I think the Feds should fund the development of an operating system and office suite. The software would be released to the public, including source code.
Get with the program, kid. The era of Big Government is over.
It's time for Faith-Based Computing solutions.
"God is my co-processor."
Spearheaded by privately-funded initiatives with matching funds provided by Federal block grants, the vital task of providing operating systems and userland utilities will be managed by religious institutions with a proven track record in this area of expertise.
VaticanOS, based on RC-DOS; Windows for Prayer Circles 3.11; WinME (Methodist/Episcopal); *BSD (Behold, Shiva the Destroyer); ScientologOS (now with 30% fewer Body Thetans and censorware in the kernel); MacintoshenOS (with Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox compatability layers); Shi'ia and Sunni Linux...
Jason Hutchens, who was quoted in the article, wrote MegaHAL, which won the '96 Loebner Award. It's a fun program to play around with, especially if you "prime" it with different text files (e.g., Usenet posts, memos from marketing, pr0n, etc.).
"IT TAKES 47 PANCAKES TO SHINGLE A DOG." -- MegaHAL
Speaking of Windows XP, I was wondering the other night: What does "XP" stand for?
Back in the '80s, there was a television commercial that ran on certain NYC cable-tv channels almost constantly. It was an advertisement for a 1-900 phone sex line and featured an attractive blonde woman being urinated on by several off-screen men (the streams of yellowish liquid that covered her were later revealed to be Gatorade).
The ad's voiceover, a woman's breathy, sexy voice, said this: "1-900-555-PEEE. The extra E stands for eXtra Pee".
Windows eXtra Pee. At least Microsoft isn't telling us it's rain anymore.
3) eXterminate Privacy
Windows for Daleks 3.11.
k.
Twenty-four hours.
on
Code Redux
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Looking over the infected hosts, it seems that half are broadband clients (RR, Bellsouth, Verizon, @Home, etc.), a third are overseas (with.de,.tw, and.kr most prevalent), and the remaining sixth are US corporations, including some Fortune 500 hosts.
I see Code Red as a big boon to jobhunters, especially those looking for SA work. Right there in your logs is a list of companies that are hiring, whether they know it or not.
I guess the big question is this: do you root their box before the first interview or after?
Recently, I opened a Hotmail account. Within minutes, I had my first spam arrive (toner cartridges). Minutes. On an address that has never been given out, used, or posted anywhere.
A friend of mine has an login name that's both short and is made up of the first five letters of the alphabet. She gets upwards of 100 pieces of spam each day.
J. Random Spammer, like an orangutang with an assault rifle, could care less if spam arrives at a valid e-mail address. As long as the client can be billed for "1,000,000 direct marketing messages sent". That's all that matters.
The real problem is all of the brain dead system administrators that leave port 25 open for anyone who wants to drop trou and take a huge dump in everyones' In Box. Korea, Ireland, Brazil, China...and the good ol' USA. Idiots.
Fetch my LART gun, boy.
k. --
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
As a Verizon victim...err, customer, this would affect me as well. Except I stopped using their SMTP server when it started choking on my outgoing mail (hanging in the middle of DATA).
And though I've never used my bellatlantic.net address ever, it somehow manages to receive about ten pieces of spam each day, starting with the very first day my DSL went live.
Then there's the news swerver, which fell down and went boom a couple of weeks ago (collateral damage from the Hipcrime floods?). Instead of rebuilding the spool, they just started from scratch.
Their Tier 2 techs are pretty clueful, but Tier 1 tech support is staffed by some human-fish hybrid.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Actually, the present ABM treaty has only prevented the US from developing anti-missile systems. The Soviets were violating it the whole time.
Actually, the original ABM Treaty had a provision which allowed both the USA and USSR to deploy one battery of ABMs.
The US deployed the Safeguard/Spartan system around ICBM silos in the Midwest.
The USSR system was known as GALOSH and was deployed as a ring around Moscow, 64 missiles at first, later expanded to 100 under the 1982 treaty.
The supposed Soviet violation was the construction of a large phased-array radar complex near the Bering Strait, far from the Moscow ABM ring. This system is similar to the PAVE PAWS at Otis AFB and Shemya.
(Source: Jane's Weapon Systems 1985-86)
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
DXF (Autodesk's Drawing eXchange Format) only contains a subset of an object's attributes. Import/export in.DXF format strips everything except shapes and layers.
Among the things that are not supported are textures and texture mapping, object hierarchies, unified face normals, and smoothing groups.
DXF has always been my "format of last resort", and I've found that even when a program claims to support DXF i/o, it's often a broken implementation. Plus, since it's ASCII, there are CR/LF issues when moving objects across platforms.
The 3DS file format is just as "open" as DXF, retains more attributes, and is smaller, too.
k., turning caffeine into animations since 1989
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Maybe they should have Linus on "car talk". They could have a computer segment where people call in with questions about "Wy won't my computer start?" "Why does it make that funny noise?" and the ever popular "What is that funny smell and black smoke coming from?"
"Hi, this is Kathi in Eugene, Oregon."
"K-A-T-H-Y, right?"
"No, I."
"Okay, what's your question?"
"I have a Dell PII/333 and it makes a funny noise when it boots."
"Let me guess...it's beige."
"Um, yes..."
k. --
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I hate to break it to you but a musician does not live from the music he sells. A musician lives off revenues from live shows and merchandise.
Buh-shit.
Touring is expensive. So many hungry mouths to feed, so many palms to grease. Touring sucks, too, whether it's two months in a van or a year in the Marriotts of the world.
Believe me, you're a lucky fucker if you manage to break even after a tour. Sometimes you can squeeze "tour support" money from the label, but often it's recoupable.
You're donating little more then a penny to the band by buying their album.
More bullshit. Depending on the contract and the number of tracks (which determines mechanical royalties) it's $1/CD, give or take. Indie artists get a larger cut of a smaller pie.
k. --
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I have a wireless device that gives me Red Sox scores, along with realtime play-by-play and color commentary (in two languages), and fan feedback (accessable from any telephone).
Also, I get traffic and weather reports, news headlines, and the latest stock market numbers.
Not only that, but there are channels that stream the latest hits in near-CD quality, too.
All for the low, low price of $9.95. No hidden monthly fees, no credit card required.
It's called a "transistor radio" and it's nearly forty years old.
Sheesh.
k. --
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
In 1994, I leveraged the knowledge I'd gained using an Amiga and Impulse 2.0 to get a job creating 3D models using 3DS for DOS (R2), running on '486. I was lucky. The Amiga was a toy, Impulse was a toy, and I considered myself lucky to have a $3K program running on a $3K computer (at my client's expense) for a change.
Using DOS and WfW 3.11 for the first time, I missed the close coupling between GUI and CLI that the Amiga OS had, and the opacity of the startup scripts (compared to autoexec.bat, config.sys, win.ini, and system.ini).
All the while I'd been using Macs to do digital audio and MIDI sequencing, along with DTP and video editing and Director scripting (since version 1.0). But I missed the control that the AmigaOS command line afforded. Eventually, I discovered MacShell, a CLI for MacOS 7.x, but as a userland app it lacked the speed I craved and the power I needed. The power of "/".
Fast-forward to the year 2001, Dave.
I have a fricken' fast machine with a closely coupled GUI/CLI system...Mac OS X on a G4/466.
It's like an Amiga on steroids, and it runs Photoshop, Quark, and Illustrator, along with Apache, ftpd, gcc, and ssh.
"Nostalgia is a disease of dogs." -- Lenin
Woof.
k. --
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Dream with me on how YOUR LinuxPC will be so neat with that flat monitor you are lusting after. Dream with me of the ways the ergonomics of a typical cubicle can be improved using a wall-mounted flat monitor and a LinuxPC stuck on the wall with Velcro, and soon our dreams will ring in the ears of companies like Acer, Apple, IBM, Motorola, the companies that can make our dreams come true.
Sheesh, Henry. Lay off the 'shrooms and buy a laptop, already.
Not from the article:
I have a dream that one day penguins and demons will walk hand in hand. I have a dream that the chips of MIPS and the chips of SPARC and the chips of Motorola will walk together as sisters and brothers...
...when we let it ring from every colo and every server farm, from every desktop and every rack, we will be able to speed up that day when all of Turing's children, microprocessors and microcontrollers, Big Endian and Little Endian, 32-bit and 64-bit, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Linux spiritual, "Free from Wintel! free from Wintel! thank Linus Almighty, we are free from Wintel!"
Amen.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
What on earth do you use all these CDRs for? Seriously, how can you amass so much data so quickly that you need spindles atop spindles of them? =)
In my case data isn't amassed quickly. Instead, it has accreted slowly like a stalagtite. I have over fifteen years of data on CD-R, and there are still 400K Mac diskettes I haven't copied yet.
Wow, a whole operating system in 124K. Too bad it only supports one button mice.
I keep track of everything with flat text files that I can grep (or point htgrep at for a web-enabled search). The big list of files is about 15Mb.
sarah:$ grep "[\/|-]1985" filelist.html | wc -l
33
sarah:$ grep "[\/|-]1990" filelist.html | wc -l
2005
sarah:# grep "[\/|-]1995" filelist.html | wc -l
13263
sarah:$ grep "[\/|-]2000" filelist.html | wc -l
61748
From '85 to '94 it's mostly MIDI and Sound Designer I audio files. After that it's all 3D objects and textures, Director files, and digital video. Sorry, no pr0n.
sarah:$ grep -i \.3ds filelist.html | wc -l
30568
sarah:$ grep -i \.tga filelist.html | wc -l
42872
Also, I remember that '42 Slack distro. IIRC, it was nicknamed "Victory Slack" and came on olive drab diskettes. They gave them out for free if you bought a $50 War Bond or collected more than 100 lbs. of scrap metal.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Seriously. It may sound odd, but cooking yourself good-to-excellent meals is an astonishingly pleasurable experience. It can also be very healthy.
Seconded, with additions:
Chopping that onion or garlic, or slicing into that head of lettuce with a honking huge cleaver is a great stress weapon. Just watch out for your thumb.
Cooking with wine is even more fun, especially if you grew up watching Graham Kerr, the Galloping Gourmet get sloshed on camera every day. Again, watch out for the thumbs.
Eating less take-out food meant less colds, less flus, no more cankersores, and I can't remember the last time I had the runs. Restaurants are a vector of disease. Do you really think they actually wash their hands after using the bathroom? Cooking your own food is like compiling from source, rather than installing a binary. Hell, I've even found bugs in the broccoli and removed them. Would that happen at a busy restaurant? Also, it's not unheard of for one to find a thumb in your take-out.
k. --
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
P.S.: does anyone know how to go about changing NetInfo type stuff at the command line? The GUI NetInfoManager is nice and nifty and stuff, but it would be nice to be able to do some of this administrative stuff *without* having to be physically sitting at the machine.
man niutil, man niload, man nidump
k. --
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Re:mail is great in the workplace
on
Buried in email?
·
· Score: 2
4:30 Break
Shouldn't that be 4:20?
k. --
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Does this remind anyone else (other than me) of the oft-failed concept of the network computer? This seems to come up every few years -- it's back to the future time, as companies try to restore the days of dumb terminals and mainframes. Sure, the processing is now distributed, but the fundamental problem remains: People simply aren't comfortable with having their software residing on another machine.
People are certainly comfortable having their search engines and mail servers residing on another machine. For the majority of computer users, the location of a process is irrelevant: only the results matter.
k. --
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Snow Crash I think is situated a little ahead of The Diamond Age on the time line but you can easily see how one story leads to the other.
I think it's the other way around: there's a passage in Diamond Age that implies that Nell's teacher at the Victorian school (Miss Matheson) is none other than YT from Snow Crash (see page 320-21 of the Diamond Age paperback).
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Slashdot Mirror
Last season, John Delancie (the actor who plays Q) appeared on The West Wing as a lobbyist and on The Practice as a lawyer.
Do you think he might be getting typecast here? What's next, the Jack Valenti biopic?
k.
Get with the program, kid. The era of Big Government is over.
It's time for Faith-Based Computing solutions.
"God is my co-processor."
Spearheaded by privately-funded initiatives with matching funds provided by Federal block grants, the vital task of providing operating systems and userland utilities will be managed by religious institutions with a proven track record in this area of expertise.
VaticanOS, based on RC-DOS; Windows for Prayer Circles 3.11; WinME (Methodist/Episcopal); *BSD (Behold, Shiva the Destroyer); ScientologOS (now with 30% fewer Body Thetans and censorware in the kernel); MacintoshenOS (with Reform, Conservative, and Orthodox compatability layers); Shi'ia and Sunni Linux...
Let a thousand pustules bloom...
k.
Jason Hutchens, who was quoted in the article, wrote MegaHAL, which won the '96 Loebner Award. It's a fun program to play around with, especially if you "prime" it with different text files (e.g., Usenet posts, memos from marketing, pr0n, etc.).
"IT TAKES 47 PANCAKES TO SHINGLE A DOG." -- MegaHAL
k.
Back in the '80s, there was a television commercial that ran on certain NYC cable-tv channels almost constantly. It was an advertisement for a 1-900 phone sex line and featured an attractive blonde woman being urinated on by several off-screen men (the streams of yellowish liquid that covered her were later revealed to be Gatorade).
The ad's voiceover, a woman's breathy, sexy voice, said this: "1-900-555-PEEE. The extra E stands for eXtra Pee".
Windows eXtra Pee. At least Microsoft isn't telling us it's rain anymore.
Windows for Daleks 3.11.
k.
grep ida access_log | cut -d" " -f1 | sort | uniq | wc -l
139
Looking over the infected hosts, it seems that half are broadband clients (RR, Bellsouth, Verizon, @Home, etc.), a third are overseas (with
I see Code Red as a big boon to jobhunters, especially those looking for SA work. Right there in your logs is a list of companies that are hiring, whether they know it or not.
I guess the big question is this: do you root their box before the first interview or after?
k.
Recently, I opened a Hotmail account. Within minutes, I had my first spam arrive (toner cartridges). Minutes. On an address that has never been given out, used, or posted anywhere.
A friend of mine has an login name that's both short and is made up of the first five letters of the alphabet. She gets upwards of 100 pieces of spam each day.
J. Random Spammer, like an orangutang with an assault rifle, could care less if spam arrives at a valid e-mail address. As long as the client can be billed for "1,000,000 direct marketing messages sent". That's all that matters.
The real problem is all of the brain dead system administrators that leave port 25 open for anyone who wants to drop trou and take a huge dump in everyones' In Box. Korea, Ireland, Brazil, China...and the good ol' USA. Idiots.
Fetch my LART gun, boy.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Hi! How are you!
I send you this file in order to have your advice.
[Attachment: Dastardly Plan Details.doc.pif]
k., who's gotten about a dozen of these so far.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
As a Verizon victim...err, customer, this would affect me as well. Except I stopped using their SMTP server when it started choking on my outgoing mail (hanging in the middle of DATA).
And though I've never used my bellatlantic.net address ever, it somehow manages to receive about ten pieces of spam each day, starting with the very first day my DSL went live.
Then there's the news swerver, which fell down and went boom a couple of weeks ago (collateral damage from the Hipcrime floods?). Instead of rebuilding the spool, they just started from scratch.
Their Tier 2 techs are pretty clueful, but Tier 1 tech support is staffed by some human-fish hybrid.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Actually, the original ABM Treaty had a provision which allowed both the USA and USSR to deploy one battery of ABMs.
The US deployed the Safeguard/Spartan system around ICBM silos in the Midwest.
The USSR system was known as GALOSH and was deployed as a ring around Moscow, 64 missiles at first, later expanded to 100 under the 1982 treaty.
The supposed Soviet violation was the construction of a large phased-array radar complex near the Bering Strait, far from the Moscow ABM ring. This system is similar to the PAVE PAWS at Otis AFB and Shemya.
(Source: Jane's Weapon Systems 1985-86)
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
DXF (Autodesk's Drawing eXchange Format) only contains a subset of an object's attributes. Import/export in
Among the things that are not supported are textures and texture mapping, object hierarchies, unified face normals, and smoothing groups.
DXF has always been my "format of last resort", and I've found that even when a program claims to support DXF i/o, it's often a broken implementation. Plus, since it's ASCII, there are CR/LF issues when moving objects across platforms.
The 3DS file format is just as "open" as DXF, retains more attributes, and is smaller, too.
k., turning caffeine into animations since 1989
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I love you,
You love me,
Let's recite from OT III
Uh, oh! There's a nasty cluster of Body Thetans on you, Barney!
Let's kill them with a Tom Cruise Missile!
Holy Xenu! You killed Barney! YOU BASTARDS!
Aw, too bad. Anyway, here's the Teletubbies to sing you the DeCSS source code song. Let's
all sing along!
k., before coffee.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
"Hi, this is Kathi in Eugene, Oregon."
"K-A-T-H-Y, right?"
"No, I."
"Okay, what's your question?"
"I have a Dell PII/333 and it makes a funny noise when it boots."
"Let me guess...it's beige."
"Um, yes..."
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Buh-shit.
Touring is expensive. So many hungry mouths to feed, so many palms to grease. Touring sucks, too, whether it's two months in a van or a year in the Marriotts of the world.
Believe me, you're a lucky fucker if you manage to break even after a tour. Sometimes you can squeeze "tour support" money from the label, but often it's recoupable.
More bullshit. Depending on the contract and the number of tracks (which determines mechanical royalties) it's $1/CD, give or take. Indie artists get a larger cut of a smaller pie.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I have a wireless device that gives me Red Sox scores, along with realtime play-by-play and color commentary (in two languages), and fan feedback (accessable from any telephone).
Also, I get traffic and weather reports, news headlines, and the latest stock market numbers.
Not only that, but there are channels that stream the latest hits in near-CD quality, too.
All for the low, low price of $9.95. No hidden monthly fees, no credit card required.
It's called a "transistor radio" and it's nearly forty years old.
Sheesh.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Isn't that what this is?
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
s/opacity/transparency/g
Sheesh.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I come to bury the Amiga, not praise it.
In 1994, I leveraged the knowledge I'd gained using an Amiga and Impulse 2.0 to get a job creating 3D models using 3DS for DOS (R2), running on '486. I was lucky. The Amiga was a toy, Impulse was a toy, and I considered myself lucky to have a $3K program running on a $3K computer (at my client's expense) for a change.
Using DOS and WfW 3.11 for the first time, I missed the close coupling between GUI and CLI that the Amiga OS had, and the opacity of the startup scripts (compared to autoexec.bat, config.sys, win.ini, and system.ini).
All the while I'd been using Macs to do digital audio and MIDI sequencing, along with DTP and video editing and Director scripting (since version 1.0). But I missed the control that the AmigaOS command line afforded. Eventually, I discovered MacShell, a CLI for MacOS 7.x, but as a userland app it lacked the speed I craved and the power I needed. The power of "/".
Fast-forward to the year 2001, Dave.
I have a fricken' fast machine with a closely coupled GUI/CLI system...Mac OS X on a G4/466.
It's like an Amiga on steroids, and it runs Photoshop, Quark, and Illustrator, along with Apache, ftpd, gcc, and ssh.
"Nostalgia is a disease of dogs." -- Lenin
Woof.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Sheesh, Henry. Lay off the 'shrooms and buy a laptop, already.
Not from the article:
Amen.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
In my case data isn't amassed quickly. Instead, it has accreted slowly like a stalagtite. I have over fifteen years of data on CD-R, and there are still 400K Mac diskettes I haven't copied yet.
Here's a couple from '85:
maczip212212000.list:TN.020.Server 13K WORD MACA 2/9/1985 4:43 PM
maczip312212000.list:System 124K ZSYS MACS 4/8/1985 6:01 PM
Wow, a whole operating system in 124K. Too bad it only supports one button mice.
I keep track of everything with flat text files that I can grep (or point htgrep at for a web-enabled search). The big list of files is about 15Mb.
sarah:$ grep "[\/|-]1985" filelist.html | wc -l
33
sarah:$ grep "[\/|-]1990" filelist.html | wc -l
2005
sarah:# grep "[\/|-]1995" filelist.html | wc -l
13263
sarah:$ grep "[\/|-]2000" filelist.html | wc -l
61748
From '85 to '94 it's mostly MIDI and Sound Designer I audio files. After that it's all 3D objects and textures, Director files, and digital video. Sorry, no pr0n.
sarah:$ grep -i \.3ds filelist.html | wc -l
30568
sarah:$ grep -i \.tga filelist.html | wc -l
42872
Also, I remember that '42 Slack distro. IIRC, it was nicknamed "Victory Slack" and came on olive drab diskettes. They gave them out for free if you bought a $50 War Bond or collected more than 100 lbs. of scrap metal.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I parsed the title as From Wanger to Virtual Reality, and thought this was about pr0n.
I need more coffee. OkBYE!
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Seconded, with additions:
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
man niutil, man niload, man nidump
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Shouldn't that be 4:20?
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
People are certainly comfortable having their search engines and mail servers residing on another machine. For the majority of computer users, the location of a process is irrelevant: only the results matter.
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
I think it's the other way around: there's a passage in Diamond Age that implies that Nell's teacher at the Victorian school (Miss Matheson) is none other than YT from Snow Crash (see page 320-21 of the Diamond Age paperback).
k.
--
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people
are really good at heart." - Anne Frank