The last "dark age" was a period during which knowledge (accumulated through a small number of precious and jealously-guarded books) was preserved in the hands of a very small number pf people.
The Gutenberg Press was probably responsible for other "dark ages" not having occurred since, but (and I freely admit that this is a pet peeve of mine) just think about this for a moment.
Since about 1850, the majority of books, research papers and other documents have been printed on paper made from wood pulp, where the acid content has resulted in a lot of them simply disintegrating. (How many of us own paperback novels from as recently as the '80s which are falling apart?)
I think this will result in a "dark age" on a far vaster scale than the failure of disk drives.
I realise your post is flamebait, but I'll bite anyway. Gnome has just released version 2.0, which has a shipload of new features. Unless I'm mistaken, Enlightenment has shown no evidence of progress in well over a year. While I do admire many aspects of Enlightenment's interface, it would appear to many of us that Enlightenment is as good as it's going to get. Having said that, I'm quite sure the Enlightenment crew would welcome your donation. It's all about freedom of choice, after all.
an old game called Hamurabi that used to be installed on Prime [what used to be called mini-]computers. Any Slashdotters old enough to remember those boxen?.
Not quite in disuse: a nurse with a Chaucerian turn of phrase might say, "the patient hath yshyten [past perfect] twice today... as opposed to an NT server sysadmin who would just say "the *@#$%&@#$* has just shat itself again"...
You lose many of those little changes you forgot you made
I get around this by setting up a script file (which, in a feeble attempt at being funny, I call "getitup") which I update every time I make a config change. I also use it to build localised libraries and applications. It came in useful the other week when my hard drive trashed itself; I was able to re-install the OS from my Slackware ISOs, run my magic script and have the machine up and running as before within 60 minutes of installing a new hard drive.
From a specialist viewpoint: I spent 12 years working as a blacksmith (how many slashdotters are blacksmiths, I wonder?), and I know a fair bit about iron and steel.
Steels are designed for very specialised purposes. Cr-Mo steels typically make quite good kitchen knives but are lousy where shock/abrasion/heat resistance are required. In fact, there are several steel manufacturers who catalogue their products on varying scales of combinations of hardness, shock/heat/abrasion resistance by the addition of chromium, vanadium, manganese, phosphorus and/or a host of other elements and compounds.
I've been working with computers for some 25 years now on mainframes, minis and PCs, and I've yet to find an OS that can be guaranteed to upgrade 100% cleanly on top of another installation. I prefer the approach of having a re-install procedure for localised settings and apps (or better, a script that handles the job automatically) and going with the fresh install on newly formatted partitions. I have found this saves a lot of headaches.
If they ship with that so-called 2.96 hack of GCC, chances are that a few people will find stuff that doesn't compile easily. I had to do a bit of tweaking a couple of months ago on a friend's system to get OpenOffice to compile. The configure script didn't like 2.96 as a GCC version, only 2.95 or 3.x.
Funny, I found lots of things were broken in 8.2 that were OK in 8.1, from a Gnome desktop perspective. I realise that the KDE implementation is supposed to be better, though... I got the impression that mdk's financial woes were the driving force behind the 8.2 release date.
I use a MS Natural keyboard now (although I've been a diehard Linux user since about '96 or so). The only thing wrong with it was the MS logo at the top right hand corner. But it comes off quite nicely with careful application of acetone with tissue paper:-)
Yeah, I seem to remember they were about the same vintage as the Commodore PET, or maybe a bit before. I wrote an unbeatable tic-tac-toe prog for one of those... I think the keyboard sucked on that one, too:-)
Have you ever used one of the old-style typewriters? I have. Hitting any two keys within a very short period of time caused the mechanism to jam, as the doodads that bashed the character through the ribbon got tangled up. The engineers of the day designed (and re-designed) the keyboard to short-circuit the hot-shot lightning typist ladies (I'm not being sexist, they were mostly female) to allow those doodads to fall back into place (mostly by gravity) before the next one hit the platten.
My first real computer keyboard was an 029 card-punch (none of that wimpoid QWERTY stuff, no sirree!). Anybody remember those? (Yes, I do realise I've just dated myself big-time, but what the hell...) In fact, I've still got one somewhere. It's about the right size and weight to make a good door-stop. I haven't used it for a long time (22 years, to be precise), but I can remember being expected to code assembly and fortran source code directly on to cards just using a pseudocode crib... I don't think I could do that now:-(
If my postal service would agree to cease filling up my snail-mail box with crap, I probably sign up for it (though of course I wouldn't give my primary email address). It would effectively give it a path to/dev/null, where it belongs.
Australia Post used to sell "Australia Post Only" mailbox stickers at their shops, but when I tried to buy one recently, they had stopped selling them. When I asked the lady at the counter if that was because AP is the biggest distributor of junk mail, she said "I wouldn't deny it".
I wasn't bashing Woody in my parent post; Not long ago, when I was changing distros (as I do from time to time) I tried to get hold of Woody on CDs, as I don't have the bandwidth to download the ISOs. Nobody here in Australia was willing to take the time to answer my enquiries, so I gave up and went back to Slackware.
Slashdot Mirror
The Gutenberg Press was probably responsible for other "dark ages" not having occurred since, but (and I freely admit that this is a pet peeve of mine) just think about this for a moment.
Since about 1850, the majority of books, research papers and other documents have been printed on paper made from wood pulp, where the acid content has resulted in a lot of them simply disintegrating. (How many of us own paperback novels from as recently as the '80s which are falling apart?)
I think this will result in a "dark age" on a far vaster scale than the failure of disk drives.
I realise your post is flamebait, but I'll bite anyway. Gnome has just released version 2.0, which has a shipload of new features. Unless I'm mistaken, Enlightenment has shown no evidence of progress in well over a year. While I do admire many aspects of Enlightenment's interface, it would appear to many of us that Enlightenment is as good as it's going to get. Having said that, I'm quite sure the Enlightenment crew would welcome your donation. It's all about freedom of choice, after all.
probably why he relies so much on techno whiz... God knows, he certainly doesn't rely on good script-writing. Deader than Heaven on a Saturday night.
I guess he doesn't need to :-D
an old game called Hamurabi that used to be installed on Prime [what used to be called mini-]computers. Any Slashdotters old enough to remember those boxen?.
well said.
Not quite in disuse: a nurse with a Chaucerian turn of phrase might say, "the patient hath yshyten [past perfect] twice today... as opposed to an NT server sysadmin who would just say "the *@#$%&@#$* has just shat itself again"...
Easy. I just pull the plug from my windoze desktop machine and plug it into my Linux laptop.
The only way Microsoft will get people to stop using Windows 95 is to hire an army of thugs to go out and amputate their hands.
Uhh... Maybe I should take my old Sperry/UNIVAC 1100/82 and see if it'll dual-boot with Windows CE :-)
You lose many of those little changes you forgot you made
I get around this by setting up a script file (which, in a feeble attempt at being funny, I call "getitup") which I update every time I make a config change. I also use it to build localised libraries and applications. It came in useful the other week when my hard drive trashed itself; I was able to re-install the OS from my Slackware ISOs, run my magic script and have the machine up and running as before within 60 minutes of installing a new hard drive.
Steels are designed for very specialised purposes. Cr-Mo steels typically make quite good kitchen knives but are lousy where shock/abrasion/heat resistance are required. In fact, there are several steel manufacturers who catalogue their products on varying scales of combinations of hardness, shock/heat/abrasion resistance by the addition of chromium, vanadium, manganese, phosphorus and/or a host of other elements and compounds.
I've been working with computers for some 25 years now on mainframes, minis and PCs, and I've yet to find an OS that can be guaranteed to upgrade 100% cleanly on top of another installation. I prefer the approach of having a re-install procedure for localised settings and apps (or better, a script that handles the job automatically) and going with the fresh install on newly formatted partitions. I have found this saves a lot of headaches.
If they ship with that so-called 2.96 hack of GCC, chances are that a few people will find stuff that doesn't compile easily. I had to do a bit of tweaking a couple of months ago on a friend's system to get OpenOffice to compile. The configure script didn't like 2.96 as a GCC version, only 2.95 or 3.x.
It would probably be sort of OK, but I would wait until the Release Candidates come through.
oldest of the Linux distros, I mean... :-|
Though the oldest of them all, Slackware has (as far as I'm aware) never bothered with this...
Funny, I found lots of things were broken in 8.2 that were OK in 8.1, from a Gnome desktop perspective. I realise that the KDE implementation is supposed to be better, though... I got the impression that mdk's financial woes were the driving force behind the 8.2 release date.
I use a MS Natural keyboard now (although I've been a diehard Linux user since about '96 or so). The only thing wrong with it was the MS logo at the top right hand corner. But it comes off quite nicely with careful application of acetone with tissue paper :-)
Yeah, I seem to remember they were about the same vintage as the Commodore PET, or maybe a bit before. I wrote an unbeatable tic-tac-toe prog for one of those... I think the keyboard sucked on that one, too :-)
Have you ever used one of the old-style typewriters? I have. Hitting any two keys within a very short period of time caused the mechanism to jam, as the doodads that bashed the character through the ribbon got tangled up. The engineers of the day designed (and re-designed) the keyboard to short-circuit the hot-shot lightning typist ladies (I'm not being sexist, they were mostly female) to allow those doodads to fall back into place (mostly by gravity) before the next one hit the platten.
My first real computer keyboard was an 029 card-punch (none of that wimpoid QWERTY stuff, no sirree!). Anybody remember those? (Yes, I do realise I've just dated myself big-time, but what the hell...) In fact, I've still got one somewhere. It's about the right size and weight to make a good door-stop. I haven't used it for a long time (22 years, to be precise), but I can remember being expected to code assembly and fortran source code directly on to cards just using a pseudocode crib... I don't think I could do that now :-(
You could always disable sigs in your preferences. They're rarely pertinent anyway...
Australia Post used to sell "Australia Post Only" mailbox stickers at their shops, but when I tried to buy one recently, they had stopped selling them. When I asked the lady at the counter if that was because AP is the biggest distributor of junk mail, she said "I wouldn't deny it".
I wasn't bashing Woody in my parent post; Not long ago, when I was changing distros (as I do from time to time) I tried to get hold of Woody on CDs, as I don't have the bandwidth to download the ISOs. Nobody here in Australia was willing to take the time to answer my enquiries, so I gave up and went back to Slackware.