Oh my. PC's catch up to CP/M circa '81 and AmigaDOS circa '86. Put your C compiler, sources and vi in ramdisk and things were just nice, even on a floppy based system. And oh yes your makefile did put a copy back on the floppy.
Ramdisks are utterly wonderous things, albeit, a little transient. When did you last check your UPS?:-)
Buy one 20 years old and fix it up, bit by bit. In 5-10 years, if you've been careful, and barring catastrophe, you will not have lost a cent.
Same deal with home theatre. You can go out right now and drop a wad of cash on a consumer grade turnkey system. Or, you can go out right now and buy all the bits you need and build its equivalent, cheaper.
But if you'll notice, most of the people here who have checked in as having done this are doing it incrementally. Start with what you have lying around, or maybe buy 1 or two bits and pieces, then as time goes on you can add this, upgrade that.
This way you're not zapped with a big upfront cost, you get to have fun doing it and you learn about how this stuff really works more so than just reading about it someplace.
I used to run a FreeBSD 2.2.1 barebones system in 4 megs of ram and a 100G disk drive. For (the few small number of) things you do not need a lot of RAM for it works fine. It was a mail relay on a T1 for a company I worked at once and was more than adequate. We did put 16M in it when the price to do that dropped to under, yes kiddies, $900. This was a 486.
Obviously that's not what I'd run at home for a more general purpose machine but I would like it if developers as the normal course of action see to it that it could run on such a machine. The only excuse for code bloat is laziness; we should have better software now in 2004 than what we had in 1974, we don't, and not by a large margin.
Nice going, guys.
on
KISS
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Ohthankgod, I had thought aliens had secretly killed everybody else that knew machine language.
Also encouraging is things like Operas archive where you can still get an award winningly small (gads, only 3.4M) browser.
So I dunno if I share the doom and gloom of the article. To some extent eveythings eventually ends up in it's simplest and most efficient form because we aren't the only ones here that want KISS.
A note on the bygone simplicty of software
on
KISS
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Phones seem to have gotten more complex; perhaps there is hope they emerge as the dominant pocket appliance - it seems sure something will emerge as such, at least to me. I don't want to have to worry about carrying more than one device and yes it would be nice if it had a flashlight and also unlocked my car and started it too.
So, whoever said it is right, phones are getting more complex. This is probably ok if you really think about it.
CD players aren't really, and the same goes for VCRs and DVD players. They can all now be had very very cheaply in their most simple form. This is, I think, a good thing. One might argue, they've been around longer as consumer appliances and they've figured KISS out.
But, I'm not seeing a whole lot of KISS in the software world. Especially in the Windows world.
With the exception of most decent and I mean really decent *nix software, most software seems to have gone on a sugar and steroid fad diet for nearly the past few decade.
Ever see MSDOS 2.2 run on a multi gighertz modern machine? Try it. It's scary fast. What happened?
Ten years ago I used to setup internet stuff in people houses for a local ISP. It was a good way to make $100/hr as it really didn't take more than 45 minutes anyway. I carried around Netscape on one flopy, Eudora, Trumpet Winsock, ftp, telnet and talk on the other floppy.
Quark was 3 megs. Then it was 7 megs. Now it's 300. Is it 100x better? Fuck no, it's not even as good.
Fit enough for an internet setup on a floppy? I'm not sure you could get it to fit on one CD these days.
If any of you out there actually write this stuff: WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? HAVE YOU NO PRIDE?
"Hello World!" Shouldn't be 7 frikkin megs because you're pulling in God knows what class libraries, this can be 42 byte program if you really try.
I swear Windows apps had to go through 3 or 4 generations of hardware upgrades just to get back to as fast as they were before they all went "true 32 bit" and I cringe at the prospect of 64 and maybe even 128 bit apps.
One of the computers I use is a W98 system on fairly contemporary hardware. I still use 3 or 4 16-bit Windows programs I've been carrying with me for over a decade now. They're small, fast do what I want and nothing more.
And all 3 fit on one floppy with room to spare.
I dunno about thit object oriented class library stuff, I really don't know. I wish more people would learn assembler below the C level than keep wanting to go above it with "easier" and "more powerful" languages; I think it's ill advised.
Short term pain for long term gain: you should probably suffer writing software so I don't have to when using it.
I keep hearing about these damnable popups, but dude, really, ever since halfway decent browsers have let you block them in one mouseclick forever* why is anybody still complaining about them?
*In the version of Opera I'm using this to type with mouse over to File at the top of the page, click to pull down a menu, while holding the mouse button down select Quick Preferences then Refuse Pop Ups. Let go of the mouse. Popups are now blocked. You may have to follow different steps if you're using a different version or brand of browser. Maybe you can't do it at all, in which case either use a browser that does or stop complaining about an easily fixed problem. Email spam is a big deal. This isn't even enough of a problem to rate a "minor annoyance" rating
I dunno what typical is or means. Even on a lowly W98 box I put Simple DNS+ ($35) or, better, BIND PE (free) on it. And they will query the root servers to find where the pointers to say,.TH or.SK are.
Probably you mean most people just use their ISP's DNS servers. This is usualy not a terrific idea as most of these blow dead goats.
If you have a spare 386 or higher, deploy it as a dedicated DNS server (under Windows or *nix, it does't matter), primary the root on it and watch everything you do get just a little bit faster, or if you have a funky ISP, maybe even considerably faster.
The most it'll cost you is $6/mo for the electricity.
In the bad old days you and you alone were in control of name resolution. For those of you without receding and/or grey hairlines who may not know or remember this, you had a file called hosts.txt that contained all the mappings of names to IPs. That, obviously, didn't scale and DNS was developed and was widely deployed by about 86 or so.
The one big gotcha with DNS is it takes control out of your hands. That is, you may have your own DNS server locally, but you traditionally refer to other servers that serve up the root zone that tells your DNS server where all the TLD servers are. Somewhere along the line the decision was made to use other machines, not your own, for this.
This is wrong for many reasons:
It's slower than if you have your own local copy of the root zone
it's a point of failure you can live without - a DDOS on the legacy roots shouldn't take you down
it provides a political point of capture - he who controls the root controls all the DNS namespace, and it's currently under the aegis of the trademark lobby under the guise of an incompetant and gutless wonder we jokingly refer to as "ICANN".
But there are ways around this. The easiest if is you static route the 13 root server IPs to your own nameserver. Then you can run an unmodified copt of the legacy root zone on your own nameserver and the US government root servers can be backhoed or DDOS'd and you wouldn't even notice. ISP's are starting to figure this out, especiallly ones with expensive longhaul connections.
Or, you can modify your nameserver to declare youtself primary for the root zone (which you've dutifully downloaded) and edit out the declarations for "." in the legacy root zone.
Or you can use the ORSC root zone. If it's good enough for two ICANN board members, it's good enough for you.
Whatever you do, for God's sake dump bind and use DJBDNS. It really is so much better it's just not funny.
I must be stupid I just don't get Perl, PhP, Python or what have you. I worked with Dave Conroy in 1976 and learned C on what he wrote then for a PDP-11 which today is GCC and it must have ruined my brain, I guess, as noting else seems to click with me. I find Perl inearly mpossible to understand, but can read any C very easily.
I use a code generator I wrote to do all the gruntwork, but yes, every web interface I write is in C and I'll race anybody with any other language in terms of development and holding up under load or bad input.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a ROM BASIC they sold to Altair/MITS, an S-100 CP/M computer with real neat switches and lights. Ironically it was written on a PDP-11 running what would ultimatly become SCO UNIX. The Altair was a neat machine, but no it didn't run Linux and no you wouldn't like to see a Beowolf cluster of them.
Microsft DOS came from Seattle Computer Products QDOS; MS licensed QDOS-86, told IBM they had an exclusive (a lie) and the rest was history.
QDOS was a bad clone of CP/M, which was written by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, which was sold to Novell which was sold to Caldera, now SCO. Gary originally worked at Shugart and, lucky devil that he was, ended up with a very expensive 8" floppy drive. He decided to write a disk loader for it, hence "Disk Operating System" or "DOS". The rest of us loaded software from casette tapes using the BIOS; disk drives were very evry expensive.
Back in the day, Digital Reaserch sold Operating Systems and Microsoft sold languages. When DR decided to sell a langauge around '83 the rumor was MS retaliated by selling an OS. The motivation may be a myth, but it was a popular one back then.
Gates pubilshed some undocumented Z-80 instructions in, I think, Dr. Dobbs. It was the last usefull thing he ever did.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, I'm like SO here already. Society finds you, don't you worry about that.
"all this and dialup, too. Woo hoo!"
I grew up on FORTRAN II on punched card, Later WATFOR and WATFIV.
I'd like to say those were the happiest days of my life.
I'd like to say the prospects for world peace are good, too.
> With an Intel-optimized Fortran compiler,
Thanks. I'm gonna have to slaughter a pig to that THAT thought out of my head.
...against the bit.
> One word - Ramdisk.
:-)
Oh my. PC's catch up to CP/M circa '81 and AmigaDOS circa '86. Put your C compiler, sources and vi in ramdisk and things were just nice, even on a floppy based system. And oh yes your makefile did put a copy back on the floppy.
Ramdisks are utterly wonderous things, albeit, a little transient. When did you last check your UPS?
They've finally made a CPU that has more registers than a state of the 1973 art PDP-11.
Wow.
Any idea how many decades till we get a rational instruction set?
> "we will need MORE than 4 gigs of ram"
Absolutely. Just to be able to run a mail program.
Bloat on, you slacking fucks!
Buy one 20 years old and fix it up, bit by bit. In 5-10 years, if you've been careful, and barring catastrophe, you will not have lost a cent.
Same deal with home theatre. You can go out right now and drop a wad of cash on a consumer grade turnkey system. Or, you can go out right now and buy all the bits you need and build its equivalent, cheaper.
But if you'll notice, most of the people here who have checked in as having done this are doing it incrementally. Start with what you have lying around, or maybe buy 1 or two bits and pieces, then as time goes on you can add this, upgrade that.
This way you're not zapped with a big upfront cost, you get to have fun doing it and you learn about how this stuff really works more so than just reading about it someplace.
Get SCO to patent Antactica.
Posers read and post. Real extremophiles create alt groups.
I used to run a FreeBSD 2.2.1 barebones system in 4 megs of ram and a 100G disk drive. For (the few small number of) things you do not need a lot of RAM for it works fine. It was a mail relay on a T1 for a company I worked at once and was more than adequate. We did put 16M in it when the price to do that dropped to under, yes kiddies, $900. This was a 486.
Obviously that's not what I'd run at home for a more general purpose machine but I would like it if developers as the normal course of action see to it that it could run on such a machine. The only excuse for code bloat is laziness; we should have better software now in 2004 than what we had in 1974, we don't, and not by a large margin.
...running well in 4 megs of RAM.
Ohthankgod, I had thought aliens had secretly killed everybody else that knew machine language.
Also encouraging is things like Operas archive where you can still get an award winningly small (gads, only 3.4M) browser.
So I dunno if I share the doom and gloom of the article. To some extent eveythings eventually ends up in it's simplest and most efficient form because we aren't the only ones here that want KISS.
Phones seem to have gotten more complex; perhaps there is hope they emerge as the dominant pocket appliance - it seems sure something will emerge as such, at least to me. I don't want to have to worry about carrying more than one device and yes it would be nice if it had a flashlight and also unlocked my car and started it too.
So, whoever said it is right, phones are getting more complex. This is probably ok if you really think about it.
CD players aren't really, and the same goes for VCRs and DVD players. They can all now be had very very cheaply in their most simple form. This is, I think, a good thing. One might argue, they've been around longer as consumer appliances and they've figured KISS out.
But, I'm not seeing a whole lot of KISS in the software world. Especially in the Windows world.
With the exception of most decent and I mean really decent *nix software, most software seems to have gone on a sugar and steroid fad diet for nearly the past few decade.
Ever see MSDOS 2.2 run on a multi gighertz modern machine? Try it. It's scary fast. What happened?
Ten years ago I used to setup internet stuff in people houses for a local ISP. It was a good way to make $100/hr as it really didn't take more than 45 minutes anyway. I carried around Netscape on one flopy, Eudora, Trumpet Winsock, ftp, telnet and talk on the other floppy.
Quark was 3 megs. Then it was 7 megs. Now it's 300. Is it 100x better? Fuck no, it's not even as good.
Fit enough for an internet setup on a floppy? I'm not sure you could get it to fit on one CD these days.
If any of you out there actually write this stuff: WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE? HAVE YOU NO PRIDE?
"Hello World!" Shouldn't be 7 frikkin megs because you're pulling in God knows what class libraries, this can be 42 byte program if you really try.
I swear Windows apps had to go through 3 or 4 generations of hardware upgrades just to get back to as fast as they were before they all went "true 32 bit" and I cringe at the prospect of 64 and maybe even 128 bit apps.
One of the computers I use is a W98 system on fairly contemporary hardware. I still use 3 or 4 16-bit Windows programs I've been carrying with me for over a decade now. They're small, fast do what I want and nothing more.
And all 3 fit on one floppy with room to spare.
I dunno about thit object oriented class library stuff, I really don't know. I wish more people would learn assembler below the C level than keep wanting to go above it with "easier" and "more powerful" languages; I think it's ill advised.
Short term pain for long term gain: you should probably suffer writing software so I don't have to when using it.
I keep hearing about these damnable popups, but dude, really, ever since halfway decent browsers have let you block them in one mouseclick forever* why is anybody still complaining about them?
*In the version of Opera I'm using this to type with mouse over to File at the top of the page, click to pull down a menu, while holding the mouse button down select Quick Preferences then Refuse Pop Ups. Let go of the mouse. Popups are now blocked. You may have to follow different steps if you're using a different version or brand of browser. Maybe you can't do it at all, in which case either use a browser that does or stop complaining about an easily fixed problem.
Email spam is a big deal. This isn't even enough of a problem to rate a "minor annoyance" rating
I dunno what typical is or means. Even on a lowly W98 box I put Simple DNS+ ($35) or, better, BIND PE (free) on it. And they will query the root servers to find where the pointers to say, .TH or .SK are.
Probably you mean most people just use their ISP's DNS servers. This is usualy not a terrific idea as most of these blow dead goats.
If you have a spare 386 or higher, deploy it as a dedicated DNS server (under Windows or *nix, it does't matter), primary the root on it and watch everything you do get just a little bit faster, or if you have a funky ISP, maybe even considerably faster.
The most it'll cost you is $6/mo for the electricity.
NSI used to pay for them by picking up the tab for machines and bandwidth. I don't know if they still do that or if the USG pays for it.
You can primary the root on your own box. Hell if you ask NSI nicely they'll let you download daily copies of .com and .net as well.
If you have the disk space, ram and cpu you can do all of these.
You can primary the root zone (it's a piddly 100K file) on a 386 and get better performance than using the legacy root servers.
I don't undestand the question. What exactly are you trying to do?
http://www.cbc.ca/mondayreport/videos/ontario.html
In the bad old days you and you alone were in control of name resolution. For those of you without receding and/or grey hairlines who may not know or remember this, you had a file called hosts.txt that contained all the mappings of names to IPs. That, obviously, didn't scale and DNS was developed and was widely deployed by about 86 or so.
The one big gotcha with DNS is it takes control out of your hands. That is, you may have your own DNS server locally, but you traditionally refer to other servers that serve up the root zone that tells your DNS server where all the TLD servers are. Somewhere along the line the decision was made to use other machines, not your own, for this.
This is wrong for many reasons:
But there are ways around this. The easiest if is you static route the 13 root server IPs to your own nameserver. Then you can run an unmodified copt of the legacy root zone on your own nameserver and the US government root servers can be backhoed or DDOS'd and you wouldn't even notice. ISP's are starting to figure this out, especiallly ones with expensive longhaul connections.
Or, you can modify your nameserver to declare youtself primary for the root zone (which you've dutifully downloaded) and edit out the declarations for "." in the legacy root zone.
Or you can use the ORSC root zone. If it's good enough for two ICANN board members, it's good enough for you.
Whatever you do, for God's sake dump bind and use DJBDNS. It really is so much better it's just not funny.
There's more to this that meets the eye. Err, your eyes anyway.
Saaaaaay, don't you need a new swimsuit?
You make that sound like it's a negative thing.
I must be stupid I just don't get Perl, PhP, Python or what have you. I worked with Dave Conroy in 1976 and learned C on what he wrote then for a PDP-11 which today is GCC and it must have ruined my brain, I guess, as noting else seems to click with me. I find Perl inearly mpossible to understand, but can read any C very easily.
I use a code generator I wrote to do all the gruntwork, but yes, every web interface I write is in C and I'll race anybody with any other language in terms of development and holding up under load or bad input.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a ROM BASIC they sold to Altair/MITS, an S-100 CP/M computer with real neat switches and lights. Ironically it was written on a PDP-11 running what would ultimatly become SCO UNIX. The Altair was a neat machine, but no it didn't run Linux and no you wouldn't like to see a Beowolf cluster of them.
Microsft DOS came from Seattle Computer Products QDOS; MS licensed QDOS-86, told IBM they had an exclusive (a lie) and the rest was history.
QDOS was a bad clone of CP/M, which was written by Gary Kildall of Digital Research, which was sold to Novell which was sold to Caldera, now SCO. Gary originally worked at Shugart and, lucky devil that he was, ended up with a very expensive 8" floppy drive. He decided to write a disk loader for it, hence "Disk Operating System" or "DOS". The rest of us loaded software from casette tapes using the BIOS; disk drives were very evry expensive.
Back in the day, Digital Reaserch sold Operating Systems and Microsoft sold languages. When DR decided to sell a langauge around '83 the rumor was MS retaliated by selling an OS. The motivation may be a myth, but it was a popular one back then.
Gates pubilshed some undocumented Z-80 instructions in, I think, Dr. Dobbs. It was the last usefull thing he ever did.