Grammar is largely the outward manifestation of orderly thought in a given language. You don't notice English Grammar for the same reason that a fish doesn't notice the water. You've had all your life to slowly absorb the lesson that some ways of arranging words in English sentences just don't work.
"For my next trick, I will boot MacOS faster, using AmigaDOS!"
Once upon a time, someone (Perry Kivolowitz, I think) figured out a way to get the Amiga's ramdisk device to survive a restart with its contents intact. Like probably everyone else who discovered this trick, I immediately set about figuring out a way to get my Amiga to boot from its own ram disk, just because it was such an unbelievably goofy thing to want to do. It was pretty neat to be able to hit Control-Amiga-Amiga and have the whole computer reboot in a matter of seconds.
For a time, I also had one of those Emplant Mac-ona-stick cards for my Amiga. The Emplant cards were well-known for being able to run Mac apps faster than an equivalently-CPU'ed Mac (even while also running Amiga apps at the same time), thanks to the Amiga's coprocessors. Perhaps if I had set up my ramdisk-based boot sequence to immediately fire up Finder on the Emplant, that trick could have worked.
Alas, the Emplant card was the sole computer casualty of my last move, thereby sparing me from spending a truly ridiculous amount of time firing up my old A3000 just to see. Maybe I'll just do something useful instead, like my taxes, or building a working jet engine out of Lego bricks.
In terms of justification, I must admit that "By the way, we thought you might like to avoid an agonizing death" is a somewhat better reason to invade my privacy than "Here's a coupon for 50 cents off your next purchase of adult incontinence control products."
Same here -- my computer room TV is a Commodore Amiga 1084S 14" monitor. Great little TV. Stereo speakers, even.
The TV I used before the 1084S was an even older Commodore composite color monitor made for a C=64 (or maybe a 128). I got it for free from a co-worker who didn't want it any more, and immediately pressed it into service as a TV (the 1084S was busy being used on one of my Amigas back then).
The older monitor probably still works; I think that its power switch is just busted. One of these days I need to open up its case and see if I can fix that, so that I can return the 1084S to service as a monitor again -- at the moment, only the newest of my Amigas has a working monitor, and it is being shared with my older Red Hat computer.
I agree with the article's comment that a Supreme Court appeal is almost inevitable, given the apparent contradiction between this decision and New York Times v. Tasini. The judge made some effort to create space between his ruling and Tasini, but I just don't really see it -- and I especially don't see any way of formulating a consistent policy which is capable of distinguishing between the two different rulings on any kind of general basis.
I think that this one's going straight to the Supreme Court, and I think it's likely that Tasini will prevail, and that this decision will be overturned.
On the other hand, as time goes by, this will make less and less of a difference: In the wake of Tasini (indeed, even before Tasini), publishers have been changing their freelance contract terms to specifically include inclusion in future media collections. The main impact of these decisions, one way or the other, will continue to be on publications with considerable libraries of back issues which have some potential commercial value -- like National Geographic and The New York Times, of course, but also Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Time and Life, The New Yorker, and a few others (some of which may already have had freelance contracts structured in a sufficiently different way to leave them already in the clear, of course).
We really need to be careful here, because if the cost goes up a mere $271.28 next year, it will reach $65536, and all of the Christmas Index computers which are still using unsigned short integers will crash.
And, indeed, that is how companies in Canada havve been getting around the existing levy for years.
I think I even remember talk about loading songs onto IDE Hard Drives sold as components.
For that matter, the Canadian RIAA-equivalent has been collecting this money for several years now; but as of the last time this subject came up, they had yet to distribute a single cent to Canadian artists. At the time, it had been at least two years, although the article seems to be saying that they have, in fact, finally started sharing the wealth. Does anybody know when they finally started distributing the proceeds?
For what it's worth, the main reasons it took me so long to tweak my nother-in-law's XP machine were:
Her machine was, IMO, underpowered for XP. This was before there were any P4 mobos with DDR support, so her computer came with PC133 RAM. Combine that with a so-so speed P4, and onboard video, and you've got a recipe for a lethargic machine. When my sister and I got my father a computer a while later, we were able to get one with a faster P4 and DDR RAM; I didn't have to disable nearly as many features (and "features") to make it run well. So I had to do a bit more than just turning off menu animations and the like for her machine.
XP was still fairly new at the time; many of the tools and techniques which are now generally available to tweak XP hadn't yet escaped into the spiritus mundi at the time, so I had to spend more time researching and poking around than I would have to now (this ties in with my observation that 98SE is a well-defined target for tweaking after all these years).
And finally:
I wasn't working on it constantly during those two weeks! Partially, this was because I would make a change, and then wait a while to see how much of an effect it had; but mainly it was because I had other things to do with my life. Like read Slashdot and check out porn.
I'm amazed that Interior managed to achieve a grade as high as "F" -- frankly, I would have expected them to have to invent entirely new letters to fully encompass the magnitude of insecurity in their computer systems.
On several occasions, Interior has been forced to take their entire public network offline due to rampant insecurity, especially in the portions of the network which control the billions of dollars in the Bureau of Indian Affairs' American Indian Trust Fund, which is still offline (with good reason, due to the fact that it had, essentially, no security, and that no one actually knows how much money should be in the Trust Fund, which would make detecting any electronic diversion of those funds pretty damned difficult).
The Bureau and the Department have spent millions of dollars commissioning security reports which they later admitted to not having read; they have spent tens of millions of dollars to secure their networks, only to have to admit that they are still completely insecure.
I'm pretty sure that on at least one occasion a twelve year old playing "Super Mario Tetris Cart 2001" accidentally sold the state of Utah to the Seminole indians by pressing Up-Left-Triangle-Right-Circle-Circle-Down on the "High Score" menu.
The truly scary thing is that State got an even lower grade on security than Interior.
Actually, now that I think about it, this makes a lot of sense: Many recent foreign policy decisions we have made can best be explained as the work of a bunch of bored teenaged l33t haxors who have gained control of State's network.
Windows 98SE is still the baseline gaming platform for Windows gaming, and certainly represented a local maximum in stability -- it is worlds more stable than its predecessors (Win95 and 98 original), and it is also more stable than its immediate successor, WinME. And while the NT branch of the family was sometimes more stable than 98SE (and sometimes not), not until XP has game support come anywhere near being equal to that of 98SE.
98SE is, of course, far from perfect, but I, for one, still use it (don't worry, though -- I dual boot with Red Hat). When my mother-in-law got a new computer with XP on it, I had to spend a couple of weeks hacking and slashing away at its bells and whistles (and security holes and spyware) before it would run acceptably.
XP also suffers from the classic Microsoft "your OS knows what's best for you, and you'd better like it" syndrome. On the other hand, after five years, most of the operational innards of Win98 have been well mapped by generations of hardy explorers, and there are plenty of tools available for tweaking it just so.
Obviously, Win98SE is not the greatest OS of all time; but, in terms of relative stability combined with widespread application compatability, it is certainly the most successful OS Microsoft has ever produced.
I suppose you could look at it as being similar to the late 19th century British cavalry saber -- a form which realized its ideal expression at the same time as it became obsolete.
I have a 1084S right in front of me now -- I use it as a television.
That was one big advantage to the really old monitors -- they could always be used as TVs, in a pinch (before I replaced it with the 1084S, my previous television in here was an old Commodore composite monitor from someone's dead C=64).
"The first time I felt like normal life was starting to come back again was when they got the N and R running on their old route, but it's meant we've been commuting through (past? under?) a mass gravesite twice a day. (That was another marker: The first time I didn't smell that burnt-plastic reek as soon as the doors opened at Canal Street.)
"At first and for a long time thereafter, the station was full of heavy upright timber supports, spaced closely together, connected to each other by 4x4 cross-ties and heavy hardware fastenings. They looked like the bottom half of a singularly unfortunate grove. On the platforms on both sides of the station, big hand-lettered signs said DON'T STOP HERE, to keep subway conductors who'd driven that route for decades from automatically making the stop.
"After they'd gotten the roof shored up level again--that downward bulge was profoundly disturbing--the spookiest thing was the farecard machines. They stayed on the whole time. As the months went by, their internal computers crashed, one by one, changing their previous displays to the blue screen of [word left out]. A few times when I passed through the overhead lights were dimmed, and the station was lit by the bluish glow of those screens."
I'm not sure, but in an odd way, this is the first thing I've heard about SCO's strategy in a long time that makes any sense at all. I personally don't see much (if any) chance of it succeeding, but if they can revisit the AT&T/UCB suit and somehow win it, then the remainder of their claims will be significantly strengthened: Think about those code snippets they showed that were later found to date back to BSD, for instance.
If they actually want to argue that they own all UNIX-like IP -- which seems to be what they are arguing -- they have to go after BSD.
It's a Hail Mary Pass, but it's about the only chance they would have of winning anything more than a very narrowly-tailored breach of con tract lawsuit against IBM (and the prospects of ekeing out a breach-of-contract suit against IBM sure aren't the hot air that's been inflating SCO's stock price, that's for sure).
As Jo Walton put it during one rec.arts.sf.written discussion of A Fire Upon the Deep, "It was such an amazing experience discovering that usenet was _real_."
Henry Spencer == Sandor is pretty well-known, yeah.
[Classic Henry Spencer moment, talking about A Fire Upon the Deep: "I discovered that my mother's copy has bookmarks in it at all the appearances of Sandor!"]
I have not read them all, but I have not seen one that is explicit. Vernor removed certain annotations before sending them to me, mostly garbage ones but possibly some juicy ones.
What he does say is that "Twirlip may know all the great secrets" and talk about how Twirlip developed from a bizarre alien Ravna was ignoring into a character that gives clues.
I believe that Twirlip speculates that the Zones are artificial at some point during the book, FWIW.
I wrote ClariNet to ask them when the '94 version was going to come out, but I don't recall ever getting an answer. Dang.
Getting the rights negotiated with all of the many publishers and authors was just too much of a headache for Brad Templeton, IIRC.
Given that most publishers these days make sure that Hugo-nominated works are available on the web prior to the voting deadline (for obvious reasons), it might be easier to talk them into a repeat of the CD-ROM; by the same token, given that all of the nominees are available on-line, there's less of a reason to do it in the first place.
If I recall correctly, every so often Brad gets the itch -- or someone else tries to convince him -- to try to do it again. Mostly, I think he takes some aspirin and waits for the feeling to go away.
Slashdot Mirror
>English sentences just don't work.
If that were true then what you just said would have made no sense.
It that were what I had said, then what you said would be true.
Grammar is largely the outward manifestation of orderly thought in a given language. You don't notice English Grammar for the same reason that a fish doesn't notice the water. You've had all your life to slowly absorb the lesson that some ways of arranging words in English sentences just don't work.
Euclid himself did not discover geometry or even make any great new contributions to the field in terms of ways to apply it.
That was left to his much smarter but not quite as well known cousin, Noneuclid.
In other news, the judge also ruled that "SCO" was too much like "Scum," and ordered them to clean up their act.
"For my next trick, I will boot MacOS faster, using AmigaDOS!"
Once upon a time, someone (Perry Kivolowitz, I think) figured out a way to get the Amiga's ramdisk device to survive a restart with its contents intact. Like probably everyone else who discovered this trick, I immediately set about figuring out a way to get my Amiga to boot from its own ram disk, just because it was such an unbelievably goofy thing to want to do. It was pretty neat to be able to hit Control-Amiga-Amiga and have the whole computer reboot in a matter of seconds.
For a time, I also had one of those Emplant Mac-ona-stick cards for my Amiga. The Emplant cards were well-known for being able to run Mac apps faster than an equivalently-CPU'ed Mac (even while also running Amiga apps at the same time), thanks to the Amiga's coprocessors. Perhaps if I had set up my ramdisk-based boot sequence to immediately fire up Finder on the Emplant, that trick could have worked.
Alas, the Emplant card was the sole computer casualty of my last move, thereby sparing me from spending a truly ridiculous amount of time firing up my old A3000 just to see. Maybe I'll just do something useful instead, like my taxes, or building a working jet engine out of Lego bricks.
In terms of justification, I must admit that "By the way, we thought you might like to avoid an agonizing death" is a somewhat better reason to invade my privacy than "Here's a coupon for 50 cents off your next purchase of adult incontinence control products."
Same here -- my computer room TV is a Commodore Amiga 1084S 14" monitor. Great little TV. Stereo speakers, even.
...So many computers, so little time.
The TV I used before the 1084S was an even older Commodore composite color monitor made for a C=64 (or maybe a 128). I got it for free from a co-worker who didn't want it any more, and immediately pressed it into service as a TV (the 1084S was busy being used on one of my Amigas back then).
The older monitor probably still works; I think that its power switch is just busted. One of these days I need to open up its case and see if I can fix that, so that I can return the 1084S to service as a monitor again -- at the moment, only the newest of my Amigas has a working monitor, and it is being shared with my older Red Hat computer.
Sigh
What do you mean, "What about the Slashdot crowd?" -- they're zero-indexing their age range, aren't they? Isn't that enough?
For a horrible, horrible moment, I read the headline as "Build Your Own Spamming Tunneling Microscope."
Just think what horrid new forms of viral marketing a research tool like that could help develop.
I agree with the article's comment that a Supreme Court appeal is almost inevitable, given the apparent contradiction between this decision and New York Times v. Tasini. The judge made some effort to create space between his ruling and Tasini, but I just don't really see it -- and I especially don't see any way of formulating a consistent policy which is capable of distinguishing between the two different rulings on any kind of general basis.
I think that this one's going straight to the Supreme Court, and I think it's likely that Tasini will prevail, and that this decision will be overturned.
On the other hand, as time goes by, this will make less and less of a difference: In the wake of Tasini (indeed, even before Tasini), publishers have been changing their freelance contract terms to specifically include inclusion in future media collections. The main impact of these decisions, one way or the other, will continue to be on publications with considerable libraries of back issues which have some potential commercial value -- like National Geographic and The New York Times, of course, but also Sports Illustrated, Playboy, Time and Life, The New Yorker, and a few others (some of which may already have had freelance contracts structured in a sufficiently different way to leave them already in the clear, of course).
We really need to be careful here, because if the cost goes up a mere $271.28 next year, it will reach $65536, and all of the Christmas Index computers which are still using unsigned short integers will crash.
And, indeed, that is how companies in Canada havve been getting around the existing levy for years.
I think I even remember talk about loading songs onto IDE Hard Drives sold as components.
For that matter, the Canadian RIAA-equivalent has been collecting this money for several years now; but as of the last time this subject came up, they had yet to distribute a single cent to Canadian artists. At the time, it had been at least two years, although the article seems to be saying that they have, in fact, finally started sharing the wealth. Does anybody know when they finally started distributing the proceeds?
Her machine was, IMO, underpowered for XP. This was before there were any P4 mobos with DDR support, so her computer came with PC133 RAM. Combine that with a so-so speed P4, and onboard video, and you've got a recipe for a lethargic machine. When my sister and I got my father a computer a while later, we were able to get one with a faster P4 and DDR RAM; I didn't have to disable nearly as many features (and "features") to make it run well. So I had to do a bit more than just turning off menu animations and the like for her machine.
XP was still fairly new at the time; many of the tools and techniques which are now generally available to tweak XP hadn't yet escaped into the spiritus mundi at the time, so I had to spend more time researching and poking around than I would have to now (this ties in with my observation that 98SE is a well-defined target for tweaking after all these years).
And finally:
I wasn't working on it constantly during those two weeks! Partially, this was because I would make a change, and then wait a while to see how much of an effect it had; but mainly it was because I had other things to do with my life. Like read Slashdot and check out porn.
I'm amazed that Interior managed to achieve a grade as high as "F" -- frankly, I would have expected them to have to invent entirely new letters to fully encompass the magnitude of insecurity in their computer systems.
On several occasions, Interior has been forced to take their entire public network offline due to rampant insecurity, especially in the portions of the network which control the billions of dollars in the Bureau of Indian Affairs' American Indian Trust Fund, which is still offline (with good reason, due to the fact that it had, essentially, no security, and that no one actually knows how much money should be in the Trust Fund, which would make detecting any electronic diversion of those funds pretty damned difficult). The Bureau and the Department have spent millions of dollars commissioning security reports which they later admitted to not having read; they have spent tens of millions of dollars to secure their networks, only to have to admit that they are still completely insecure.
I'm pretty sure that on at least one occasion a twelve year old playing "Super Mario Tetris Cart 2001" accidentally sold the state of Utah to the Seminole indians by pressing Up-Left-Triangle-Right-Circle-Circle-Down on the "High Score" menu.
The truly scary thing is that State got an even lower grade on security than Interior.
Actually, now that I think about it, this makes a lot of sense: Many recent foreign policy decisions we have made can best be explained as the work of a bunch of bored teenaged l33t haxors who have gained control of State's network.
Windows 98SE is still the baseline gaming platform for Windows gaming, and certainly represented a local maximum in stability -- it is worlds more stable than its predecessors (Win95 and 98 original), and it is also more stable than its immediate successor, WinME. And while the NT branch of the family was sometimes more stable than 98SE (and sometimes not), not until XP has game support come anywhere near being equal to that of 98SE.
98SE is, of course, far from perfect, but I, for one, still use it (don't worry, though -- I dual boot with Red Hat). When my mother-in-law got a new computer with XP on it, I had to spend a couple of weeks hacking and slashing away at its bells and whistles (and security holes and spyware) before it would run acceptably.
XP also suffers from the classic Microsoft "your OS knows what's best for you, and you'd better like it" syndrome. On the other hand, after five years, most of the operational innards of Win98 have been well mapped by generations of hardy explorers, and there are plenty of tools available for tweaking it just so.
Obviously, Win98SE is not the greatest OS of all time; but, in terms of relative stability combined with widespread application compatability, it is certainly the most successful OS Microsoft has ever produced.
I suppose you could look at it as being similar to the late 19th century British cavalry saber -- a form which realized its ideal expression at the same time as it became obsolete.
I have a 1084S right in front of me now -- I use it as a television. That was one big advantage to the really old monitors -- they could always be used as TVs, in a pinch (before I replaced it with the 1084S, my previous television in here was an old Commodore composite monitor from someone's dead C=64).
Teresa Nielsen Hayden, over at Naking Light , reminisces about multiple BSOD's at the subway station under the World Trade Center:
"The first time I felt like normal life was starting to come back again was when they got the N and R running on their old route, but it's meant we've been commuting through (past? under?) a mass gravesite twice a day. (That was another marker: The first time I didn't smell that burnt-plastic reek as soon as the doors opened at Canal Street.)
"At first and for a long time thereafter, the station was full of heavy upright timber supports, spaced closely together, connected to each other by 4x4 cross-ties and heavy hardware fastenings. They looked like the bottom half of a singularly unfortunate grove. On the platforms on both sides of the station, big hand-lettered signs said DON'T STOP HERE, to keep subway conductors who'd driven that route for decades from automatically making the stop.
"After they'd gotten the roof shored up level again--that downward bulge was profoundly disturbing--the spookiest thing was the farecard machines. They stayed on the whole time. As the months went by, their internal computers crashed, one by one, changing their previous displays to the blue screen of [word left out]. A few times when I passed through the overhead lights were dimmed, and the station was lit by the bluish glow of those screens."
You're thinking small -- knowing SCO, they'll claim ownership of CMU itself!
I'm not sure, but in an odd way, this is the first thing I've heard about SCO's strategy in a long time that makes any sense at all. I personally don't see much (if any) chance of it succeeding, but if they can revisit the AT&T/UCB suit and somehow win it, then the remainder of their claims will be significantly strengthened: Think about those code snippets they showed that were later found to date back to BSD, for instance.
If they actually want to argue that they own all UNIX-like IP -- which seems to be what they are arguing -- they have to go after BSD. It's a Hail Mary Pass, but it's about the only chance they would have of winning anything more than a very narrowly-tailored breach of con tract lawsuit against IBM (and the prospects of ekeing out a breach-of-contract suit against IBM sure aren't the hot air that's been inflating SCO's stock price, that's for sure).
Especially since it was Arthur C. Clarke who said that.
I was just amused to see this paean to openness being credited to "Anonymous Coward."
As Jo Walton put it during one rec.arts.sf.written discussion of A Fire Upon the Deep, "It was such an amazing experience discovering that usenet was _real_."
[Classic Henry Spencer moment, talking about A Fire Upon the Deep: "I discovered that my mother's copy has bookmarks in it at all the appearances of Sandor!"]
I have not read them all, but I have not seen one that is explicit. Vernor removed certain annotations before sending them to me, mostly garbage ones but possibly some juicy ones.
What he does say is that "Twirlip may know all the great secrets" and talk about how Twirlip developed from a bizarre alien Ravna was ignoring into a character that gives clues.
I believe that Twirlip speculates that the Zones are artificial at some point during the book, FWIW.I wrote ClariNet to ask them when the '94 version was going to come out, but I don't recall ever getting an answer. Dang.
Getting the rights negotiated with all of the many publishers and authors was just too much of a headache for Brad Templeton, IIRC.Given that most publishers these days make sure that Hugo-nominated works are available on the web prior to the voting deadline (for obvious reasons), it might be easier to talk them into a repeat of the CD-ROM; by the same token, given that all of the nominees are available on-line, there's less of a reason to do it in the first place.
If I recall correctly, every so often Brad gets the itch -- or someone else tries to convince him -- to try to do it again. Mostly, I think he takes some aspirin and waits for the feeling to go away.