For what it is worth:-) I had a heavy IO application running on a Celeron 500, and moved it to a Thunderbird 850. The configurations were similar otherwise. Based on my application the Athlon runs about 2.5 times faster than the Celeron. Even counting the bus speed difference (66 to 100), this is an impressive improvement.
Would you see the same improvement? I doubt it. But I think it backs up your point that the only "benchmark" with meaning is the one you run yourself...
well this is real disturbing. part of the problem is that a lot of the people who COULD use computers CAN'T because they don't have any juice (electricity) to run them on.
Well, this might be another place where the GE fuel cells would be appropriate:-) They are supposed to sell for what, about $10k each? And 7kw would probably be a great start for a village that never had electricity before.
Of course, the next problem would be propane delivery and storage, but one problem at a time...
however, if it was a fairly predictable event, like a neighbor's sprinkler head getting blown off by water pressure (preferably while they work on it),
Hmmm. "fairly predictable"? It sounds like you know more about this than you're willing to share. I'm glad I'm not your neighbor:-)
Why not start with a middle ground? Simply stipulate that the contractors must provide source code with all deliverables, and include a perpetual non-exclusive right for the government agency to use and maintain the software.
That is just the general case of my foodservice innovation - the Spaghetti Burrito.
The problem: Italian food - especially pasta - is delicious and healthy. In older times, we could simply sit down and enjoy a healthy meal. But these days, in the After Ford era, we don't have that luxury. Since our only source of nourishment is limited to a choice of fast food chains, we have to settle for burgers, pseudo-Mexican food, or various arrangements of extruded chicken parts.
The solution: The answer is the Spaghetti Burrito. It is a generous helping of pasta and tangy sauce rolled into a flour burrito shell. It can be eaten in one hand. Properly wrapped, it won't leak or tear.
The details: The Spaghetti Burrito is prepared from pasta, sauce, and the shell. It is flash-frozen and packaged for foodservice distribution. At the restaurant, it is kept frozen until needed. Cooking is simply a matter of dropping into a deep-fry vat until golden brown.
I'd look at PC Power & Cooling. I've bought several standard power supplies from them, and they are good quality. They have an "ultra quiet" line you might want to check out.
Domain names in the.com,.net, and.org domains can now be registered
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
No match for "QCATSUCKS.COM".
>>> Last update of whois database: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 10:14:38 EDT
The Registry database contains ONLY.COM,.NET,.ORG,.EDU domains and
Registrars.
They also added hardware watchpoints to gdb:-) It will be WELL worth the bother upgrading one of my development boxes just for that alone. Maybe you aren't a developer, but I have been wishing for some kind of hardware breakpoints for a long time. You haven't really lived until you spend a half day trying to find out which line of code in a multi-threaded or multi-process server is fiddling with that data...
There are a few other nice improvements, but this is enough reason for me to snarf 4.1.1
I've heard of Java Beans, but "Java Rocks"?
on
Java Rocks On Linux
·
· Score: 4
I'm glad to hear that we now have "Java Rocks". Not that I have the slightest clue how to implement an application or class library on this new development, but it just sounds cool.
Isn't a cool name the core of any new technology product?
It brings up an image - I see it now! A penguin hurling Java Rocks at stained windows...
Enough pointless rambling:-) I have enough serious rambling yet to finish.
Because we were small and thought we had a fantastic idea...
Of course. From your perspective, that is. If you thought it were not worthwhile, you would be working somewhere else. Keep in mind that your enthusiasm is not neccessarily an indicator of potential interest with everyone who walks in your door.
Granted, we were not sue happy folks...
If you whip out the legal documents and make such a big deal of their "importance", I would have to assume that you ARE ready to sue.
Also: I get so tired of lawyers saying what the "intent" of a legal document is, and that I should not be concerned with the wording. Well, if it comes before a judge, what are the chances that he will rule on our unwritten "intent" versus the legal definitions and remedies expressed in black and white?
Sometimes a contract (euphemistically called an "agreement") is holding up a valuable deal, and it is worth going through all the cycles of review, ammend, negotiate. But unless it is really that worthwhile, I would just say NO.
Quoting from the article: Attorney General Janet Reno said last week that technical specifications of the system will be disclosed to a "group of experts."
I seem to remember a similar situation with clipper/skipjack. The algorithm was too "sensitive" for public release, so they got a group of "experts" to reassure us. (sarcasm) World renown experts like Dorothy Deming. (/sarcasm) You may remember her as one of the encryption experts who looked at the skipjack and found (paraphrasing), "it looks fine by me, so stop worrying about backdoors!"
Somehow I did not find that reassuring then. And I have a feeling that I will not find the FBI's experts assurances convincing now, regarding Carnivore.
At first glance, this seems to be going to extremes. After all, when was the last time the number 128 changed to, say 127? Or 129? Odds are, most numbers won't change values on us...
On second thought, though, what about the social and political ramifications? Suppose that we wake up one morning and find that 128 has been declared "hate speech"? (It was nice knowing you, 128!) Now what do we do with the zillions of lines of code that have to be changed, in order to avoid jail time for "hate speech" or some other felony? The answer, of course, is to abstract these potentially hateful numbers as #define statements so that we can change them later to politically approved numbers. Like "the number formerly known as 128". Or "127 plus 1".
A few moments after posting, I realized that I wrote 19th century, not 20th... Argh. No, actually that should be, "DUH!". Honestly, I am usually a moderately intelligent guy:-)
And the quotes with "righteous" and "evil" are just the literary equivalent of passing wind - please pardon me while I vent:-) It's all in fun.
After the battle against Circuit City and DIVX ended with victory for the righteous, I think we all celebrated in some way. Like a vampire with a stake in its heart, or a werewolf finally slain with a silver bullet, DIVX would be forever dead.
(mild rant) So, what happened? Apparently someone with a really sick sense of humor decided that this Microsoft code rip should bear the badge we have come to hate and despise. Even Microsoft doesn't deserve that...
Ok, ok, they changed the capitalization from DIVX to DivX. By that argument, it would be perfectly fine to call someone a nAzI or FAscisT because the difference in case indicates we really are not talking about 19th century dictatorships here.
Or to turn this around, using the term DivX would tend to dilute the connotation of concentrated evil that we have painstakingly built for the (Circuit City) DIVX.
Why is this irritating to me? Because the purpose of language is to communicate, and words have meaning in order to facilitate understanding. Why would someone choose to promote ambiguity? (/mild rant)
I guess I have to admit that every now and then I run across an animated GIF that is actually interesting or amusing...
But as a general rule, I find animated images to be annoying and repulsive. They tend to be distracting, and draw my attention away from the real reason I have the web page on my screen - the content.
Every day, I wish that my browser had an option to disable animated images. Perhaps there could be a menu icon I could click to enable them on the rare occasion that I really wanted to see the other frames. Now THAT feature would be a major plus to Mozilla. Chances are, I will some day go into the code and add it myself (THANK YOU, MOZILLA for the source code:-)
Honestly, how many of you really enjoy those crappy, animated banner ads on your screen? Is this going to be an *improvement* for Mozilla?
We all hear about somebody winning some lottery and winning $10^6 to $10^7 as the prize. Now what the heck are they going to actually DO with the money? After making a donation to the taxman, of course:-( Sure, the first million will pay bills and buy some excellent toys. Then what?
Without any clear picture of doing anything in particular with the remaining millions, I'll bet most lottery ticket buyers are not thrilled and excited as they could be if the prize were unique and glamourous like (you guessed it) a trip to space...
Now picture a lottery where the prize includes the obligatory couple $million, but most importantly, a round trip ticket to some space destination. Let me tell you, money is nice but it doesn't get the blood pumping like the idea of getting off this planet for even a little while.
This story suggests that someone put "hidden" frames in an MPEG2 stream. Yeah, right. The basis for MPEG1/2 encoding is to use information from earlier (and later) frames to achieve temporal compression. Unless you dedicate two "I" frames to each "blip", you are simply not going to have a usable sequence. This is in addition to the normal I-B-P sequence, of course.
Then again, two seconds after thinking about this, it was obvious that this was another April fool's joke. Ok, we saw the stupid Internet cleanup story just like every year. You had your cheap laugh. Just because nobody laughed does not mean you need to keep trying. It is not funny.
SO ENOUGH WITH THIS APRIL FOOL'S SHIT ALREADY! Can you hear me, or do I need to turn it up? (Now turning middle finger from down to upraised position).
I use XEMACS for most all my editing, and it is generally pretty useful. For debugging, though, I sometimes have to use gdb because XEMACS is a pain in the ass.
First, as soon as I start debugging, my source code goes read only. So I don't have any convenient way to make changes in my source until I kill the debugger. This is probably so that gdb keeps sync with my source code frame, but it is still annoying.
Second, XEMACS pulls focus away from my command line window every time I step through any instruction. Yes, I want to see the pointers move as it runs, but NO! I don't want to have to pull focus back to my gdb command line to print a variable, dump memory, or whatever.
And maybe this is a trivial gripe, but XEMACS cannot figure out that I might want to debug the program in the current buffers. Instead, I have to navigate the file requester boxes to point out the executable. Now I am just a programmer to say this, but maybe it could figure out that if I have someprog.c in my window, and I want to debug, just MAYBE the executable is called someprog? Oh, well... Maybe I am just an ungrateful bastard...
In short, while (X)EMACS has some handy debugging support, I will generally opt for running gdb from the command line 70-90% of the time.
It is not clear whether he is going to hire legal help, but it might be easier for him to make that desision if some sympathetic supporters made an offer. Would this be an cause for the EFF to be involved in? If so, I would be willing to kick in a bit, perhaps through an EFF trust fund.
If the EFF is not interested, perhaps another reputable rights organisation would be willing to set up a legal defense fund? To me, the key is knowing that the money is being used for its intended purpose. I don't just want to send an envelope full of cash to some foreign country and hope it arrives!
Sorry I am asking questions and not answering them, but I would like to help, and I am sure others feel the same way.
Besides powering laptop computers, this kind of technology would be great for certain types of survival (or wilderness) gear. Take aircraft, for instance. Most every airplane has an ELT, and emergency locater transmitter that goes off if the plane crashes. This ELT runs off batteries, batteries that have a limited run time, and need to be replaced every few years with fresh ones. Now our unfortunate pilot has one powered by a fuel cell that will last for days, if needed.
How about two-way radios for backpackers, radios that can be refilled as needed, say for a week or so? I have to imagine that fluorescent camp lites powered by fuel cells would be better per quart of fuel than the fire-based Coleman lanterns. I suppose if you wanted to be really funny, you could even bring along a miniature fridge based on peltier devices and fuel cells.
I guess we should be careful with technology, though, or pretty soon we would see boneheads and other twits taking their TV sets and boomboxes into the wilderness...
Niven and Barnes' book "Achilles' Choice" brings up some interesting possibilities and dangers with the technology of wiring our brains with computers. In their scenario, the "linked" enjoy a level of power, both technological and political. In an earlier book, "Oath of Fealty", he touches on some interesting advantages of having instant data and communications available from a cerebral implant communicating with a central computer.
So... This story looks like another small victory towards the future where we can get our information faster and easier. Right now, it is a tool for helping the handicapped, but perhaps it will be a status symbol once it reaches technological maturity. Be honest! Who would not be tempted to become one of the "linked"?
I guess some people think Kaufman was some kind of comic genius, just like a lot of French people seem to think Jerry Lewis was actually funny. They are entitled to their opinion, of course.
My first recollection of Andy was in some kind of second-rate TV talent show (not the Gong Show). He walked on stage and set up one of those old-fashioned record players. Remember the ones with tubes and built-in speaker that we listened to when "doing the hokey pokey" in grammar school? Anyway, he played a record that had someone else talking with spaces where he could talk back. For its time, maybe that was innovative. Maybe. Then he sang a song, I think it was "Old McDonald had a farm".
Now fast-forward to Saturday Night Live and Taxi. I don't remember which came first, but his role in Taxi was not really that annoying, but nothing special either. Just another supporting role. Nothing to compare with Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd in my opinion. In SNL, the only parts I remember is where he just would not shut up about being able to out-wrestle any woman. He challenged any woman to the ring to prove him wrong. Yawn. Annoying.
Mercifully, he disappeared from my radar shortly afterwards, and only blipped back a couple times since. He announced that he had adopted a whole bunch of children, to show what a decent human being he was. He was dying from some disease. Then he faked his death, apparently to find out how much people would care once he was gone. Then he re-appeared. Then he died.
Maybe he was a really decent guy in real life. I just know the small pieces of him that he flung at us, and I did not really enjoy the experience. Rest in peace, Andy, but I will not shed a tear.
... But I will ask the question anyway:-) Assuming that someone had more money than brains, could a Beowulf cluster run an interactive application? Say, wine for instance? I just had this vision of Windows apps actually running fast... On second thought, nahhh. Some things are just not meant for mankind.
Like most (all?) other mentions of D&D, there was no mention here of Dave Arneson. Remember him? He was the co-author of the original three D&D books. And Blackmoor, which I thought was a waste of $5... The story I heard was that Gygax was a major prick and cheated Arneson, then changed the name to AD&D. Then, of course, he published the monster handbook, player handbook, and the DM guide. Does anyone remember what REALLY happened back then? (Yes, I remember Hargrave, too:-)
So you think you can handle Penix? Ok, big guy - I will call your bluff. I will give you control of penix.com, and you create the web site and distribution. It's up to you, but I suggest: "Loosely based on the BFD distribution", "Comes with the book 'Penix Unzipped'", "Available as an embedded system", Including utilities like: finger, head, man, mount, tail, touch, and uptime. Supports frontpage, hard links, ports, and sockets, of course. Well you asked for it - get to work:-)
Slashdot Mirror
For what it is worth :-) I had a heavy IO application running on a Celeron 500, and moved it to a Thunderbird 850. The configurations were similar otherwise. Based on my application the Athlon runs about 2.5 times faster than the Celeron. Even counting the bus speed difference (66 to 100), this is an impressive improvement.
Would you see the same improvement? I doubt it. But I think it backs up your point that the only "benchmark" with meaning is the one you run yourself...
well this is real disturbing. part of the problem is that a lot of the people who COULD use computers CAN'T because they don't have any juice (electricity) to run them on.
:-) They are supposed to sell for what, about $10k each? And 7kw would probably be a great start for a village that never had electricity before.
Well, this might be another place where the GE fuel cells would be appropriate
Of course, the next problem would be propane delivery and storage, but one problem at a time...
however, if it was a fairly predictable event, like a neighbor's sprinkler head getting blown off by water pressure (preferably while they work on it),
:-)
Hmmm. "fairly predictable"? It sounds like you know more about this than you're willing to share. I'm glad I'm not your neighbor
Why not start with a middle ground? Simply stipulate that the contractors must provide source code with all deliverables, and include a perpetual non-exclusive right for the government agency to use and maintain the software.
That is just the general case of my foodservice innovation - the Spaghetti Burrito.
The problem:
Italian food - especially pasta - is delicious and healthy. In older times, we could simply sit down and enjoy a healthy meal. But these days, in the After Ford era, we don't have that luxury. Since our only source of nourishment is limited to a choice of fast food chains, we have to settle for burgers, pseudo-Mexican food, or various arrangements of extruded chicken parts.
The solution:
The answer is the Spaghetti Burrito. It is a generous helping of pasta and tangy sauce rolled into a flour burrito shell. It can be eaten in one hand. Properly wrapped, it won't leak or tear.
The details:
The Spaghetti Burrito is prepared from pasta, sauce, and the shell. It is flash-frozen and packaged for foodservice distribution. At the restaurant, it is kept frozen until needed. Cooking is simply a matter of dropping into a deep-fry vat until golden brown.
Is this a winner or what?
I'd look at PC Power & Cooling. I've bought several standard power supplies from them, and they are good quality. They have an "ultra quiet" line you might want to check out.
:-(
Ultr a quiet line.
They're not exactly cheap, though. Figure about $70 to $100
ws3: {526} whois qcatsucks.com
.com, .net, and .org domains can now be registered
.COM, .NET, .ORG, .EDU domains and
Whois Server Version 1.3
Domain names in the
with many different competing registrars. Go to http://www.internic.net
for detailed information.
No match for "QCATSUCKS.COM".
>>> Last update of whois database: Thu, 28 Sep 2000 10:14:38 EDT
The Registry database contains ONLY
Registrars.
For me, it's more than just RSA.
:-) It will be WELL worth the bother upgrading one of my development boxes just for that alone. Maybe you aren't a developer, but I have been wishing for some kind of hardware breakpoints for a long time. You haven't really lived until you spend a half day trying to find out which line of code in a multi-threaded or multi-process server is fiddling with that data...
They also added hardware watchpoints to gdb
There are a few other nice improvements, but this is enough reason for me to snarf 4.1.1
I'm glad to hear that we now have "Java Rocks". Not that I have the slightest clue how to implement an application or class library on this new development, but it just sounds cool.
:-) I have enough serious rambling yet to finish.
Isn't a cool name the core of any new technology product?
It brings up an image - I see it now! A penguin hurling Java Rocks at stained windows...
Enough pointless rambling
Because we were small and thought we had a fantastic idea...
Of course. From your perspective, that is. If you thought it were not worthwhile, you would be working somewhere else. Keep in mind that your enthusiasm is not neccessarily an indicator of potential interest with everyone who walks in your door.
Granted, we were not sue happy folks...
If you whip out the legal documents and make such a big deal of their "importance", I would have to assume that you ARE ready to sue.
Also: I get so tired of lawyers saying what the "intent" of a legal document is, and that I should not be concerned with the wording. Well, if it comes before a judge, what are the chances that he will rule on our unwritten "intent" versus the legal definitions and remedies expressed in black and white?
Sometimes a contract (euphemistically called an "agreement") is holding up a valuable deal, and it is worth going through all the cycles of review, ammend, negotiate. But unless it is really that worthwhile, I would just say NO.
Quoting from the article:
Attorney General Janet Reno said last week that technical specifications of the system will be disclosed to a "group of experts."
I seem to remember a similar situation with clipper/skipjack. The algorithm was too "sensitive" for public release, so they got a group of "experts" to reassure us. (sarcasm) World renown experts like Dorothy Deming. (/sarcasm) You may remember her as one of the encryption experts who looked at the skipjack and found (paraphrasing), "it looks fine by me, so stop worrying about backdoors!"
Somehow I did not find that reassuring then. And I have a feeling that I will not find the FBI's experts assurances convincing now, regarding Carnivore.
At first glance, this seems to be going to extremes. After all, when was the last time the number 128 changed to, say 127? Or 129? Odds are, most numbers won't change values on us...
On second thought, though, what about the social and political ramifications? Suppose that we wake up one morning and find that 128 has been declared "hate speech"? (It was nice knowing you, 128!) Now what do we do with the zillions of lines of code that have to be changed, in order to avoid jail time for "hate speech" or some other felony? The answer, of course, is to abstract these potentially hateful numbers as #define statements so that we can change them later to politically approved numbers. Like "the number formerly known as 128". Or "127 plus 1".
See, it all makes sense now.
A few moments after posting, I realized that I wrote 19th century, not 20th... Argh. No, actually that should be, "DUH!". Honestly, I am usually a moderately intelligent guy :-)
:-) It's all in fun.
And the quotes with "righteous" and "evil" are just the literary equivalent of passing wind - please pardon me while I vent
Thanks for your thoughts.
After the battle against Circuit City and DIVX ended with victory for the righteous, I think we all celebrated in some way. Like a vampire with a stake in its heart, or a werewolf finally slain with a silver bullet, DIVX would be forever dead.
(mild rant)
So, what happened? Apparently someone with a really sick sense of humor decided that this Microsoft code rip should bear the badge we have come to hate and despise. Even Microsoft doesn't deserve that...
Ok, ok, they changed the capitalization from DIVX to DivX. By that argument, it would be perfectly fine to call someone a nAzI or FAscisT because the difference in case indicates we really are not talking about 19th century dictatorships here.
Or to turn this around, using the term DivX would tend to dilute the connotation of concentrated evil that we have painstakingly built for the (Circuit City) DIVX.
Why is this irritating to me? Because the purpose of language is to communicate, and words have meaning in order to facilitate understanding. Why would someone choose to promote ambiguity?
(/mild rant)
I guess I have to admit that every now and then I run across an animated GIF that is actually interesting or amusing...
:-)
But as a general rule, I find animated images to be annoying and repulsive. They tend to be distracting, and draw my attention away from the real reason I have the web page on my screen - the content.
Every day, I wish that my browser had an option to disable animated images. Perhaps there could be a menu icon I could click to enable them on the rare occasion that I really wanted to see the other frames. Now THAT feature would be a major plus to Mozilla. Chances are, I will some day go into the code and add it myself (THANK YOU, MOZILLA for the source code
Honestly, how many of you really enjoy those crappy, animated banner ads on your screen? Is this going to be an *improvement* for Mozilla?
We all hear about somebody winning some lottery and winning $10^6 to $10^7 as the prize. Now what the heck are they going to actually DO with the money? After making a donation to the taxman, of course :-( Sure, the first million will pay bills and buy some excellent toys. Then what?
Without any clear picture of doing anything in particular with the remaining millions, I'll bet most lottery ticket buyers are not thrilled and excited as they could be if the prize were unique and glamourous like (you guessed it) a trip to space...
Now picture a lottery where the prize includes the obligatory couple $million, but most importantly, a round trip ticket to some space destination. Let me tell you, money is nice but it doesn't get the blood pumping like the idea of getting off this planet for even a little while.
Now, who wants to buy tickets?
This story suggests that someone put "hidden" frames in an MPEG2 stream. Yeah, right. The basis for MPEG1/2 encoding is to use information from earlier (and later) frames to achieve temporal compression. Unless you dedicate two "I" frames to each "blip", you are simply not going to have a usable sequence. This is in addition to the normal I-B-P sequence, of course.
Then again, two seconds after thinking about this, it was obvious that this was another April fool's joke. Ok, we saw the stupid Internet cleanup story just like every year. You had your cheap laugh. Just because nobody laughed does not mean you need to keep trying. It is not funny.
SO ENOUGH WITH THIS APRIL FOOL'S SHIT ALREADY! Can you hear me, or do I need to turn it up? (Now turning middle finger from down to upraised position).
I use XEMACS for most all my editing, and it is generally pretty useful. For debugging, though, I sometimes have to use gdb because XEMACS is a pain in the ass.
First, as soon as I start debugging, my source code goes read only. So I don't have any convenient way to make changes in my source until I kill the debugger. This is probably so that gdb keeps sync with my source code frame, but it is still annoying.
Second, XEMACS pulls focus away from my command line window every time I step through any instruction. Yes, I want to see the pointers move as it runs, but NO! I don't want to have to pull focus back to my gdb command line to print a variable, dump memory, or whatever.
And maybe this is a trivial gripe, but XEMACS cannot figure out that I might want to debug the program in the current buffers. Instead, I have to navigate the file requester boxes to point out the executable. Now I am just a programmer to say this, but maybe it could figure out that if I have someprog.c in my window, and I want to debug, just MAYBE the executable is called someprog? Oh, well... Maybe I am just an ungrateful bastard...
In short, while (X)EMACS has some handy debugging support, I will generally opt for running gdb from the command line 70-90% of the time.
It is not clear whether he is going to hire legal help, but it might be easier for him to make that desision if some sympathetic supporters made an offer. Would this be an cause for the EFF to be involved in? If so, I would be willing to kick in a bit, perhaps through an EFF trust fund.
If the EFF is not interested, perhaps another reputable rights organisation would be willing to set up a legal defense fund? To me, the key is knowing that the money is being used for its intended purpose. I don't just want to send an envelope full of cash to some foreign country and hope it arrives!
Sorry I am asking questions and not answering them, but I would like to help, and I am sure others feel the same way.
Besides powering laptop computers, this kind of technology would be great for certain types of survival (or wilderness) gear. Take aircraft, for instance. Most every airplane has an ELT, and emergency locater transmitter that goes off if the plane crashes. This ELT runs off batteries, batteries that have a limited run time, and need to be replaced every few years with fresh ones. Now our unfortunate pilot has one powered by a fuel cell that will last for days, if needed.
How about two-way radios for backpackers, radios that can be refilled as needed, say for a week or so? I have to imagine that fluorescent camp lites powered by fuel cells would be better per quart of fuel than the fire-based Coleman lanterns. I suppose if you wanted to be really funny, you could even bring along a miniature fridge based on peltier devices and fuel cells.
I guess we should be careful with technology, though, or pretty soon we would see boneheads and other twits taking their TV sets and boomboxes into the wilderness...
Niven and Barnes' book "Achilles' Choice" brings up some interesting possibilities and dangers with the technology of wiring our brains with computers. In their scenario, the "linked" enjoy a level of power, both technological and political. In an earlier book, "Oath of Fealty", he touches on some interesting advantages of having instant data and communications available from a cerebral implant communicating with a central computer.
So... This story looks like another small victory towards the future where we can get our information faster and easier. Right now, it is a tool for helping the handicapped, but perhaps it will be a status symbol once it reaches technological maturity. Be honest! Who would not be tempted to become one of the "linked"?
I guess some people think Kaufman was some kind of comic genius, just like a lot of French people seem to think Jerry Lewis was actually funny. They are entitled to their opinion, of course.
My first recollection of Andy was in some kind of second-rate TV talent show (not the Gong Show). He walked on stage and set up one of those old-fashioned record players. Remember the ones with tubes and built-in speaker that we listened to when "doing the hokey pokey" in grammar school? Anyway, he played a record that had someone else talking with spaces where he could talk back. For its time, maybe that was innovative. Maybe. Then he sang a song, I think it was "Old McDonald had a farm".
Now fast-forward to Saturday Night Live and Taxi. I don't remember which came first, but his role in Taxi was not really that annoying, but nothing special either. Just another supporting role. Nothing to compare with Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd in my opinion. In SNL, the only parts I remember is where he just would not shut up about being able to out-wrestle any woman. He challenged any woman to the ring to prove him wrong. Yawn. Annoying.
Mercifully, he disappeared from my radar shortly afterwards, and only blipped back a couple times since. He announced that he had adopted a whole bunch of children, to show what a decent human being he was. He was dying from some disease. Then he faked his death, apparently to find out how much people would care once he was gone. Then he re-appeared. Then he died.
Maybe he was a really decent guy in real life. I just know the small pieces of him that he flung at us, and I did not really enjoy the experience. Rest in peace, Andy, but I will not shed a tear.
... But I will ask the question anyway :-) Assuming that someone had more money than brains,
could a Beowulf cluster run an interactive application? Say, wine for instance?
I just had this vision of Windows apps actually running fast... On second thought, nahhh.
Some things are just not meant for mankind.
Like most (all?) other mentions of D&D, there was no mention here of Dave Arneson. Remember him? :-)
He was the co-author of the original three D&D books. And Blackmoor, which I thought was a waste
of $5...
The story I heard was that Gygax was a major prick and cheated Arneson, then changed the name to AD&D.
Then, of course, he published the monster handbook, player handbook, and the DM guide. Does
anyone remember what REALLY happened back then?
(Yes, I remember Hargrave, too
So you think you can handle Penix? Ok, big guy - I will call your bluff. I will give you control :-)
of penix.com, and you create the web site and distribution. It's up to you, but I suggest:
"Loosely based on the BFD distribution",
"Comes with the book 'Penix Unzipped'",
"Available as an embedded system",
Including utilities like: finger, head, man,
mount, tail, touch, and uptime.
Supports frontpage, hard links, ports, and sockets, of course.
Well you asked for it - get to work