Oh, the fun I used to have with a Casio VL-Tone twenty or so years ago. I was playing keyboards in a sort of psychedelic funk band (think XTC meets Parliament) and though my main keyboards were a Farfisa Mini-Compact, a Roland Juno 106, and an Ensoniq Mirage, a pair of VL-Tones were part of my gear.
Despite tone generators worthy of a Nokia cell phone, a rhythm box that made a 606 sound like John Bonham, and a four-banger calculator to boot, they sounded like God's Own Voice when run through a Roland Space Echo, an Electro Harmonix Memory Man, various fuzz boxes and guitar effect pedals, and an Ampeg bass amp driving an 18" speaker.
For purely visual effect, I'd have my roadies duct tape one to each of my forearms for that Casio Borg effect. We used the cheesy rhythm box sounds as a click track for one of our songs (our drummer was steady enough to keep in sync without a headphone feed).
Playing melodies on those tiny chicklet keys was a bitch, though, especially after a few backstage drinks.
I use tcpdump on Mac OS X and Linux/Unix, but when I'm at a client site and all I have is my WinXP laptop, Packetyzer is my sniffer of choice. One of my cow-orkers swears by Ethereal, but it's all good.
When the phone companies were truly a regulated monopoly (AT&T) you got *real* quality of service...
I remember the "good ol' days" of Ma Bell's monopoly, before the big breakup. I'd take exception to the use of the phrase "*real* quality of service".
The only good thing I recall about those days was that most Western Electric phones were virtually bulletproof, the telco equivalent of an IBM Type M keyboard. But that's about it.
For starters, since the telco owned everything on the network, adding an extension phone was a violation of their terms of service, and they'd come down hard on you if they found one in use (and don't think they didn't check up on people; they did). The sound quality was vastly inferior to what we now have: long distance sounded like long distance, but even local calls could sometimes be rendered unintelligible by the monopoly's antiquated switching system. Service in rural areas pretty much sucked hind tit; even in the late '70s it was party lines or nothing in certain towns in upstate New York.
Even worse, Ma Bell's responsiveness to consumer complaints was a national joke. Remember Lily Tomlin's character Ernestine? One ringy-dingy... That was a caricature, of course, but one grounded in truth.
After divestiture, things really changed for the better overall. The relaxation of restrictions on what could be placed on the network meant a boom in devices like answering machines, fax machines, and modems. Had the old pre-1984 restrictions been in place, what do you think the effect would have been on BBSs and dial-up access to the Internet? Imagine having to pay extra in order to have a modem connected to your phone line. Sound quality improved largely due to technological advances, but had the monopoly still been in place, would there have been any incentive to upgrade the telco network?
Yes, AT&T had been on the cutting edge of computer science and electronic engineering for decades. But had the break-up not taken place, we'd still be using a phone system worthy of the movie Brazil.
I'm sure this has been discussed on soc.history.what-if or alt.folklore.computers, but I'll take a wild-assed stab at this...
1. What if Microsoft hadn't bought QDOS from Tim Patterson and licensed it to IBM? IBM would have come to terms with the mercurial Gary Kildall, licensed another OS (like CP/M), or developed one in-house (a Unix derivative like Xenix?).
2. Given the above, would PCs have become as pervasive as they are now? A lot of the success of the PC depended on the clone makers, like Compaq, who lowered the price point considerably. The clone's popularity depended in no small part on their ability to run MS-DOS, thanks to the non-exclusive agreement MS had with IBM. Had IBM chosen a different OS, the licensing terms would have probably been different, and the clones would have never been, well, cloned.
3. Had the PC not taken off as it did, who would fill the gap? At the time, the Apple II and the TRS-80 led the home/small business markets, though the Macintosh was still a couple of years from its introduction. The conventional wisdom is that the PC killed the market for minis and micros; would DEC still be alive today? I'm of the opinion that DEC would find a way to die, no matter what. But it's entirely possible that enterprise computing would still be a mini in each department and a VT-100 on every desk.
4. It's easy to conclude that, without Microsoft dominating the desktop, Macintosh, Amiga, and various flavors of Unix would split that 95% share. But I think that would be wrong. One of these, or perhaps a contender we'd never heard of, would take the lion's share because of the nature of the network effect. The "winner" might not get a 95% share, but 66% to 75% is not out of the question, IMHO.
5. Pure serendipity on my part: I think the Mac would have become dominant, but not without Mac clones. One software company could dominate the market (as we have seen), but hardware is different: the market is too big for just one company.
I used to play in a band with a guitar player who was borderline obsessive about his equipment, particularly his guitar. He was constantly swapping out his pickups, trying new necks, bridges, nuts, and machine heads. It got to the point where he was replacing the capacitors and potentiometers in his guitar with precision components.
Don't get me wrong, he was an excellent player. None of this detracted from his practicing or performing. And this, I think, is the key: as good a player as he was, I believe that he felt that he was just a hardware upgrade away from excellence, at least in his own self-assessment.
For the most part, I think that most overclockers, hot rodders, or builders of Frankenguitars are hobbyists, for which these things are an end unto themselves. But there are a few people who do this believe that by building these things their skills, driving or gaming or shredding, will be unleashed, unencumbered by the limitations of their gear.
Is anybody here old enough to share his/her impressions of the first Star Trek shown, back in '66 ? it would be like magic, back then. Today we consider cell phones, digital recording devices and palmtop computers as everyday reality, but back then, it must have been very jaw-dropping, to say the least.
I was six years old in '66, and I recall eagerly looking forward to ST's debut, to the point that I conned my parents into letting me stay up past my bedtime ("Mom, Dad said it was okay...", "Dad, Mom said it was okay...").
A little background: I was pretty well aware of tech back then, having been to the '64-'65 Worlds' Fair two or three times over the previous years. And in '64, my father's company bought an IBM System 360, a roomful of machines that was administered by men in starched white lab coats, so I had a good idea what a computer looked like.
As for Trek tech, some things were impressive, some were underwhelming, even for a starry-eyed six-year-old. Transporters, phasers, and tricorders fell into the former category, while the viewscreen, the computer, and the various consoles on the bridge fell into the latter. I think they were underwhelming to me because I had the impression that running a starship would involve more in the way of dials, gauges, buttons, switches, etc. One of the things that fascinated me back then (and really still does) are pre-glass cockpit aircraft flight decks. I guess I expected something more like that. Instead, the bridge consoles looked like an orderly collection of gumdrops.
The computer wasn't impressive to me because it was, in essence, a disembodied voice. I knew that somewhere in the ship was a room full of hulking grey or black boxes with rows of toggle switches and blinkenlights (the contemporary show Time Tunnel was more impressive in this respect), and I damn well wanted to see it. Maybe they did show it, but I don't recall any specifics or particular episodes. Seeing 2001 a few years later, I recall that one of my favorite parts was when Dave enters Hal's "core" and starts to pull out memory modules, little rectangular lights that I suppose were meant to be reminiscent of the Monolith. Symbolism aside, that scene was like a money shot for a tech-obsessed pre-teen like I was at the time.
Same with the viewscreen: I'd seen a videophone demo at the World's Fair, and it just seemed like something we'd all have in our living rooms in a few years. One thing that bothered me even then were the displays that were arrayed around the bridge, above the stations and near the ceiling. They always seemed to show some random nebula or Spirograph-like pattern. It looked cheesy, even to a six-year-old kid.
All in all, I had no doubt that I'd see some of these things in my lifetime. And why not? There were more jet planes flying overhead than propeller-driven craft (I lived near an airport back then). Televisions came in color now, skyscrapers were built with glass and steel instead of granite and stone, and it seemed like every other month there was another Gemini spacecraft being launched. They promised us flying cars and jet packs by the year 2000, and I had no doubt that they'd deliver.
I hope this hasn't been too much of a Grampa Simpson-like ramble. Oh, did I mention how I used to tie an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time...?
Wow, that had to be an excruciatingly tedious experience. The IIci had a 25Mhz 68030 and maxed out at 128MB RAM (though all that RAM would have cost nearly as much as the IIci back then, and the standard IIci was 1 or 4 MB out of the box). They used something like 320K of system RAM for video, though 3rd party NuBus video cards were readily available (still, with only something like 2MB or 4MB of VRAM).
There's no mention of which software he used, but I recall that in '94 the big Mac 3D package was ElectricImage, with Strata 3D and Infini-D at the low end of the scale (~$500 or so). Photoshop was at around version 2 or 2.5; it wasn't until 3.0 when layers were implemented.
I remember trying to model and animate on an Amiga 500 with Turbo Silver back in 1989: anything with reflection or refraction would take about 24 hours per frame. Five years later, I was using Autodesk 3D Studio (R3 for DOS) on a 486 and had a room full of PCs for doing network rendering. Watching that red "Rendering" bar creep across the screen became a thing of the past (well, except for previews and such). Those five years were an interesting time, seeing the price point for a computer powerful enough for doing productive animation work (and digital video and audio) fall to where an independent artist could afford one.
Gotta hand it to Kerry Conran: if he had the patience to model and animate on a IIci, he surely paid his dues.
I don't know about anyone else, but when amortized over the three to five year lifespan of the average Wintel PC, I think Freecell alone is worth that $45. I can't think of any other piece of software that's given me so much enjoyment for between $9 and $15 dollars per year.
One in twenty? More like one in five or worse. Of course, UW only looked for four pieces of spyware. IIRC, the latest Spybot definition file has over 12,000 entries (not all of which are covered by the strict definition of "spyware", but still...).
My current job is doing graphics and web work for a small computer services company, but at least once per week I go out on service and maintenance calls for our clients. At one place, the spyware infection rate was closer to 80%: Gator/Claria, Bonzi Buddy, Vomit Cursor, HiWire, IGetNet, BestWeb, Bargain Buddy, etc. One machine had 477 separate pieces of spyware and browser hijackers. Another had 25 instances of the same pr0n dialer. Even the ones that were relatively "clean" still had crapware like Webshots or WeatherBug that brought these commodity PCs to their knees. And don't get me started on Kazaa...
When I started doing this, I'd cut the users a lot of slack, letting them keep their Webshots or Benadryl Desktop Allergy Alerts. But after a month, the BOFH-nature possessed me. I have become an IT fascist: NO WEATHERBUG FOR YOU! NEXT!!!
Gah. Now I'm pissed. I think I'll go in tomorrow and schedule scandisks and defrags for 9AM Monday morning. That'll learn 'em.
Maybe: Walmart is somewhat vulnerable, having been recently accused by the US DoJ of knowingly hiring illegal aliens. Also, they've taken a lot of heat in the press lately, due to the public perception that they're responsible for displacing local businesses (mom 'n' pop stores, the mainstays of "Main Street, USA"). Witness their recent ad campaign, an attempt to soften their image.
Maybe not: Walmart is huge. Mother huge. Makes IBM look like a candy store. 1.3 million employees huge. Consider that the US workforce is 139 million: this means that nearly 1 out of 100 working people in this country work for Walmart.
Also, getting money out of Wally World is like squeezing blood from a rock. I know this from experience; a relative of mine is one of their software vendors. Walmart doesn't pay until the invoice is marked "FINAL NOTICE - WE MEAN IT THIS TIME - YOU PAY NOW OR DIE!!!" in 72 point blood red type.
Sam Walton might be dead and buried, but his management style lives on at Wally World. Before he died, he was the richest man in the US (before Bill Gates, basically the Windows 1.0 era), but he drove an old pickup truck. To say he was stingy would be the ultimate understatement.
So, in the spirit of that parsimonious old fuck, I think Walmart would rather spend $10 million fighing SCO than settle for $1 million, just out of principle, since it would be a sign of weakness to settle out of court. And just for spite, they'd insist that all of their suppliers maintain a SCO-free shop or lose their shelf-space. It would be like Rome and Carthage all over again, with SCO razed and salted, their employees sold into slavery.
Why that? What can you do with Photoshop that you can't do with the Gimp?
Adobe has integrated Photoshop and Illustrator to the point where they might as well be the same application. Photoshop's.PSD files have text layers that are editable in Illustrator, and you can use many of the same filters and plug-ins in both programs.
This vertical integration extends from fonts and color management at one end to printing at the other, with the applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, InDesign) in between. The Gimp might get awfully close to Photoshop's feature set, but until there are mature and stable open source vector graphics and page layout packages, all the Gimp will do is steal market share from PaintShop Pro.
I can also speak of thousands of carpenters and masons who died ill and destitute because the law wouldn't enable them to collect ongoing royalties on the houses they built. I can speak of teachers' children who are destitute because the law wouldn't enable them to collect royalties on the knowledge their parents imparted to school children who grew up and used the education to become rich.
Carpenters, masons, and teachers have strong unions behind them that fight for competitve wages and benefits (well, carpenters and masons at least). Songwriters have no such support. Writing songs is like working on spec; even the most successful writers might have 1 in 10 of their songs recorded.
Besides, the architect who drew up the plans for the house that the carpenters and masons built receives a royalty for each blueprint bought. The author of the textbook that the teacher uses receives a royalty for every copy sold. There's a difference between an occupation that generates intellectual property and one that uses intellectual property. Consider a session musician that plays on a recording: they do not receive royalties (and many of them belong to the union).
But I'll tell you what I can't live without. Public domain Robert Johnson, Mississippi John Hurt, Jelly Roll Morton, Blind Lemon Jefferson, Huddie Ledbetter, Woody Guthrie.
All long dead. They don't need any money. But corporations are still making money from them, and the corporations would keep renewing, and renewing and renewing.
I know Woody Guthrie's daughter, Nora. She pretty much spends all of her time administering his estate, and by estate I mean his legacy: his songs and the royalties that they generate.
Woody died in 1967 of Huntington's Chorea, a degenerative neurological disease. Nora and the Woody Guthrie Foundation have been instrumental in raising money towards finding a cure for Huntington's Disease, something that would be all but impossible if there wasn't a royalty stream from Woody's music.
I mention this not to name-drop, but to disabuse you of the notion that some faceless corporation is cashing the checks each time This Land is Your Land gets covered or played on the radio.
I think we're going to succeed in pissing off the Macophiles in the crowd with this one. I like OS X as much as anyone, and its multipedia capabilities are utterly obscene, but for general apps most people don't need it.
I guess I can speak for the Macophiles on this (I started doing digital audio and MIDI with a 512K Mac, Sound Designer I, and an Ensoniq Mirage in '86, though I'm typing this on a Wintel box behind a Linux firewall).
There's a corollary to Murphy's Law that says that work always takes up the time alotted. It's the same with applications and operating systems, RAM and CPU speeds. In two years time, running the latest version of Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux will require a 2+ GHz proc and 512 MB RAM, even if you're not going to do anything more than send e-mail or browse web pages. Add to that the bundled apps that a casual user will get when he buys a digital camera, DV camcorder, or scanner. What Intel/Motorola/IBM giveth, Microsoft/Apple/Red Hat taketh away.
Linux based systems tend to hold the line on excess hardware bloat. You don't need to stay on an endless treadmill of forced hardware and sofware upgrades for support; a skilled tech can keep your setup running. Security is potentially higher, with proper configuration. And virii are pretty much a null threat.
If you're only going to run Slackware in text mode or with fwvm or icewm, yes. But to run the latest Gnome or KDE, no. You need 128MB RAM, minimum, and that old 2MB VRAM Diamond Viper video card isn't going to cut it any more.
Most office productivity can be handled with F/OSS analogues of Windows tools. Programs like OOo and FireFox, The Gimp and the myriad SQL databases do a great deal of work.
I work for a company that does systems administration for small businesses, mainly as a graphic artist and web developer, though I also do service calls and maintenance, so I can speak from real world experience here:
Case study: Car dealership X has 25 Compaq Presarios, spread among sales, service, parts and finance. 75% of their business is done through a terminal emulator, connected to a server that's maintained by ADP. For the most part, they could run their business on 486s running Slackware. But the other 25% is the sticking point: the Kelly Blue Book CDs use a proprietary application that needs mucho CPU and RAM.
Case study: A small accounting office with 5 Dell PCs. Their business runs on Quickbooks, Timeslips, MS Office, and various Java-based tax applications, for which there is no Linux analogue.
These businesses (and the others that my company services) wanted off-the-shelf computing solutions and wanted to leverage the systems and applications that their employees (and potential employees) were familiar with. That Dell and HP/Compaq offered turnkey systems with Windows and Office pre-installed sealed the deal. It's the network effect, writ large.
As for viruses and spyware, that's the lion's share of our maintenance routine. I call it "job security".
That's life in the trenches, outside of the niche markets that Apple owns. I was brought on as someone who knew Macs as well as the Wintel world, but I have yet to service one.
As for the Gimp, well, I think it's a very good replacement for PaintShop Pro. But a Photoshop killer it ain't. I use Photoshop CS every day, along with Illustrator and InDesign (Adobe's Quark killer, since Quark 6 is the spawn of Satan and sucks like a $3 whore). It's the integration of these three apps that the Gimp will never achieve, unless it suddenly grows serious CMYK, vector, and pre-press support overnight. Photoshop and Illustrator are looking more and more like each other with every release. I think that by the next iteration they'll be one in the same.
k.
Re:NFL = No Fun League
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Superbowling
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· Score: 1
Honestly, I wonder what would happen if the Casinos said "F-U NFL" and showed the games on huge screens, what are the fines/other penalties for displaying the game on a 100' screen? A $10,000 fine might be trivial compared to the revenue it brings in.
The penalties for infringement are set out in 18 USC 113, sec. 2319(a): a maximum of 10 years imprisonment, plus the forfeiture of assets (all those plasma screens, etc.) and civil penalties (equivalent to loss of profits times 3) as per 17 USC 110.
The real hit would be with the Nevada Gaming Commission, which doesn't look kindly on its licensees getting convicted of a felony offense. That's the big enchilada; the casinos could absorb the civil penalties without breaking a sweat. It's the loss of a license to operate that's the dealbreaker.
Now, I am not a lawyer, but I don't see what would stop an Indian casino like Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun from setting up a S*per B*wl simulcast. They're built on what's essentially sovereign land and I'm not entirely sure that the Pequot Nation is a signatory to the Berne Convention.
At the very least, it would be a nice payback for having an NFL team with the name "Redskins".
k.
Re:NFL = No Fun League
on
Superbowling
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· Score: 4, Informative
The NFL says NO WAY to Casinos in las vegas showing the game on anything bigger than a 55" TV. They say its copyright law, but last I checked copyright law didnt say anything about TV Size.
Perhaps you should check again. From 17 USC 110:
(II) if the performance or display is by audiovisual means, any visual portion of the performance or display is communicated by means of a total of not more than 4 audiovisual devices, of which not more than 1 audiovisual device is located in any 1 room,
and no such audiovisual device has a diagonal screen size greater than 55 inches, and any audio portion of the performance or display is communicated by means of a total of not more than 6 loudspeakers, of which not more than 4 loudspeakers are located in any 1 room or adjoining outdoor space;
I've been involved with copyright issues for over 25 years and I've seen the Copyright Act go from a fairly straightforward document to one that's filled with exemptions and intentional loopholes, some that actually benefit the consumer at the expense of corporate interests. Those are the minority, to be sure, but they're in there.
You want even more scary? Watch the network news sometime (or CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, SkyNews, etc.). Look for stories on pharmaceutical products, mad cow, commercial aviation, or other large, well-funded industries.
More often than not, a large portion of the video footage in these news items come from "video press releases" sent to the news outlets by the industries in question. These press packages are accompanied by "B-reel", a tape of raw footage sans commentary. These reels get folded into the news outlets' video libraries, so when some stock footage of a dairy farm is needed for a piece on milk subsidies, for example, b-reel footage is used in between "talking head" shots.
So, public relations firms and advertising agencies end up producing 1/3 to 1/2 of the national news we see every day. Does this influence public opinion? Certainly the fact that their b-reel footage and VPRs only show the best side of the industries they rep for has to have some influence.
Even scarier: lobbyists have been known to contribute to drafts of Federal legislation, and pharma tech reps are often present in the operating room when new surgical treatments (e.g., arterial stents, artificial joints, etc.) are performed. A decade ago, a Howmedica tech rep was indicted for actually performing a hip replacement in place of the surgeon (who was merely an observer in this case).
B-1B bombers have a similar recovery system, though they do not fly in as extreme an environment.
You might be thinking of the F-111, which had an ejection capsule for the pilot and copilot. The B-1B has standard ejection seats (ACES II model) for its four crewmembers.
Pedantry aside, the problem with the F-111's capsule system was due to the hard weight limit imposed by the size of the parachute. That is, over the service life of the aircraft, there would be numerous enhancements to avionics, life-support, and other systems, invariably adding weight to the cockpit area. In a conventional ejection-seat equipped aircraft, the additional weight could be compensated for by reducing payload or fuel capacity, for example. But in a capsule ejection system, the weight budget is much, much tighter, as there's very little that can be removed from the capsule to compensate for the increase in weight.
The net result is a cockpit capsule that's too heavy for its parachutes. There's a volume budget, too, which places a limit on the size of the chutes. This means a barely survivable, extremely hard landing. This negates the advantage a capsule has over a conventional ejection seat, where even a successful "punch out" often results in a career-ending back or neck injury.
Now, with a trans-orbital craft, the cost/benefit ratio is different, considering the speed and altitude involved. On the other hand, the weight and volume limitations are even tighter than on an aircraft. And given the way Columbia was tumbling during its last reentry, its probable that such a system wouldn't have been able to save the crew anyway.
ObEjectionTrivia: pilots who punch out in a seat made by the Martin Baker, Ltd receive a special necktie from the manufacturer (IIRC, it's blue with small "MB" embriodery), provided that they survive and still have a neck.
Though it didn't seem so at the time, some of the jobs I've had and the places I've worked were downright deadly.
I dropped out of music school to play full time with a band back in 1980. Some of the venues were actually pretty nice, like the hotel bar that would give us a suite as a dressing room. Nothing beats a nice hot bath between soundcheck and the set.
But most of the places -- nightclubs with capacities between 100 and 1200 people -- were veritable Black Holes of Calcutta. CBGBs was pretty typical (first played there in '78, last time in '98). Men's room had about two inches of standing liquid on the floor (and I don't mean water). If at all possible, we'd find a quiet restaurant or bar in which to chill between check and set (a span of four or five hours). But in some towns, hanging in the club was unavoidable. Sucking in the second-hand smoke and having to listen to opening acts of dubious talent and skill really begins to wear on one's patience. But hey, most of the time the beer was free (as in beer).
Sometimes I managed to eke out a living doing this, but most of the time I had to have a day job. Up until '92, this meant driving and/or dispatching taxis.
I've seen a lot of pretty bad workplace environments among the comments, but very few that had sudden death listed as a hazard. I consider myself lucky: I had only one major accident while driving (t-boned by some kids out joyriding...no seatbelts in the cab because of the partition installation...got tossed around and broke the taximeter off of it's mount with my head) and had only one attempted hold-up (at knifepoint; mine was bigger so the perp made a tactical retreat).
Trauma wasn't the only hazard: just the fumes from driving through the harbor tunnels back and forth to Logan Airport (BOS) a dozen times a day was enough to take ten years off my life. But hey, those ten years come off of the end, so I probably won't miss them.
After a couple of years of driving (5 or 6 12hr shifts/wk.), a dispatching position opened up in the radio room. "No more exhaust fumes!" I gleefully thought. Tough luck, kid: the radio room is right over the garage, in a rickety wooden loft. Below, a motley crew of mechanics worked at keeping the fleet running, mostly by removing emissions controls (they had their own state inspection station) and reaming out the catalytic converters with air drills. About once each year one of the operators would start to get nauseous and faint, and all of us would have to go to the hospital for a blood gas exam.
Ironically enough, for the last ten weeks I've been working part time as a dispatcher at a cab company on Cape Cod (though it's my last week there, as my other employer, a computer services outfit, wants me on a full-time basis). In between the cab gigs I've been a recording studio owner, and a freelance graphic artist and animator, working out of the comfort and privacy of my home for the most part.
One note about the Cape Cod cab company: it's all computerized. The calltaker stations are VT-100-like terminals hanging off a SCO OpenServer box, feeding an NT4 server that runs the business logic. The dispatch station is a dual-monitor W2K box with a map display that shows the position and status of all of the GPS-equipped cabs. Each cab has a mobile data terminal with an 8x40 LCD screen. Back in Boston, all we had were little slips of paper and a microphone. And we liked it...
No. We hated it. Do you know how hard it is to explain to a recent immigrant the difference between Arlington St. and Armington St.? Or which of the 13 Washington Streets within the city limits he's supposed to find?
That disk was called "Macintosh Guided Tour", IIRC and, at the time I bought my first Mac (late '85), was accompanied by an audio cassette (also called "Guided Tour"). The tape consisted of a gentleman with a soothing voice walking you through the Finder and instructing you on how to use the mouse. There was a new-agey piano track under the voiceover. "Very West Coast", I thought at the time.
I do recall that there was a little maze applet that was meant to introduce you to mousing. I might still have the diskette in storage somewhere, though I'm pretty sure I recorded over the cassette. I wasn't thinking about the eBay value of things like that back in 1985.
Oh, and one other thing: I recall that the street price of my 512K "Fat Mac" was somewhere around $1200. I bought it to do MIDI sequencing, and still have it around. Still boots, too. With the Mac, Sound Designer I, and an Ensoniq Mirage, I had a poor-man's Fairlight CMI.
So far this week, I've received only seven actual copies of W32/Sobig. However, the number of messages from mailer-daemons and mail server virus scanners has exceeded this by a factor of ten. Some of these rejection messages actually include a copy of the infected.PIF file.
You would think that after Klez, the people who write these virus scanners and those who administer mail servers would realize that viruses sometimes spoof the "From:" field. I didn't send it, my Mac is not infected. You're just annoying me. Please go away.
At best, this is collateral damage. At worst, these rejection messages are actually advertising the IP addresses of infected systems. Should a virus drop a back door payload, this would multiply the damage.
New Zealand does not have specific anti-spam laws.
I used to think that comparing the Internet to the Wild West was just as bad as that "superhighway" metaphor, but lately I've come to realize how appropriate it's come to be.
You've got a legal vacuum for the most part, considering that most law enforcement authorities won't take action until a certain monetary dollar amount of damage has been done (with some notable exceptions such as child pornography). Thus, the medium is dominated by penis-enlarging snake oil salesmen, grizzled dataminers trying to pass off fool's gold as the real thing, men in black hats, men in white hats, Indians with H1B visas (yeah, I know...), and e-mail programs infected with smallpox.
I only beat the Net Rush of '94 by a couple of years, but I've heard some of the oldtimers tell tales of yore, when the whole community would get together to raise a barn or wire a school with CAT-5, or how you could always rely on your neighbor to help mend a fence or patch sendmail.
"Round up a posse, boys. We'll head 'em off at the router..."
Yeah, it's a stretch. I know. But everytime I look in that Deadman's Gulch I call my inbox, my trigger finger starts to itch and I yearn for a nice.45-70 Henry rifle.
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Oh, the fun I used to have with a Casio VL-Tone twenty or so years ago. I was playing keyboards in a sort of psychedelic funk band (think XTC meets Parliament) and though my main keyboards were a Farfisa Mini-Compact, a Roland Juno 106, and an Ensoniq Mirage, a pair of VL-Tones were part of my gear.
Despite tone generators worthy of a Nokia cell phone, a rhythm box that made a 606 sound like John Bonham, and a four-banger calculator to boot, they sounded like God's Own Voice when run through a Roland Space Echo, an Electro Harmonix Memory Man, various fuzz boxes and guitar effect pedals, and an Ampeg bass amp driving an 18" speaker.
For purely visual effect, I'd have my roadies duct tape one to each of my forearms for that Casio Borg effect. We used the cheesy rhythm box sounds as a click track for one of our songs (our drummer was steady enough to keep in sync without a headphone feed).
Playing melodies on those tiny chicklet keys was a bitch, though, especially after a few backstage drinks.
k.
I use tcpdump on Mac OS X and Linux/Unix, but when I'm at a client site and all I have is my WinXP laptop, Packetyzer is my sniffer of choice. One of my cow-orkers swears by Ethereal, but it's all good.
k.
Syntax error: core dumped
Maybe I just don't have the right library installed for that particular idiom.
k., who just got over a bad case of Achilles Heel.
I remember the "good ol' days" of Ma Bell's monopoly, before the big breakup. I'd take exception to the use of the phrase "*real* quality of service".
The only good thing I recall about those days was that most Western Electric phones were virtually bulletproof, the telco equivalent of an IBM Type M keyboard. But that's about it.
For starters, since the telco owned everything on the network, adding an extension phone was a violation of their terms of service, and they'd come down hard on you if they found one in use (and don't think they didn't check up on people; they did). The sound quality was vastly inferior to what we now have: long distance sounded like long distance, but even local calls could sometimes be rendered unintelligible by the monopoly's antiquated switching system. Service in rural areas pretty much sucked hind tit; even in the late '70s it was party lines or nothing in certain towns in upstate New York.
Even worse, Ma Bell's responsiveness to consumer complaints was a national joke. Remember Lily Tomlin's character Ernestine? One ringy-dingy... That was a caricature, of course, but one grounded in truth.
After divestiture, things really changed for the better overall. The relaxation of restrictions on what could be placed on the network meant a boom in devices like answering machines, fax machines, and modems. Had the old pre-1984 restrictions been in place, what do you think the effect would have been on BBSs and dial-up access to the Internet? Imagine having to pay extra in order to have a modem connected to your phone line. Sound quality improved largely due to technological advances, but had the monopoly still been in place, would there have been any incentive to upgrade the telco network?
Yes, AT&T had been on the cutting edge of computer science and electronic engineering for decades. But had the break-up not taken place, we'd still be using a phone system worthy of the movie Brazil.
k.
I'm sure this has been discussed on soc.history.what-if or alt.folklore.computers, but I'll take a wild-assed stab at this...
1. What if Microsoft hadn't bought QDOS from Tim Patterson and licensed it to IBM? IBM would have come to terms with the mercurial Gary Kildall, licensed another OS (like CP/M), or developed one in-house (a Unix derivative like Xenix?).
2. Given the above, would PCs have become as pervasive as they are now? A lot of the success of the PC depended on the clone makers, like Compaq, who lowered the price point considerably. The clone's popularity depended in no small part on their ability to run MS-DOS, thanks to the non-exclusive agreement MS had with IBM. Had IBM chosen a different OS, the licensing terms would have probably been different, and the clones would have never been, well, cloned.
3. Had the PC not taken off as it did, who would fill the gap? At the time, the Apple II and the TRS-80 led the home/small business markets, though the Macintosh was still a couple of years from its introduction. The conventional wisdom is that the PC killed the market for minis and micros; would DEC still be alive today? I'm of the opinion that DEC would find a way to die, no matter what. But it's entirely possible that enterprise computing would still be a mini in each department and a VT-100 on every desk.
4. It's easy to conclude that, without Microsoft dominating the desktop, Macintosh, Amiga, and various flavors of Unix would split that 95% share. But I think that would be wrong. One of these, or perhaps a contender we'd never heard of, would take the lion's share because of the nature of the network effect. The "winner" might not get a 95% share, but 66% to 75% is not out of the question, IMHO.
5. Pure serendipity on my part: I think the Mac would have become dominant, but not without Mac clones. One software company could dominate the market (as we have seen), but hardware is different: the market is too big for just one company.
k.
I used to play in a band with a guitar player who was borderline obsessive about his equipment, particularly his guitar. He was constantly swapping out his pickups, trying new necks, bridges, nuts, and machine heads. It got to the point where he was replacing the capacitors and potentiometers in his guitar with precision components.
Don't get me wrong, he was an excellent player. None of this detracted from his practicing or performing. And this, I think, is the key: as good a player as he was, I believe that he felt that he was just a hardware upgrade away from excellence, at least in his own self-assessment.
For the most part, I think that most overclockers, hot rodders, or builders of Frankenguitars are hobbyists, for which these things are an end unto themselves. But there are a few people who do this believe that by building these things their skills, driving or gaming or shredding, will be unleashed, unencumbered by the limitations of their gear.
k.
I was six years old in '66, and I recall eagerly looking forward to ST's debut, to the point that I conned my parents into letting me stay up past my bedtime ("Mom, Dad said it was okay...", "Dad, Mom said it was okay...").
A little background: I was pretty well aware of tech back then, having been to the '64-'65 Worlds' Fair two or three times over the previous years. And in '64, my father's company bought an IBM System 360, a roomful of machines that was administered by men in starched white lab coats, so I had a good idea what a computer looked like.
As for Trek tech, some things were impressive, some were underwhelming, even for a starry-eyed six-year-old. Transporters, phasers, and tricorders fell into the former category, while the viewscreen, the computer, and the various consoles on the bridge fell into the latter. I think they were underwhelming to me because I had the impression that running a starship would involve more in the way of dials, gauges, buttons, switches, etc. One of the things that fascinated me back then (and really still does) are pre-glass cockpit aircraft flight decks. I guess I expected something more like that. Instead, the bridge consoles looked like an orderly collection of gumdrops.
The computer wasn't impressive to me because it was, in essence, a disembodied voice. I knew that somewhere in the ship was a room full of hulking grey or black boxes with rows of toggle switches and blinkenlights (the contemporary show Time Tunnel was more impressive in this respect), and I damn well wanted to see it. Maybe they did show it, but I don't recall any specifics or particular episodes. Seeing 2001 a few years later, I recall that one of my favorite parts was when Dave enters Hal's "core" and starts to pull out memory modules, little rectangular lights that I suppose were meant to be reminiscent of the Monolith. Symbolism aside, that scene was like a money shot for a tech-obsessed pre-teen like I was at the time.
Same with the viewscreen: I'd seen a videophone demo at the World's Fair, and it just seemed like something we'd all have in our living rooms in a few years. One thing that bothered me even then were the displays that were arrayed around the bridge, above the stations and near the ceiling. They always seemed to show some random nebula or Spirograph-like pattern. It looked cheesy, even to a six-year-old kid.
All in all, I had no doubt that I'd see some of these things in my lifetime. And why not? There were more jet planes flying overhead than propeller-driven craft (I lived near an airport back then). Televisions came in color now, skyscrapers were built with glass and steel instead of granite and stone, and it seemed like every other month there was another Gemini spacecraft being launched. They promised us flying cars and jet packs by the year 2000, and I had no doubt that they'd deliver.
I hope this hasn't been too much of a Grampa Simpson-like ramble. Oh, did I mention how I used to tie an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time...?
k.
Wow, that had to be an excruciatingly tedious experience. The IIci had a 25Mhz 68030 and maxed out at 128MB RAM (though all that RAM would have cost nearly as much as the IIci back then, and the standard IIci was 1 or 4 MB out of the box). They used something like 320K of system RAM for video, though 3rd party NuBus video cards were readily available (still, with only something like 2MB or 4MB of VRAM).
There's no mention of which software he used, but I recall that in '94 the big Mac 3D package was ElectricImage, with Strata 3D and Infini-D at the low end of the scale (~$500 or so). Photoshop was at around version 2 or 2.5; it wasn't until 3.0 when layers were implemented.
I remember trying to model and animate on an Amiga 500 with Turbo Silver back in 1989: anything with reflection or refraction would take about 24 hours per frame. Five years later, I was using Autodesk 3D Studio (R3 for DOS) on a 486 and had a room full of PCs for doing network rendering. Watching that red "Rendering" bar creep across the screen became a thing of the past (well, except for previews and such). Those five years were an interesting time, seeing the price point for a computer powerful enough for doing productive animation work (and digital video and audio) fall to where an independent artist could afford one.
Gotta hand it to Kerry Conran: if he had the patience to model and animate on a IIci, he surely paid his dues.
k.
I don't know about anyone else, but when amortized over the three to five year lifespan of the average Wintel PC, I think Freecell alone is worth that $45. I can't think of any other piece of software that's given me so much enjoyment for between $9 and $15 dollars per year.
k.
The Passion of the Bijesus?
k.
One in twenty? More like one in five or worse. Of course, UW only looked for four pieces of spyware. IIRC, the latest Spybot definition file has over 12,000 entries (not all of which are covered by the strict definition of "spyware", but still...).
My current job is doing graphics and web work for a small computer services company, but at least once per week I go out on service and maintenance calls for our clients. At one place, the spyware infection rate was closer to 80%: Gator/Claria, Bonzi Buddy, Vomit Cursor, HiWire, IGetNet, BestWeb, Bargain Buddy, etc. One machine had 477 separate pieces of spyware and browser hijackers. Another had 25 instances of the same pr0n dialer. Even the ones that were relatively "clean" still had crapware like Webshots or WeatherBug that brought these commodity PCs to their knees. And don't get me started on Kazaa...
When I started doing this, I'd cut the users a lot of slack, letting them keep their Webshots or Benadryl Desktop Allergy Alerts. But after a month, the BOFH-nature possessed me. I have become an IT fascist: NO WEATHERBUG FOR YOU! NEXT!!!
Gah. Now I'm pissed. I think I'll go in tomorrow and schedule scandisks and defrags for 9AM Monday morning. That'll learn 'em.
k.
Maybe, maybe not.
Maybe: Walmart is somewhat vulnerable, having been recently accused by the US DoJ of knowingly hiring illegal aliens. Also, they've taken a lot of heat in the press lately, due to the public perception that they're responsible for displacing local businesses (mom 'n' pop stores, the mainstays of "Main Street, USA"). Witness their recent ad campaign, an attempt to soften their image.
Maybe not: Walmart is huge. Mother huge. Makes IBM look like a candy store. 1.3 million employees huge. Consider that the US workforce is 139 million: this means that nearly 1 out of 100 working people in this country work for Walmart.
Also, getting money out of Wally World is like squeezing blood from a rock. I know this from experience; a relative of mine is one of their software vendors. Walmart doesn't pay until the invoice is marked "FINAL NOTICE - WE MEAN IT THIS TIME - YOU PAY NOW OR DIE!!!" in 72 point blood red type.
Sam Walton might be dead and buried, but his management style lives on at Wally World. Before he died, he was the richest man in the US (before Bill Gates, basically the Windows 1.0 era), but he drove an old pickup truck. To say he was stingy would be the ultimate understatement.
So, in the spirit of that parsimonious old fuck, I think Walmart would rather spend $10 million fighing SCO than settle for $1 million, just out of principle, since it would be a sign of weakness to settle out of court. And just for spite, they'd insist that all of their suppliers maintain a SCO-free shop or lose their shelf-space. It would be like Rome and Carthage all over again, with SCO razed and salted, their employees sold into slavery.
k.
Adobe has integrated Photoshop and Illustrator to the point where they might as well be the same application. Photoshop's
This vertical integration extends from fonts and color management at one end to printing at the other, with the applications (Photoshop, Illustrator, GoLive, InDesign) in between. The Gimp might get awfully close to Photoshop's feature set, but until there are mature and stable open source vector graphics and page layout packages, all the Gimp will do is steal market share from PaintShop Pro.
k.
Carpenters, masons, and teachers have strong unions behind them that fight for competitve wages and benefits (well, carpenters and masons at least). Songwriters have no such support. Writing songs is like working on spec; even the most successful writers might have 1 in 10 of their songs recorded.
Besides, the architect who drew up the plans for the house that the carpenters and masons built receives a royalty for each blueprint bought. The author of the textbook that the teacher uses receives a royalty for every copy sold. There's a difference between an occupation that generates intellectual property and one that uses intellectual property. Consider a session musician that plays on a recording: they do not receive royalties (and many of them belong to the union).
k.
Faster than a speeding packet! More powerful than a Beowulf cluster! Able to leap tall datacenters in a single click!
Apparently, the Slashdot Effect is the kryptonite of the net.
k.
I know Woody Guthrie's daughter, Nora. She pretty much spends all of her time administering his estate, and by estate I mean his legacy: his songs and the royalties that they generate.
Woody died in 1967 of Huntington's Chorea, a degenerative neurological disease. Nora and the Woody Guthrie Foundation have been instrumental in raising money towards finding a cure for Huntington's Disease, something that would be all but impossible if there wasn't a royalty stream from Woody's music.
I mention this not to name-drop, but to disabuse you of the notion that some faceless corporation is cashing the checks each time This Land is Your Land gets covered or played on the radio.
k.
I guess I can speak for the Macophiles on this (I started doing digital audio and MIDI with a 512K Mac, Sound Designer I, and an Ensoniq Mirage in '86, though I'm typing this on a Wintel box behind a Linux firewall).
There's a corollary to Murphy's Law that says that work always takes up the time alotted. It's the same with applications and operating systems, RAM and CPU speeds. In two years time, running the latest version of Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux will require a 2+ GHz proc and 512 MB RAM, even if you're not going to do anything more than send e-mail or browse web pages. Add to that the bundled apps that a casual user will get when he buys a digital camera, DV camcorder, or scanner. What Intel/Motorola/IBM giveth, Microsoft/Apple/Red Hat taketh away.
If you're only going to run Slackware in text mode or with fwvm or icewm, yes. But to run the latest Gnome or KDE, no. You need 128MB RAM, minimum, and that old 2MB VRAM Diamond Viper video card isn't going to cut it any more.
I work for a company that does systems administration for small businesses, mainly as a graphic artist and web developer, though I also do service calls and maintenance, so I can speak from real world experience here:
Case study: Car dealership X has 25 Compaq Presarios, spread among sales, service, parts and finance. 75% of their business is done through a terminal emulator, connected to a server that's maintained by ADP. For the most part, they could run their business on 486s running Slackware. But the other 25% is the sticking point: the Kelly Blue Book CDs use a proprietary application that needs mucho CPU and RAM.
Case study: A small accounting office with 5 Dell PCs. Their business runs on Quickbooks, Timeslips, MS Office, and various Java-based tax applications, for which there is no Linux analogue.
These businesses (and the others that my company services) wanted off-the-shelf computing solutions and wanted to leverage the systems and applications that their employees (and potential employees) were familiar with. That Dell and HP/Compaq offered turnkey systems with Windows and Office pre-installed sealed the deal. It's the network effect, writ large.
As for viruses and spyware, that's the lion's share of our maintenance routine. I call it "job security".
That's life in the trenches, outside of the niche markets that Apple owns. I was brought on as someone who knew Macs as well as the Wintel world, but I have yet to service one.
As for the Gimp, well, I think it's a very good replacement for PaintShop Pro. But a Photoshop killer it ain't. I use Photoshop CS every day, along with Illustrator and InDesign (Adobe's Quark killer, since Quark 6 is the spawn of Satan and sucks like a $3 whore). It's the integration of these three apps that the Gimp will never achieve, unless it suddenly grows serious CMYK, vector, and pre-press support overnight. Photoshop and Illustrator are looking more and more like each other with every release. I think that by the next iteration they'll be one in the same.
k.
The penalties for infringement are set out in 18 USC 113, sec. 2319(a): a maximum of 10 years imprisonment, plus the forfeiture of assets (all those plasma screens, etc.) and civil penalties (equivalent to loss of profits times 3) as per 17 USC 110.
The real hit would be with the Nevada Gaming Commission, which doesn't look kindly on its licensees getting convicted of a felony offense. That's the big enchilada; the casinos could absorb the civil penalties without breaking a sweat. It's the loss of a license to operate that's the dealbreaker.
Now, I am not a lawyer, but I don't see what would stop an Indian casino like Foxwoods or Mohegan Sun from setting up a S*per B*wl simulcast. They're built on what's essentially sovereign land and I'm not entirely sure that the Pequot Nation is a signatory to the Berne Convention.
At the very least, it would be a nice payback for having an NFL team with the name "Redskins".
k.
Perhaps you should check again. From 17 USC 110:
I've been involved with copyright issues for over 25 years and I've seen the Copyright Act go from a fairly straightforward document to one that's filled with exemptions and intentional loopholes, some that actually benefit the consumer at the expense of corporate interests. Those are the minority, to be sure, but they're in there.
k.
You want even more scary? Watch the network news sometime (or CNN, Fox News, MSNBC, SkyNews, etc.). Look for stories on pharmaceutical products, mad cow, commercial aviation, or other large, well-funded industries.
More often than not, a large portion of the video footage in these news items come from "video press releases" sent to the news outlets by the industries in question. These press packages are accompanied by "B-reel", a tape of raw footage sans commentary. These reels get folded into the news outlets' video libraries, so when some stock footage of a dairy farm is needed for a piece on milk subsidies, for example, b-reel footage is used in between "talking head" shots.
So, public relations firms and advertising agencies end up producing 1/3 to 1/2 of the national news we see every day. Does this influence public opinion? Certainly the fact that their b-reel footage and VPRs only show the best side of the industries they rep for has to have some influence.
Even scarier: lobbyists have been known to contribute to drafts of Federal legislation, and pharma tech reps are often present in the operating room when new surgical treatments (e.g., arterial stents, artificial joints, etc.) are performed. A decade ago, a Howmedica tech rep was indicted for actually performing a hip replacement in place of the surgeon (who was merely an observer in this case).
k.
You might be thinking of the F-111, which had an ejection capsule for the pilot and copilot. The B-1B has standard ejection seats (ACES II model) for its four crewmembers.
Pedantry aside, the problem with the F-111's capsule system was due to the hard weight limit imposed by the size of the parachute. That is, over the service life of the aircraft, there would be numerous enhancements to avionics, life-support, and other systems, invariably adding weight to the cockpit area. In a conventional ejection-seat equipped aircraft, the additional weight could be compensated for by reducing payload or fuel capacity, for example. But in a capsule ejection system, the weight budget is much, much tighter, as there's very little that can be removed from the capsule to compensate for the increase in weight.
The net result is a cockpit capsule that's too heavy for its parachutes. There's a volume budget, too, which places a limit on the size of the chutes. This means a barely survivable, extremely hard landing. This negates the advantage a capsule has over a conventional ejection seat, where even a successful "punch out" often results in a career-ending back or neck injury.
Now, with a trans-orbital craft, the cost/benefit ratio is different, considering the speed and altitude involved. On the other hand, the weight and volume limitations are even tighter than on an aircraft. And given the way Columbia was tumbling during its last reentry, its probable that such a system wouldn't have been able to save the crew anyway.
ObEjectionTrivia: pilots who punch out in a seat made by the Martin Baker, Ltd receive a special necktie from the manufacturer (IIRC, it's blue with small "MB" embriodery), provided that they survive and still have a neck.
k.
Though it didn't seem so at the time, some of the jobs I've had and the places I've worked were downright deadly.
I dropped out of music school to play full time with a band back in 1980. Some of the venues were actually pretty nice, like the hotel bar that would give us a suite as a dressing room. Nothing beats a nice hot bath between soundcheck and the set.
But most of the places -- nightclubs with capacities between 100 and 1200 people -- were veritable Black Holes of Calcutta. CBGBs was pretty typical (first played there in '78, last time in '98). Men's room had about two inches of standing liquid on the floor (and I don't mean water). If at all possible, we'd find a quiet restaurant or bar in which to chill between check and set (a span of four or five hours). But in some towns, hanging in the club was unavoidable. Sucking in the second-hand smoke and having to listen to opening acts of dubious talent and skill really begins to wear on one's patience. But hey, most of the time the beer was free (as in beer).
Sometimes I managed to eke out a living doing this, but most of the time I had to have a day job. Up until '92, this meant driving and/or dispatching taxis.
I've seen a lot of pretty bad workplace environments among the comments, but very few that had sudden death listed as a hazard. I consider myself lucky: I had only one major accident while driving (t-boned by some kids out joyriding...no seatbelts in the cab because of the partition installation...got tossed around and broke the taximeter off of it's mount with my head) and had only one attempted hold-up (at knifepoint; mine was bigger so the perp made a tactical retreat).
Trauma wasn't the only hazard: just the fumes from driving through the harbor tunnels back and forth to Logan Airport (BOS) a dozen times a day was enough to take ten years off my life. But hey, those ten years come off of the end, so I probably won't miss them.
After a couple of years of driving (5 or 6 12hr shifts/wk.), a dispatching position opened up in the radio room. "No more exhaust fumes!" I gleefully thought. Tough luck, kid: the radio room is right over the garage, in a rickety wooden loft. Below, a motley crew of mechanics worked at keeping the fleet running, mostly by removing emissions controls (they had their own state inspection station) and reaming out the catalytic converters with air drills. About once each year one of the operators would start to get nauseous and faint, and all of us would have to go to the hospital for a blood gas exam.
Ironically enough, for the last ten weeks I've been working part time as a dispatcher at a cab company on Cape Cod (though it's my last week there, as my other employer, a computer services outfit, wants me on a full-time basis). In between the cab gigs I've been a recording studio owner, and a freelance graphic artist and animator, working out of the comfort and privacy of my home for the most part.
One note about the Cape Cod cab company: it's all computerized. The calltaker stations are VT-100-like terminals hanging off a SCO OpenServer box, feeding an NT4 server that runs the business logic. The dispatch station is a dual-monitor W2K box with a map display that shows the position and status of all of the GPS-equipped cabs. Each cab has a mobile data terminal with an 8x40 LCD screen. Back in Boston, all we had were little slips of paper and a microphone. And we liked it...
No. We hated it. Do you know how hard it is to explain to a recent immigrant the difference between Arlington St. and Armington St.? Or which of the 13 Washington Streets within the city limits he's supposed to find?
I still have nightmares about that job.
k.
That disk was called "Macintosh Guided Tour", IIRC and, at the time I bought my first Mac (late '85), was accompanied by an audio cassette (also called "Guided Tour"). The tape consisted of a gentleman with a soothing voice walking you through the Finder and instructing you on how to use the mouse. There was a new-agey piano track under the voiceover. "Very West Coast", I thought at the time.
I do recall that there was a little maze applet that was meant to introduce you to mousing. I might still have the diskette in storage somewhere, though I'm pretty sure I recorded over the cassette. I wasn't thinking about the eBay value of things like that back in 1985.
Oh, and one other thing: I recall that the street price of my 512K "Fat Mac" was somewhere around $1200. I bought it to do MIDI sequencing, and still have it around. Still boots, too. With the Mac, Sound Designer I, and an Ensoniq Mirage, I had a poor-man's Fairlight CMI.
k.
So far this week, I've received only seven actual copies of W32/Sobig. However, the number of messages from mailer-daemons and mail server virus scanners has exceeded this by a factor of ten. Some of these rejection messages actually include a copy of the infected .PIF file.
You would think that after Klez, the people who write these virus scanners and those who administer mail servers would realize that viruses sometimes spoof the "From:" field. I didn't send it, my Mac is not infected. You're just annoying me. Please go away.
At best, this is collateral damage. At worst, these rejection messages are actually advertising the IP addresses of infected systems. Should a virus drop a back door payload, this would multiply the damage.
k.
I used to think that comparing the Internet to the Wild West was just as bad as that "superhighway" metaphor, but lately I've come to realize how appropriate it's come to be.
You've got a legal vacuum for the most part, considering that most law enforcement authorities won't take action until a certain monetary dollar amount of damage has been done (with some notable exceptions such as child pornography). Thus, the medium is dominated by penis-enlarging snake oil salesmen, grizzled dataminers trying to pass off fool's gold as the real thing, men in black hats, men in white hats, Indians with H1B visas (yeah, I know...), and e-mail programs infected with smallpox.
I only beat the Net Rush of '94 by a couple of years, but I've heard some of the oldtimers tell tales of yore, when the whole community would get together to raise a barn or wire a school with CAT-5, or how you could always rely on your neighbor to help mend a fence or patch sendmail.
"Round up a posse, boys. We'll head 'em off at the router..."
Yeah, it's a stretch. I know. But everytime I look in that Deadman's Gulch I call my inbox, my trigger finger starts to itch and I yearn for a nice
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