I've been using 'Light' mode pretty much since it became available. It's much easier on the eyes. When I load the main page before logging on with a new browser, it hurts my eyes to even think about using the default homepage setting.
I haven't tried it for four or five years, but back in the day Wine played sol.exe pretty darn good as well. I used to have a Linux Wabi setup (Caldera used to sell a binary Wabi version for Linux that I have somewhere up on a shelf) and the Wabi image in my home directory could pull up a really nice 'Windows 3 inside Linux' environment. The Wabi Windows image also worked really well with Wine. All you had to do was run Progman.exe in Wine and you had a whole Windows 3.1 environment on your linux desktop. But that was five years ago.
Sol.exe must be one of the lowest-level coded Windows apps. It didn't exist until Windows 3.0 (before then there was Reversi in Windows 2) but it's been essentially unchanged since then.
In this regard, NASA operates and influences the domestic US market in ways very similar to the way US Trade Unions do.
And the parallel is strong. NASA had become coated with barnacles and bureaucratic mass, very similar to the way the 'International Office' of Trade Unions. It becomes a big feedlot for mediocrity over time.
We started off here at work with a System 36 and dumb terminals at everyone's desk. Everyone got their work done, and aside from hardware problems, there was no need to get up and walk to somone's desk. If anyone had problems, it was all centralized.
I remember those days, too.
It was sort of cool when every secretary, manager, and clerk in the company would all lose their work simultaneously because a bug in the software took the whole system down.
Hell, the keyboard/panel on your microwave oven is an embedded system. As is the microprocessor in your keyboard and the one in your mouse. Also the one in your hard drive.
And thus is pointed out the real downfall in any book on Computer Software that has a Version Number in the title.
I prefer 'Running Linux' (first edition) by Matt Welsh & Lar Kaufman. But then, better than that, my 7-volume BSD 4.3 printed manual set, and Volumes 3 & 8 of O'Reilly's X Window System Guides. Though, if I was only allowed to have one book for UNIX, it would probably be 'Introducting the UNIX System' by McGilton & Morgan, Byte Books, 1983. No other book does as comprehensive a job of covering the important stuff, i.e. ed, ex, vi, sed, roff, and so on.
Any book that is thick with GUI screenshots is bound to be obsolete by the time it hits the bookstores.
I'm not at all happy with the Xeon box precedent, but Sun have had short lived product lines like this before, I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole.
Being a collector of old hardware, I would love to have a Sun 386i.
I think the new Sun Xeon boxes probably have as much potential for Sun.
From my vantage point, case prices have gone down.
I got a full-tower ATX case last week for $15 at auction. Incidentally, it had a Pentium II on a motherboard, a CD-ROM, an Adaptec UW SCSI controller with a 4.6GB wide SCSI drive. When I powered it up it had Netware on top of MS-DOS on it.
I buy hardly anything new these days. If you're going to be picky about used gear, what you do is buy a new brand-name power supply for the old case.
The cases these days are shiny plastic junk. Or overengineered hulks with cooling systems that make them sound like the dehumidifier down in the cellar. I sorta blame Apple for introducing the concept of 'fashion' to cases. The hell with that.
I did my first 'case mod' back in about 1986 when I built my first 'PC' machine.
I had picked up one of those 63.5 watt IBM-PC power supplies at a swapmeet. I had bought an XT-clone motherboard. I had bought a Leading Edge Model D case (empty). I'd bought an IBM MDA display card and disk controller, and two 360K floppies.
I got it all home and said 'Hmmm'. The motherboard didn't fit into the case. The bracket spacing on the Model D was different from the standard XT layout. The Power supply didn't fit into the case either. It was a standard (real IBM actually) 'XT' type power supply (but pre-XT as it was from an original PC.
I carved away a lot of the bracket frames in the Leading Edge case and used metal standoffs and screws to bolt in the XT-clone motherboard. I completely removed the power supply from it's case and mounted it at the right place in the old Leading Edge case using more metal standoffs and screws. I mounted in the floppy drives, plugged in all 640K of RAM (I'd found it cheap at a surplus store- about $8 each for 256Kx1 chips).
It all worked. I used that machine for years. There weren't any flashing lights. There weren't really any lights at all unless the A: drive or the B: drive was in use.
Worse yet, they'll make it blink themselves, in interesting patterns, by writing special programs that run in the background that access the memory (which goes on and off as it's accessed). Then, because the programs running in the background are tying up resources, they'll go out and buy a faster processor.
Netscape was never worth over $3B. That was back when, er, VA [Linux|Software|Whatever] was worth big bucks. Back before most of the promienent open source sites all got sucked under one umbrella (how marvelous, now if VA/hAndover fails, *poof* a ton of OS projects disappear!).
Please use a Mac Plus or a plain SE for that. The case on the Mac Plus is actually better, it's got less slots and openings to seal than an SE or SE/30.
And there seem to be more Mac Pluses on the market anyway, for almost free.
But I got four Power Macs (the all-in-one with screen kind) yesterday for five dollars at a school auction. The case is too big for a bong, but it would make a nice big aquarium.
'Open Standards' is a lowest-common-denominator thing. Every product that hopes to compete in a marketplace where consumers have many options of what software to run will need to 'go beyond' the standard to differentiate itself from other products. That's just the way it is.
So there will be additonal 'tags' and features beyond the standard, just like there were with Netscape's browser/server combo back when they hoped to dominate and be the ONE TRUE web browser.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been using 'Light' mode pretty much since it became available. It's much easier on the eyes. When I load the main page before logging on with a new browser, it hurts my eyes to even think about using the default homepage setting.
You're describing 'security through obscurity' not 'software diversity.'
I haven't tried it for four or five years, but back in the day Wine played sol.exe pretty darn good as well. I used to have a Linux Wabi setup (Caldera used to sell a binary Wabi version for Linux that I have somewhere up on a shelf) and the Wabi image in my home directory could pull up a really nice 'Windows 3 inside Linux' environment. The Wabi Windows image also worked really well with Wine. All you had to do was run Progman.exe in Wine and you had a whole Windows 3.1 environment on your linux desktop. But that was five years ago.
Sol.exe must be one of the lowest-level coded Windows apps. It didn't exist until Windows 3.0 (before then there was Reversi in Windows 2) but it's been essentially unchanged since then.
The MacOS v10 team didn't copy GNUstep.
They bought the company (NeXT) that produced the GUI/Operating System that GNUstep copied.
I enjoy running pySol sometimes, but it's much, MUCH slower than plain old sol.exe. I can run sol.exe on my 386SX-16 laptop with 4 megs of RAM.
Will Python itself even run on that limited a platform?
You're talking about this sybian, I assume.
Since Sun Microsystems is a hardware vendor, any form of bloat that forces new hardware/upgrades onto their customers is seen as a positive thing.
Why Microsoft does it remains a mystery. Hell, they could make good money by thinning down their OS and selling it to the current install base.
In this regard, NASA operates and influences the domestic US market in ways very similar to the way US Trade Unions do.
And the parallel is strong. NASA had become coated with barnacles and bureaucratic mass, very similar to the way the 'International Office' of Trade Unions. It becomes a big feedlot for mediocrity over time.
We started off here at work with a System 36 and dumb terminals at everyone's desk. Everyone got their work done, and aside from hardware problems, there was no need to get up and walk to somone's desk. If anyone had problems, it was all centralized.
I remember those days, too.
It was sort of cool when every secretary, manager, and clerk in the company would all lose their work simultaneously because a bug in the software took the whole system down.
For certain values of 'cool' only, of course.
Hell, the keyboard/panel on your microwave oven is an embedded system. As is the microprocessor in your keyboard and the one in your mouse. Also the one in your hard drive.
Wyse has always been strong in the dumb-terminal market, now renamed 'thin client.'
Literally countless numbers of Wyse 'green screen' terminals have been deployed.
Users don't like dumb terminals, though. IT people do. It gives the power back to them.
And thus is pointed out the real downfall in any book on Computer Software that has a Version Number in the title.
I prefer 'Running Linux' (first edition) by Matt Welsh & Lar Kaufman. But then, better than that, my 7-volume BSD 4.3 printed manual set, and Volumes 3 & 8 of O'Reilly's X Window System Guides. Though, if I was only allowed to have one book for UNIX, it would probably be 'Introducting the UNIX System' by McGilton & Morgan, Byte Books, 1983. No other book does as comprehensive a job of covering the important stuff, i.e. ed, ex, vi, sed, roff, and so on.
Any book that is thick with GUI screenshots is bound to be obsolete by the time it hits the bookstores.
the "hacker" community (not crackers, it's important, look it up, DUH)
Look it up where? On Raymond's vanity page 'dictionary'??
I'm not at all happy with the Xeon box precedent, but Sun have had short lived product lines like this before, I wouldn't touch them with a barge pole.
Being a collector of old hardware, I would love to have a Sun 386i.
I think the new Sun Xeon boxes probably have as much potential for Sun.
Dean even makes Jimmy Carter look like a reasonable alternative.
From my vantage point, case prices have gone down.
I got a full-tower ATX case last week for $15 at auction. Incidentally, it had a Pentium II on a motherboard, a CD-ROM, an Adaptec UW SCSI controller with a 4.6GB wide SCSI drive. When I powered it up it had Netware on top of MS-DOS on it.
I buy hardly anything new these days. If you're going to be picky about used gear, what you do is buy a new brand-name power supply for the old case.
The cases these days are shiny plastic junk. Or overengineered hulks with cooling systems that make them sound like the dehumidifier down in the cellar. I sorta blame Apple for introducing the concept of 'fashion' to cases. The hell with that.
I did my first 'case mod' back in about 1986 when I built my first 'PC' machine.
I had picked up one of those 63.5 watt IBM-PC power supplies at a swapmeet. I had bought an XT-clone motherboard. I had bought a Leading Edge Model D case (empty). I'd bought an IBM MDA display card and disk controller, and two 360K floppies.
I got it all home and said 'Hmmm'. The motherboard didn't fit into the case. The bracket spacing on the Model D was different from the standard XT layout. The Power supply didn't fit into the case either. It was a standard (real IBM actually) 'XT' type power supply (but pre-XT as it was from an original PC.
I carved away a lot of the bracket frames in the Leading Edge case and used metal standoffs and screws to bolt in the XT-clone motherboard. I completely removed the power supply from it's case and mounted it at the right place in the old Leading Edge case using more metal standoffs and screws. I mounted in the floppy drives, plugged in all 640K of RAM (I'd found it cheap at a surplus store- about $8 each for 256Kx1 chips).
It all worked. I used that machine for years. There weren't any flashing lights. There weren't really any lights at all unless the A: drive or the B: drive was in use.
Worse yet, they'll make it blink themselves, in interesting patterns, by writing special programs that run in the background that access the memory (which goes on and off as it's accessed). Then, because the programs running in the background are tying up resources, they'll go out and buy a faster processor.
I don't want to be reminded of LIM memory. But, then, many people reading this weren't alive then.
64K 'window' paging. Eeeek!
Netscape was never worth over $3B. That was back when, er, VA [Linux|Software|Whatever] was worth big bucks. Back before most of the promienent open source sites all got sucked under one umbrella (how marvelous, now if VA/hAndover fails, *poof* a ton of OS projects disappear!).
I can't even see them releasing the source, under NDA, to Microsoft.
Similarly the case for Real Player, and Quicktime.
Never about anything so petty.
Please use a Mac Plus or a plain SE for that. The case on the Mac Plus is actually better, it's got less slots and openings to seal than an SE or SE/30.
And there seem to be more Mac Pluses on the market anyway, for almost free.
But I got four Power Macs (the all-in-one with screen kind) yesterday for five dollars at a school auction. The case is too big for a bong, but it would make a nice big aquarium.
Why is it a big deal, any more than it's a big deal to have your name, address, and phone number listed in a telphone directory?
And if you're unlisted in the telephone directory, why are you being so frickin' paranoid?
Publicly available directories with that info have been available for generations. It's not info that's particularly 'compromising' to make available.
Yeah, yeah. I am sure there are plenty of 'noids out there who will explain why I am sooo wrong.
'Open Standards' is a lowest-common-denominator thing. Every product that hopes to compete in a marketplace where consumers have many options of what software to run will need to 'go beyond' the standard to differentiate itself from other products. That's just the way it is.
So there will be additonal 'tags' and features beyond the standard, just like there were with Netscape's browser/server combo back when they hoped to dominate and be the ONE TRUE web browser.