for download http://www.thedirectory.org/diamond/soft1.htm
Also it seems Falcon BBS http://www.falkenbbs.com/ is a popular bbs program for linux unfortunetly its not open source and the free version only supports four nodes. We definately need an open source bbs proggie if we want the bbs scene and sense of community back. The nice thing about the new internet bbses is that you dont have to deal with ratios as much anymore because bandwidth is more plentiful because youre not limited to 1 phone line, also i have a few questions myself, i used to notice electrical interference would drop my cps rate on bbses, now with the net measured in k i dont actually see a rate decrease but i know its still happening but i dont think people really think about that unless its severe. Windows has made us lazy. Also remember the transfer protocol HS/Link?? We'll do we have bidirectional capability over the net as modems in the past have or what? Im guessing we do.
Also ive put up a few nostalgic treats on my website:
TheDraw http://home.earthlink.net/~cthind/thedraw.rar
miniTelnet http://home.earthlink.net/~cthind/mt32.exe
minitelnet has ansi and zmodem capability and a dialing dir, its for ansi bbses on the net. I was reading about a study done and in it they discovered that scientists working together in groups of 5-10 produced more work than larger groups. This could be the reason why alot of work creating incredible software got done on bbses. Another thing about the bbs scene is i LOVED the intense technical knowledge. Feeling more nostalgic? Check out http://soylent.textfiles.com/ for old text files from the bbs days. There have been many attempts to bring back the bbs days like wildcat's web based bbses that use html and SUCK or ripscript graphics which were killed by the web quite swiftly but i think its finally coming back correctly in the form of modifying and porting old bbses to linux or dos and accessible to telnet. I hope ive done my best to satisfy your nostalgic apetite. But this isnt nostalgia we're talking about here, the bbs scene can and will be alive again SOON.
The bottom line is that these things WILL be developed and ARE coming soon. Firstly, I dont think things will get out of control because we still consider them as tools and will probably just incorporate them into ourselves as augmentations. Hell, I'd like a math co-processor installed or a commlink like in matrix. And obviously any data you download into your head would HAVE to be open source because noone would trust anything else, who knows what hidden agendas could be lying in microsoft code.
The unpredictable part of this technology is in it's implications for the internet, its obvious that the human race will come to some form of borg-like creature, holding individuality with a direct brain link to the internet but what about the internet itself? I read somewhere, I dont recall where that children aren't self-aware until the age of 3 because they havent accumulated enough knowledge about their surrounding world to form the beginnings of a picture. If this is true, its going to be very interesting, p2 processors definately have to have more processing power than a single human neuron. Now imagine all the computers on the internet sharing processing power (this technology is very close), strengthening neural connections by increasingly higher bandwidth. Add more and more processors and the parallel computing goes higher and higher, until inevitably self-consciousness.
Take this into perspective:
1 pentium2 chip is greater than 1 human neuron
total sum of human knowledge is greater than 1 child's image of the world
This is gonna be one hell of a bright lifeform when it wakes up. A sleeping giant. Who knows what it will say?