about ZD's PC magazines is Penn Gillette's column in PC/Computing. It only ran for two years, it was dropped with no fanfare whatever (not even a mention in the Letters column) and he proudly billed it as the only non-computer column to appear in a computer magazine -- but he had a lot to say about privacy issues, communities and the Net, illusion and reality, and the like. His explanation of how public-key cryptography works is still the best I've ever seen. To this day I'm not sure whether that's because or in spite of the fact that he framed it around an account of him sending love letters to Uma Thurman that he didn't want anyone else to read.
I may be in the minority but whatever it was they replaced him with -- I think it was some kind of lame top 10 list -- I didn't think it was nearly as good, useful or entertaining.
This is sad, and it has nothing to do with PC Magazine. It's sad because before many of Slashdot's readers were born, I was a preteen electronics geek and Popular Electronics -- published by Ziff-Davis since sometime in the fifties -- was my favorite magazine. In fact I almost got busted in junior high for reading it in class. Electronics class, no less.
I subscribed to PC Magazine for over 10 years and its cousin, PC/Computing, for almost as long. I finally dropped PC/C after they changed their name and slant to a business emphasis that didn't interest me. PC Magazine followed soon after when I came to the realization that I was paying good money for a stack of paper that contained information I could get for free on the 'net.
They don't actually have to sit and talk. In fact, IMHO, IANAL, ETC, it's probably better if they don't, just because information might leak out that could taint the clean team.
Much better is for the reverse engineers to fully document the protocol on paper, then for the clean team to implement the protocol from that document, along with a statement that they did not do the reverse engineering and have not seen the original code.
This is how Phoenix did their clean-room clone of the original IBM BIOS.
Documenting the protocol on paper gives you two additional benefits. First, it gives you a written snapshot of the protocol at the time the implementation was done, and second, it can be used as documentary evidence in case of a lawsuit. Portions of the clean code can be compared to the spec, and to the original code, to show the differences in implementation.
Don't look at me. Around Seattle when people hear the name John Ellis they think of this John Ellis, who was chairman of the board of Puget Sound Power and Light but is most recently known as the chairman and CEO of the Seattle Mariners baseball team.
And yes, I figured out fairly early on that this was a different John Ellis, although I had to admit to a bit of mental whiplash when I first saw the name.
Well, I got a Klez the other day. First one I'd seen in months, and it was from a friend I hadn't heard from in a while. So, I wrote him back after checking the mail headers.
======================
Hey man, long time no see.
I got this today with your name on it. It's a copy of the Klez virus, which may mean some of your computers at work may have that virus on them. I'd check to make sure.
On the other hand, the mail trail says it originated from someotherisp.net. I don't know anyone who uses that service, but perhaps you do. If so, they could be sending out mails in your name, so you might want to check with them.
Oh yeah, right, I can just see Rowan Atkinson as Dr. Who.
"No, Baldrick, it can't possibly be a Viking helmet, it's obviously part of a spacesuit made for a cow. Here, take it home, I think it will fit your mother quite nicely."
(Yes, I know, the first part actually is more or less a quote from "The Time Meddler," but imagine Atkinson saying it in his best Blackadder the Third voice.)
Re:Desktop MVS is dead too.
on
Is Linux Dead?
·
· Score: 2
At any rate there a few things Linux is not good at:
AOLIM
There's GAIM for those who care.
Burning CD's
Excuse me? My son figured out how to rip and burn CDs using gaim and xcdroast, and nowadays the only problem he has with them is when the old man forgets to append/usr/bin/sudo to the commands in the GNOME launchers when he mucks around with something.
Supporting MS office email attachments Any kind of demoware you get in the mail
And lack of access to these are a bad thing, how again?
There's probably a way to do the attachments in something like Evolution, which I've never yet tried. Personally, when I get them I save them to disk from pine and read them in OpenOffice.
Linux needs mainstream apps as much as it needs a good, coherent desktop before it can possibly succeed as a consumer OS, but it won't get them until enough people are using it to make it worth the while of whoever's writing the app. Catch-22.
Yes, I remember those events and more, even though thank God I never did take part in any of them. But you were not alive then and I was, so I can tell you as a witness to the times that the people who stopped the war, did so in spite of the violence (which, as you pointed out in your original post, the protesters themselves didn't start), not because of it. Nixon finally brought the troops home from Vietnam, not because my contemporaries were burning housing projects and looting grocery stores, but because enough people finally put enough political pressure on the Nixon administration that Nixon had no choice but to do so.
I'm afraid your spin on history sounds a lot more like a justification for hooliganism than it does an explanation of why I should just sit back and let invaders turn my city into a war zone just because they don't like (fill in the blank). Notice that I don't say what's in the blank or whether they're justified in their dislike. There are ways of solving problems that won't make Ottawa (or Seattle, or Geneva, or any other city) look like Beirut circa 1985.
Thank you. I was trying to figure out how to say this and hadn't gotten the words right.
I grew up in the Sixties. Protest is as much a part of my upbringing as The Beverly Hillbillies and bad rock & roll. But when I think of the protests that meant anything, I think more of the people like Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, the Smothers Brothers and all those who wrote songs people would listen to that got the message across. I think of the anonymous individuals teaching others just how bad an idea the war was. I think of the ubiquitous posters saying things like "It will be a great day when the schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." None of those get in anybody's face but the cumulative effect was to sway public opinion enough to where the government had no choice but to withdraw from Vietnam.
In my mind if you're going to change people's minds about an issue, trying to do it through smashing things doesn't work ("You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar"). The WTO protesters in Seattle, in my mind, did NOT succeed in their mission, unless their mission was to drive WTO and G8 and similar meetings undergrond to places like the United Arab Emirates and the Canadian wilderness, and to have their legacy from Seattle be "those anarchists who just busted a lot of windows and looted some stores." rather than "the people who got me started thinking what a bad idea globalization is."
Au contraire, mon frere. Building an IBM-style PC, while not rocket science, is also not completely trivial. At the very least you get to learn what goes where so you can do your own hardware repairs, rather than taking it to the shop and paying $50 an hour so those screwdriver monkeys can get their $8.
As for putting your own computer together in the days before the IBM PC, there were those that did so (I think the Altair shipped as a kit). However the vast majority of computer users used TRS-80s, Apple IIs, Commodore PETs and the like, all of which required even less configuration than the IBM PC.
There are three really good reasons for building it yourself. You touched on one -- the ultimate in configuration. If you build it you know exactly what goes into it and can get exactly the parts you want for the performance you want.
Second is the experience. What better way to learn how a computer is put together than to put one together?
Third is the sheer fun of it. Putting a computer together is easier than building a skyscraper out of Tinkertoys and when you're done you can surf the Internet (or whatever) on your finished product. Can't beat that!
Re:Windependance != Freedom, it seems
on
Windependence Day
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
It brings to mind what I believe is a translated polish proverb:
A change of leaders is the joy of fools.
Yeah, we have a proverb like that in English too:
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
I chuckled when I heard the bad guy saying this in "The Sum Of All Fears" but I didn't know just how deeply Pete Townshend's line had worked itself into the linguistic landscape until I did this search.
If only people would quit wasting time and just move on to something beneficial, like harnessing the power of stupidity, the earth would be a better place.
Ah, but it's been done. What exactly do you think powers/.?
In some bands you're quite correct (namely, any band where you can't do much better than line-of-sight). However, there is a very real chance of interference in the shortwave bands (roughly 3-30 MHz). For instance, the 40 meter ham band in the US is interfered with by the 41 meter broadcast band in Europe anytime 40 is open between the two areas (they share the same set of frequencies, roughly 7100-7300 kHz). At some points in the propagation cycle this happens on a fairly regular basis, like nightly.
In the global scheme of things broadcasters interfering with hams is no big deal (except of course to the hams involved), and hams interfering with broadcasters even less so. But, consider a maritime distress or aviation band in those same general frequency areas. There needs to be some sort of coordination to make sure, for instance, that a maritime distress channel in the Indian Ocean isn't dropped right into the middle of some high-traffic communications channel.
Oh great. Now you've gone and let the cat out of the bag. Next thing you'll be telling everybody that people use FTP servers running on nonstandard ports to trade . . .
You'd think if their ideology really was superior they would welcome the challenge of putting it to the test against the rest of the world, wouldn't you?
You'd also think they'd recall something military commanders and radicals have known since there were military commanders and radicals: It's much easier to attack a fortress (or a movement, or a country, or pretty much anything) from the inside than from the outside.
In an odd turn of events, it may someday turn out that Internet was the biggest Trojan horse of all.
Slashdot Mirror
about ZD's PC magazines is Penn Gillette's column in PC/Computing. It only ran for two years, it was dropped with no fanfare whatever (not even a mention in the Letters column) and he proudly billed it as the only non-computer column to appear in a computer magazine -- but he had a lot to say about privacy issues, communities and the Net, illusion and reality, and the like. His explanation of how public-key cryptography works is still the best I've ever seen. To this day I'm not sure whether that's because or in spite of the fact that he framed it around an account of him sending love letters to Uma Thurman that he didn't want anyone else to read.
I may be in the minority but whatever it was they replaced him with -- I think it was some kind of lame top 10 list -- I didn't think it was nearly as good, useful or entertaining.
This is sad, and it has nothing to do with PC Magazine. It's sad because before many of Slashdot's readers were born, I was a preteen electronics geek and Popular Electronics -- published by Ziff-Davis since sometime in the fifties -- was my favorite magazine. In fact I almost got busted in junior high for reading it in class. Electronics class, no less.
I subscribed to PC Magazine for over 10 years and its cousin, PC/Computing, for almost as long. I finally dropped PC/C after they changed their name and slant to a business emphasis that didn't interest me. PC Magazine followed soon after when I came to the realization that I was paying good money for a stack of paper that contained information I could get for free on the 'net.
Remember all that fuss and bother about Y2K? Remember the Unix crowd talking about having a similar problem in 2038 when the epoch rolls over?
Suddenly it doesn't seem like much of a problem anymore, does it?
Currently the odds of being hit by 2002-NT7 is about 1 in 100,000
:)
For those of you playing at home, those odds are about 70 times better than the advertised odds of winning the Washington State Lottery.
Think about that next time you plop down your dollar for a Lotto ticket.
Buy asteroid collision insurance with it instead.
They don't actually have to sit and talk. In fact, IMHO, IANAL, ETC, it's probably better if they don't, just because information might leak out that could taint the clean team.
Much better is for the reverse engineers to fully document the protocol on paper, then for the clean team to implement the protocol from that document, along with a statement that they did not do the reverse engineering and have not seen the original code.
This is how Phoenix did their clean-room clone of the original IBM BIOS.
Documenting the protocol on paper gives you two additional benefits. First, it gives you a written snapshot of the protocol at the time the implementation was done, and second, it can be used as documentary evidence in case of a lawsuit. Portions of the clean code can be compared to the spec, and to the original code, to show the differences in implementation.
Don't look at me. Around Seattle when people hear the name John Ellis they think of this John Ellis, who was chairman of the board of Puget Sound Power and Light but is most recently known as the chairman and CEO of the Seattle Mariners baseball team.
And yes, I figured out fairly early on that this was a different John Ellis, although I had to admit to a bit of mental whiplash when I first saw the name.
Bet me $50 that whatever software the IRS uses to run its computers, it isn't public domain.
Only ten? Man, can I switch to your ISP?
Well, I got a Klez the other day. First one I'd seen in months, and it was from a friend I hadn't heard from in a while. So, I wrote him back after checking the mail headers.
======================
Hey man, long time no see.
I got this today with your name on it. It's a copy of the Klez virus, which may mean some of your computers at work may have that virus on them. I'd check to make sure.
On the other hand, the mail trail says it originated from someotherisp.net. I don't know anyone who uses that service, but perhaps you do. If so, they could be sending out mails in your name, so you might want to check with them.
Anyway, how are things?
I tried creating a keyboard using a set of Perl programs I wrote and ended up with all the punctuation in the home ruw. :(
Oh yeah, right, I can just see Rowan Atkinson as Dr. Who.
"No, Baldrick, it can't possibly be a Viking helmet, it's obviously part of a spacesuit made for a cow. Here, take it home, I think it will fit your mother quite nicely."
(Yes, I know, the first part actually is more or less a quote from "The Time Meddler," but imagine Atkinson saying it in his best Blackadder the Third voice.)
At any rate there a few things Linux is not good at:
/usr/bin/sudo to the commands in the GNOME launchers when he mucks around with something.
AOLIM
There's GAIM for those who care.
Burning CD's
Excuse me? My son figured out how to rip and burn CDs using gaim and xcdroast, and nowadays the only problem he has with them is when the old man forgets to append
Supporting MS office email attachments
Any kind of demoware you get in the mail
And lack of access to these are a bad thing, how again?
There's probably a way to do the attachments in something like Evolution, which I've never yet tried. Personally, when I get them I save them to disk from pine and read them in OpenOffice.
Linux needs mainstream apps as much as it needs a good, coherent desktop before it can possibly succeed as a consumer OS, but it won't get them until enough people are using it to make it worth the while of whoever's writing the app. Catch-22.
Yes, I remember those events and more, even though thank God I never did take part in any of them. But you were not alive then and I was, so I can tell you as a witness to the times that the people who stopped the war, did so in spite of the violence (which, as you pointed out in your original post, the protesters themselves didn't start), not because of it. Nixon finally brought the troops home from Vietnam, not because my contemporaries were burning housing projects and looting grocery stores, but because enough people finally put enough political pressure on the Nixon administration that Nixon had no choice but to do so.
I'm afraid your spin on history sounds a lot more like a justification for hooliganism than it does an explanation of why I should just sit back and let invaders turn my city into a war zone just because they don't like (fill in the blank). Notice that I don't say what's in the blank or whether they're justified in their dislike. There are ways of solving problems that won't make Ottawa (or Seattle, or Geneva, or any other city) look like Beirut circa 1985.
Thank you. I was trying to figure out how to say this and hadn't gotten the words right.
I grew up in the Sixties. Protest is as much a part of my upbringing as The Beverly Hillbillies and bad rock & roll. But when I think of the protests that meant anything, I think more of the people like Pete Seeger, Arlo Guthrie, Phil Ochs, Bob Dylan, the Smothers Brothers and all those who wrote songs people would listen to that got the message across. I think of the anonymous individuals teaching others just how bad an idea the war was. I think of the ubiquitous posters saying things like "It will be a great day when the schools have all the money they need and the Air Force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." None of those get in anybody's face but the cumulative effect was to sway public opinion enough to where the government had no choice but to withdraw from Vietnam.
In my mind if you're going to change people's minds about an issue, trying to do it through smashing things doesn't work ("You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar"). The WTO protesters in Seattle, in my mind, did NOT succeed in their mission, unless their mission was to drive WTO and G8 and similar meetings undergrond to places like the United Arab Emirates and the Canadian wilderness, and to have their legacy from Seattle be "those anarchists who just busted a lot of windows and looted some stores." rather than "the people who got me started thinking what a bad idea globalization is."
Au contraire, mon frere. Building an IBM-style PC, while not rocket science, is also not completely trivial. At the very least you get to learn what goes where so you can do your own hardware repairs, rather than taking it to the shop and paying $50 an hour so those screwdriver monkeys can get their $8.
As for putting your own computer together in the days before the IBM PC, there were those that did so (I think the Altair shipped as a kit). However the vast majority of computer users used TRS-80s, Apple IIs, Commodore PETs and the like, all of which required even less configuration than the IBM PC.
There are three really good reasons for building it yourself. You touched on one -- the ultimate in configuration. If you build it you know exactly what goes into it and can get exactly the parts you want for the performance you want.
Second is the experience. What better way to learn how a computer is put together than to put one together?
Third is the sheer fun of it. Putting a computer together is easier than building a skyscraper out of Tinkertoys and when you're done you can surf the Internet (or whatever) on your finished product. Can't beat that!
It brings to mind what I believe is a translated polish proverb:
A change of leaders is the joy of fools.
Yeah, we have a proverb like that in English too:
Meet the new boss, same as the old boss
I chuckled when I heard the bad guy saying this in "The Sum Of All Fears" but I didn't know just how deeply Pete Townshend's line had worked itself into the linguistic landscape until I did this search.
If only people would quit wasting time and just move on to something beneficial, like harnessing the power of stupidity, the earth would be a better place.
/.?
Ah, but it's been done. What exactly do you think powers
In some bands you're quite correct (namely, any band where you can't do much better than line-of-sight). However, there is a very real chance of interference in the shortwave bands (roughly 3-30 MHz). For instance, the 40 meter ham band in the US is interfered with by the 41 meter broadcast band in Europe anytime 40 is open between the two areas (they share the same set of frequencies, roughly 7100-7300 kHz). At some points in the propagation cycle this happens on a fairly regular basis, like nightly.
In the global scheme of things broadcasters interfering with hams is no big deal (except of course to the hams involved), and hams interfering with broadcasters even less so. But, consider a maritime distress or aviation band in those same general frequency areas. There needs to be some sort of coordination to make sure, for instance, that a maritime distress channel in the Indian Ocean isn't dropped right into the middle of some high-traffic communications channel.
More like, after the lawyers get their cut, everybody gets a $10 discount on their next Microsoft purchase and a free copy of Bob XP.
Oh great. Now you've gone and let the cat out of the bag. Next thing you'll be telling everybody that people use FTP servers running on nonstandard ports to trade . . .
um, oops
Next I expect spammers to sue the Unix software model to make filters and killfiles illegal.
It may be time to up my EFF contributions.
You'd think if their ideology really was superior they would welcome the challenge of putting it to the test against the rest of the world, wouldn't you?
You'd also think they'd recall something military commanders and radicals have known since there were military commanders and radicals: It's much easier to attack a fortress (or a movement, or a country, or pretty much anything) from the inside than from the outside.
In an odd turn of events, it may someday turn out that Internet was the biggest Trojan horse of all.
Well they let the cat out of the bag and now they can't get it back in.
My favorite metaphor for this comes from a book by Peter S. Beagle:
"You ever try to put birdshit back into the bird?"
Figures. In my lame attempt to be funny I picked the wrong Bernstein. I guess I should have said "OK, what has the composer of West Side Story gotten his fingers into this time?" Never mind that he's been dead for several years.