geesh, now that was embarassing. IBM's Microchannel architecture. Microsoft hasn't had a CPU product since they made that Z-80 card for the Apple II. (unless you include the embedded controller in the Microsoft mouse and keyboard)
Just for the record, OS9 is a Unix-like operating system that originates for the 8-bit 6809 processor. It was popular with power-users on the Radio Shack Color Computer, which had a 6809 CPU.
The Apple community shouldn't be allowed to appopriate terms from the past. Just like the gaming community shouldn't be allowed to appropriate the term for Microsoft's Microchannel architecture machines (the PS/2 machines).
Famous authors have wanted their notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, etc. to be burned at their death.
Guess what? That is their right.
I know, I know. You don't want to get an off-campus job, and if they don't archive everything, you won't be able to get the funding to do years of 'research' on it.
Re:Eon-long sotrage options...
on
Digital Dark Ages?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I take EVERY digital photograph I shoot and burn it to CDROM. nothing ever get's deleted in my photography....
An essential part of proper data archiving is to spend at least some time determining what is worth preserving. Otherwise anything important will be lost in a sea of information. You are doubtless NOT important enough that people will study you in the future (neither am I). Your big piles of material that you've saved will just be in the way, in effect noise, while they're trying to find the info that IS important.
Your thinking 'nothing has ever been intentionally archived, but *I* can do it *better* by intentionally archiving MY stuff' seems conceited.
There isn't that big of a mystery in discerning what will be important to the historical record.
Re:The Long Now Foundation
on
Digital Dark Ages?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Galileo is a lot more important than Marvin Minsky.
Huge chunks of what Minsky said are irrelevant. Books have been written mocking his 'pie-in-the-sky' dreaming. (See Herbert Dreyfus)
His important work has been published. His notes, just like the chips of rock that fell away when hierglyphs were carved in stone, need to just go away.
I know Minsky was just picked as an example, but the point is, the wheat has to be separated from the chaff, or all of everything gets lost in a sea of 'information-enthropy'.
However, as soon as the interface has changed, the manufacturers can implement DRM into the drive firmware. You won't be able to use your old drives with the new motherboards, they'll slowly die and go away.
Actually, what archaeologists are interested in is continuing to stay in school forever. They took a degree in something as 'useful' as archaeology and now they need to franticly scour the earth looking for graves to loot and historical sites to tear apart, using (of course) the latest techniques to 'preserve as much information as possible.' The fact that if we just defunded archaeological excavation entirely for half a century, we'd have far less destructive techniques to use doesn't matter to these folks. Their goal is to get funding, to dig out all the 'evidence' they can find from sites where it's been preserved for centuries, then to stow all the relics in steel and glass buildings.
Future archaeologists will say 'what were those idiots thinking of, digging in those sites? We can now use radiation to do 3-d scans of sites and get all the info, without destroying the record in the process.
Sorta the way we now look at the 'archaeologists' of the past, i.e. the ones who excavated Egyptian graves and sold off all the mummified cats as fertilizer.
I was going to add: "Political correctness and laws against hate speech" and then "roving bands of quasi-religious zealots smashing and destroying things that threaten their Gaia" but then I thought about it a moment and decided 'what's the use?'
Mono-color means fewer varieties of items to stock. It means color coordination doesn't have to be a concern when outfitting a new cubicle. It saves money.
I kinda miss the 'shop' button they put on later versions of Netscape 4. Did they kindly include that button in the new Netscape?
It was clever the way they placed it right next to the 'stop' button. Occasionally I'd accidentally click a link, and not want to have to backarrow and reload the entire page again. I'd panic but then click 'shop' and *whoop* be off to some shit Netscape wanted me to see....
Should we really be making a big 'Ask Slashdot' question out of this subject? It seems like it exposes one of the 'ugly faces' of Free Software that some organization has committed to this package, they apparently can't maintain it themselves, and now the developer can't be found.
Throwing this out as an 'Ask Slashdot' topic makes it a hard-data example that entities pushing proprietary software, i.e. Microsoft, can point to when making the case that 'you won't have anybody to call' with Free Software.
Let me guess... You're a CS Master Of Science student or graduate
Lousy guess. I have a two year degree from a Tech school. I guess I just have more respect for 'theory' and I work hard at understanding it. I consider people who schlepp code without planning to be shortsighted and poor developers.
All my commercial code (all that anybody has paid me to do) is in Assembly language on 4 and 8 bit controllers, anyway. Running in medical devices.
He should have started with IBM 650 Assembly Language and stayed with it. Then my father, who programmed on the IBM 650 (like Knuth) would be able to pick the books up easily.
The 'S': Schottky is the fastest. The no-compromise highest speed/highest power consumption saturated logic.
Agreed, an audio CD should not crash a computer. However, one of the things we should be able to expect from a well designed computer is for it not to crash the whole system when a 'bad application' (a badly coded audio CD is a bad application) is loaded. If a Linux system crashed under similar circumstances people would fix the OS vulnerability. Sadly on Windows and Apple systems people have gotten used to crashes.
When you shove a copy-protected CD in a Mac, it jams the machine up, crashes the OS. Then, because everybody knows eject buttons are reactionary and shouldn't exist on any drive, the CD is wedged in the drive. The Mac user trembles like a ninny because s/he has to:
Get out the paperclip again and find the tiny hole to manually eject the disk. (This paperclip has a long tradition in the Mac world, where it was used for years before Microsoft figured out the PC users were missing out on it and came out with 'Clippy.')
or
Get out the wallet and pay another Macintax to have a 'qualified service representative' eject the CD.
It strikes me that the problem is pitiful fault tolerance in Macintosh system software, but lately we have been told to not criticize Macs for some reason. So I won't.
The last place I worked did extensive regression testing at all levels of software development. I was a member of a team developing telemetry firmware for communicating with implantable medical devices, so needless to say we needed to minimize any problems. Software 'bugs' in the field are not taken lightly.
It's quite possible there would be a healthy Macintosh clone market at this point. A whole bunch of nice PPC boxes from an array of manufacturers, that we could all be running Linux and BSD on. Maybe NT and BeOS. Oh, and MacOS.
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geesh, now that was embarassing. IBM's Microchannel architecture. Microsoft hasn't had a CPU product since they made that Z-80 card for the Apple II. (unless you include the embedded controller in the Microsoft mouse and keyboard)
Just for the record, OS9 is a Unix-like operating system that originates for the 8-bit 6809 processor. It was popular with power-users on the Radio Shack Color Computer, which had a 6809 CPU.
The Apple community shouldn't be allowed to appopriate terms from the past. Just like the gaming community shouldn't be allowed to appropriate the term for Microsoft's Microchannel architecture machines (the PS/2 machines).
Famous authors have wanted their notebooks, journals, sketchbooks, etc. to be burned at their death.
Guess what? That is their right.
I know, I know. You don't want to get an off-campus job, and if they don't archive everything, you won't be able to get the funding to do years of 'research' on it.
I take EVERY digital photograph I shoot and burn it to CDROM. nothing ever get's deleted in my photography....
An essential part of proper data archiving is to spend at least some time determining what is worth preserving. Otherwise anything important will be lost in a sea of information. You are doubtless NOT important enough that people will study you in the future (neither am I). Your big piles of material that you've saved will just be in the way, in effect noise, while they're trying to find the info that IS important.
Your thinking 'nothing has ever been intentionally archived, but *I* can do it *better* by intentionally archiving MY stuff' seems conceited.
There isn't that big of a mystery in discerning what will be important to the historical record.
Galileo is a lot more important than Marvin Minsky.
Huge chunks of what Minsky said are irrelevant. Books have been written mocking his 'pie-in-the-sky' dreaming. (See Herbert Dreyfus)
His important work has been published. His notes, just like the chips of rock that fell away when hierglyphs were carved in stone, need to just go away.
I know Minsky was just picked as an example, but the point is, the wheat has to be separated from the chaff, or all of everything gets lost in a sea of 'information-enthropy'.
DRM isn't part of the SerialATA spec.
However, as soon as the interface has changed, the manufacturers can implement DRM into the drive firmware. You won't be able to use your old drives with the new motherboards, they'll slowly die and go away.
Actually, what archaeologists are interested in is continuing to stay in school forever. They took a degree in something as 'useful' as archaeology and now they need to franticly scour the earth looking for graves to loot and historical sites to tear apart, using (of course) the latest techniques to 'preserve as much information as possible.' The fact that if we just defunded archaeological excavation entirely for half a century, we'd have far less destructive techniques to use doesn't matter to these folks. Their goal is to get funding, to dig out all the 'evidence' they can find from sites where it's been preserved for centuries, then to stow all the relics in steel and glass buildings.
Future archaeologists will say 'what were those idiots thinking of, digging in those sites? We can now use radiation to do 3-d scans of sites and get all the info, without destroying the record in the process.
Sorta the way we now look at the 'archaeologists' of the past, i.e. the ones who excavated Egyptian graves and sold off all the mummified cats as fertilizer.
I was going to add: "Political correctness and laws against hate speech" and then "roving bands of quasi-religious zealots smashing and destroying things that threaten their Gaia" but then I thought about it a moment and decided 'what's the use?'
And in the interest of fairness, will moderators be willing to equally mod up the rebuttal to SciAm's article?
Geez. Why not post it as a logged in account holder, so that it will be archived without needing to be marked up?
Here, I'll do so here so it doesn't silently disappear from the discussion thread.
Please, nobody needs to mark this up or down. I'm not even using my +1 to post it. But it belongs in the archived version of this discussion.
Mono-color means fewer varieties of items to stock. It means color coordination doesn't have to be a concern when outfitting a new cubicle. It saves money.
Occam's Razor and all that.
I run plain FVWM2 on my older K6-2 machine and my Sparcstation 5. With NetBSD. It's damn snappy, and it gets the job done.
KDE and Gnome are almost ENTIRELY bloat. It's a 'let's see if we can drag in as much bloat as Microsoft' effort.
Sorry, not interested.
I kinda miss the 'shop' button they put on later versions of Netscape 4. Did they kindly include that button in the new Netscape?
It was clever the way they placed it right next to the 'stop' button. Occasionally I'd accidentally click a link, and not want to have to backarrow and reload the entire page again. I'd panic but then click 'shop' and *whoop* be off to some shit Netscape wanted me to see....
Should we really be making a big 'Ask Slashdot' question out of this subject? It seems like it exposes one of the 'ugly faces' of Free Software that some organization has committed to this package, they apparently can't maintain it themselves, and now the developer can't be found.
Throwing this out as an 'Ask Slashdot' topic makes it a hard-data example that entities pushing proprietary software, i.e. Microsoft, can point to when making the case that 'you won't have anybody to call' with Free Software.
Let me guess... You're a CS Master Of Science student or graduate
Lousy guess. I have a two year degree from a Tech school. I guess I just have more respect for 'theory' and I work hard at understanding it. I consider people who schlepp code without planning to be shortsighted and poor developers.
All my commercial code (all that anybody has paid me to do) is in Assembly language on 4 and 8 bit controllers, anyway. Running in medical devices.
Maybe Lucas plans to hire Steven Spielbergo, the Cheap Mexican Equivalent?
Within 72 hours, this article will be 'stale' Slashdot content and the need for a dedicated server will be over.
Hope they're not dedicating a lot of expensive hardware to combatting a slashdot effect that will have subsided by the time they roll it out.
Maybe it has to do with the fact that you'd have to be more than just a 'coder' to dig very deep into Knuth.
Stick to your Nintendo, I guess.
He should have started with IBM 650 Assembly Language and stayed with it. Then my father, who programmed on the IBM 650 (like Knuth) would be able to pick the books up easily.
The 'S': Schottky is the fastest. The no-compromise highest speed/highest power consumption saturated logic.
Agreed, an audio CD should not crash a computer. However, one of the things we should be able to expect from a well designed computer is for it not to crash the whole system when a 'bad application' (a badly coded audio CD is a bad application) is loaded. If a Linux system crashed under similar circumstances people would fix the OS vulnerability. Sadly on Windows and Apple systems people have gotten used to crashes.
Get out the paperclip again and find the tiny hole to manually eject the disk. (This paperclip has a long tradition in the Mac world, where it was used for years before Microsoft figured out the PC users were missing out on it and came out with 'Clippy.')
or
Get out the wallet and pay another Macintax to have a 'qualified service representative' eject the CD.
It strikes me that the problem is pitiful fault tolerance in Macintosh system software, but lately we have been told to not criticize Macs for some reason. So I won't.
The last place I worked did extensive regression testing at all levels of software development. I was a member of a team developing telemetry firmware for communicating with implantable medical devices, so needless to say we needed to minimize any problems. Software 'bugs' in the field are not taken lightly.
If it's not 'bolted on' it almost by definition needs to break all previously written perl code.
Or will there be a switch that turns on the OO features?
Ah, you've read his underground novel, 'Pornucopia' too.
How about adding OO?
Yikes! We need FEWER programming envioronments with bolted-on-as-an-afterthought Object Oriented 'features', not more of them.
It's quite possible there would be a healthy Macintosh clone market at this point. A whole bunch of nice PPC boxes from an array of manufacturers, that we could all be running Linux and BSD on. Maybe NT and BeOS. Oh, and MacOS.