"The BBC Micro was pretty good. I'm pretty sure the Amiga's popularity with the majority people who bought them from retail stores was not because of the appeal of non-segmented registers"
Maybe in the UK, but there's not a lot of computers or operating system coming out of the UK that found widespread consumer acceptance in the US.
And don't be too sure about the Amiga. It was an expensive machine in the day and anybody that just wanted to play games had cheaper alternatives. If you look at comp.sys.amiga back then there were a lot of people that went "OMG a real cpu with a real os. Something I can program in C. Oh THANK YOU".
Never mind that if all those programmers had coded for wintel they'd have actually made money. Keith Doyle's _Director_ Amiga only animation scripting langauge arguably begat Macromedia's _Director_ animation scripting language for the PC which gave us modern day flash and made Macromedia rich and famous. Keith, otoh is probably reading this now at work. Hi Keith. Told you so.
RT-11 was a program loader. RSX-11M was an operating system. It was the one you used if you couldn't get a (real) UNIX license.
Having used (real) UNIX on the 70s, RT-11, MSDOS, CP/M were all inelegant painful low-rent crap.
Kildall was iirc, a hardware engineer, and knew enough assembly to be dangerous. He simply wanted to load programs from 8" floppy drives instead of cassette tape. It was not supposed to be an operating system - never use an "OS" written by a hardware engineer. If he was truly clever he would have added some bank switching hardware and written the moral equivalent of MINIX; it wasn't THAT much later that XENIX-286 came out. CP/M was a quick hack, nothing more.
In a world where you can download *nix and install it and run it the same day younger people have no idea how good they have it.
The roughly 10 year period when CP/M--MSDOS was "what you had to use" was the most painful decade of my life and writing MSDOS or CP/M was not that big of an achievment in a world when the UNIX system calls were freely available.
But I must say, MSDOS and the intolerable time wasting error prone x86 segment registers went perfectly well together. It was llike having both your eyes stabbed by white hot flaming steel rods instead of only one.
The Amiga had the first real OS on a computer you could buy in a retail store and part of its rabid popularity was it didn't run MSDOS or have braindead segment registers.
If I wrote MSDOS or CP/M I'd try to hide that fact these days as much as possible. It was an utter embarrasment to the computing world, then, now and always. MSDOS had only one thing going for it. It worked better than Windows. This is still true today.
I really had to laugh at the story about the ITU taking over control of the DNS namespace and IP allocations. Say it doesn't happen. The I* people are in charge. Say it does happen. They all move over there and they are still in charge. That's just what they do.
"It seems most people love to bitch piss and moan about ICANN/IANA, but they can't pick up a damned phone or write an email"
If you'd actually tried this you know how non-productive this idea is. I wasted10 years of my lifedoingexactly this, only to watch a bloated and corrupt ICANN emerge in spite of everything hundreds of people did and now watch all our predictions about their future potential wrongdoings come true. I do not feel good about this.
When the US government was handing over IANA to "the new corporation" (ICANN), open-rsc (ORSC) was invited to "advise" them in the early days. What this amounted to was every time ICANN had a truly horrific idea and we pointed out what a bad idea this was ICANN simply took our adive by using it against us and found ways to work around our criticism by adding enough spin to makie it appear it wasn't a problem and of course they were prepared now to hear this criticism and had stock nonsensical answers for their PR machine.
The list of reasons why ICANN is an utter and abject failure is miles long. Put as succinctly as I can, ICANN is supposed to measure consensus and enact policy based on it. Anybody who as at or saw the Marina del Rey 2000 selection of the 7 new tlds knows how far from reality this actually is.
The video of this is still, I believe, available at the Berkman center. Worth a look...
As for conspiracy, I can give you names of people who have first hand evidence of it. Names you will recognize. It runs in the tens (hundreds) of millions of dollars and is he reason there are so few, and so lame, new tlds.
ICANN was born "behind the scenes" and has always operated that way. It gets more distane from reality every day. At some point it will implode.
Keep in mind ICANN, a $50M+ (and climbing) organization replaces what Jon Postel used to do as a part time "task" for about 30K a year. Except Jon could not be bought. Pity he died right before ICANN was formed. For the record, I first called him in 1994.
"Since I have my phone number in the national do-not-call list, if you call me to to try to sell me something, that puts you in the same position as an e-mail spammer."
Thank you for proving his point that absent any declaration of intent to not receive these communications you're wide open.
I think a "do not spam" database would be a great idea. Let me know when that is done.
(Asserting the phone or mail systems aren't relevant does not make it so. I'd be interested in proof)
" Here's a newsflash for you, these networks are private and really, no matter what your opinion may be, they aren't open to anyone to use and/or abuse"
(again, lest there be any confusion, I wish all spammers were beamed into a black hole)
If you turned on a mailserver to accept incoming connections from the Internet at large and were then surprised you got a lot of mail you don't want then you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet works these days.
If you only want to get mail from certain people then you can configure your mail daemon to so just that.
"Taking up 70% of your internet resources and infrastructure and a significant proportion of corporate IT effort is 'not unusual'?"
It was when Robert Morris unleashed the first worm. It is not unusual today by any stretch of the imagination. There are days when it's unusual because it's "only" 70%.
" get well over 100 spam a day to an address that I've NEVER given out."
(I get more than that an hour. No matter)
If you've never given it out then you can't get spammed by definition. EIther somebody who knows it sold it or you emailed somebody who caught a virus that picked it up, phoned home and gave the mothership your address. In this example (there are probably others) you have not disallowed anything.
Anything leaving the keyboard of a computer that may at any time be connected to the internet should be considered published and unable to be deleted. Never type anything in you don't want the whole world to see.
"Spam is not FREA SPEACH. Spam is THEFT. Theft of computer ressources, theft of bandwidth, theft of storage, THEFT OF PEOPLE'S TIME."
So is slashdot. No matter...
But here's my conundrum. I'd like every spammer to die a slow painful death. But, at the end of the day, I get mail like "Hi, I'm a clueless fuckwit and I'm on one of your mailing lists (or read your webpage, whatever) and I'd like you to spend an hour helping me". I can just delete it. I can say "no" or I can choose to help them (rolls eyes, oh boy, again)
If I get a piece of spam I delete it.
Now what's the difference? Both are unsolicited. Both use my computing resources, both cost me per-byte bandwidth charges.
The only difference as I see it is we all agree (hopefully) spam is "bad" and helping people is good, but that doesn't mesh well with the law.
Ban, say, commercial unsolicted speech and then some guy who might say "Hey, I saw you're looking for a racaltitrant pleby on your webpage, I have an old one in my garage, I don't use it and you can have it for the price of postage, cheers" might fave the same penalty as your average c|@lis haflwit spammer.
What we want is a "email that pisses me off is bad" law and that's a real slippery slope.
I'm not sure the law is going to be any use here at all. Some people like/use spam. Bah.
Now, if there was some way I could say "if you want to send me unsolicited commercial email about killifish or pre-1940's Lemania chronographs that's ok. The rest of you can die" I'd have a good case, I think, for going after the penis pill hawkers, and I'd get what *I want*. Whois seems a likely place to put this.
(I'm serious about the killifish and watch parts btw, I need 4 Lemania 15TL column wheels and SJO "Loe")
"Spam is not free speech. You keep saying it is, and you keep pointing that you're a lawyer, but at the end of the day, spam requires the use of MY resources, and I have to explicitly give permission to use those resources"
How? Say you have a home page on the World Wide Weebe and I saw something interesting and say I had some useful (noncommercial) information for you. Perhaps it answers a question - whatever. I can email you. How exactly do I need your permission to do this?
Like any sane person I'm vehemently anti-spam, but your argument seems week and kangarooski makes I think, a good point.
"In California anyone over 18 is required to have ID on their person, and produce it at the request of a police officer. If you refuse you can, and probably will, be arrested. Whether you're driving, or just walking down the street, doesn't matter."
Can you show me the section of California law that's relevant?
There was a cae a few years back of some semi-famous black singer who liked to walk in Beverly Hills with no ID. This was tested in court. He won.
" But, if you pulled the same thing with a highway patrol officer, I think you'd end up with handcuffs, not a copy of the law."
That's different. (At least in california) your drivers license is a contract between you and the state. Violate the terms of that contract and you are penalized.
Slashdot Mirror
"The BBC Micro was pretty good. I'm pretty sure the Amiga's popularity with the majority people who bought them from retail stores was not because of the appeal of non-segmented registers"
Maybe in the UK, but there's not a lot of computers or operating system coming out of the UK that found widespread consumer acceptance in the US.
And don't be too sure about the Amiga. It was an expensive machine in the day and anybody that just wanted to play games had cheaper alternatives. If you look at comp.sys.amiga back then there were a lot of people that went "OMG a real cpu with a real os. Something I can program in C. Oh THANK YOU".
Never mind that if all those programmers had coded for wintel they'd have actually made money. Keith Doyle's _Director_ Amiga only animation scripting langauge arguably begat Macromedia's _Director_ animation scripting language for the PC which gave us modern day flash and made Macromedia rich and famous. Keith, otoh is probably reading this now at work. Hi Keith. Told you so.
Not even close. There was only one VAX OS - VMS and it was nothing like unix. It was vile if not reliable.
DOS and CP/M were similar. Very. They had nothing to do with VMS and Unux.
CP/M was patterend after DEC RT-11.
And I know why the $-sign was there.
"RT-11, DEC's LSI-11"
RT-11 predates the LSI-11.
"In short, Vint Cerf did something good. Sen. Gore sold it to the highest bidder."
If you dig deep enough you'll see you have that backwards.
"If my memory serves me right, CP/M was for the 8080 processor. The Z80 processor was 8080-compatible, so it could run CP/M too."
Correct. Gates' first published article in Dr. Dobbs was on using undocumented Z-80 instructions.
Problem is they didn't work on ALL Z-80 chips.
That should have been the big tip-off right there.
"wadda ya mean it crashed, it works on my computer..."
"Didn't Xenix become only available with the XT"
No, it also ran on an intel development system which was what (ihnp4)!gryphon was. It was the backbone usenet/mail hub for Los Angeles in the mid 80s.
" rip-off of RT-11"
Yup.
RT-11 was a program loader. RSX-11M was an operating system. It was the one you used if you couldn't get a (real) UNIX license.
Having used (real) UNIX on the 70s, RT-11, MSDOS, CP/M were all inelegant painful low-rent crap.
Kildall was iirc, a hardware engineer, and knew enough assembly to be dangerous. He simply wanted to load programs from 8" floppy drives instead of cassette tape. It was not supposed to be an operating system - never use an "OS" written by a hardware engineer. If he was truly clever he would have added some bank switching hardware and written the moral equivalent of MINIX; it wasn't THAT much later that XENIX-286 came out. CP/M was a quick hack, nothing more.
In a world where you can download *nix and install it and run it the same day younger people have no idea how good they have it.
The roughly 10 year period when CP/M--MSDOS was "what you had to use" was the most painful decade of my life and writing MSDOS or CP/M was not that big of an achievment in a world when the UNIX system calls were freely available.
But I must say, MSDOS and the intolerable time wasting error prone x86 segment registers went perfectly well together. It was llike having both your eyes stabbed by white hot flaming steel rods instead of only one.
The Amiga had the first real OS on a computer you could buy in a retail store and part of its rabid popularity was it didn't run MSDOS or have braindead segment registers.
If I wrote MSDOS or CP/M I'd try to hide that fact these days as much as possible. It was an utter embarrasment to the computing world, then, now and always. MSDOS had only one thing going for it. It worked better than Windows. This is still true today.
" How does ICANN make changes?"
It doesn't. That's the problem. It's into "stability" which means "no innovation, nothing changes".
Whenever a dictator takes over a country they say it's for reasons of "stability". Check it out, that really is what they say.
The reason in ICANN's case is trademarks and nothing more.
"Now if only one could figure out which heavenly "Internet Body" manages the "Trusted Root Certificate Authorities"/i?
The companies that publish the most used web browsers, that's who.
The internet is edge-controlled, and has no central authority despite what any organization whose name begins with an "I" thinks.
"Who cares? They're all starting to smell the same."
Duh. That's because it's different names for the same people.
If you google It seeks Overall Control you get ISOC.
And only ISOC. I'm sure that's just coincidence.
But, that's the way it's always been.
I really had to laugh at the story about the ITU taking over control of the DNS namespace and IP allocations. Say it doesn't happen. The I* people are in charge. Say it does happen. They all move over there and they are still in charge. That's just what they do.
"It seems most people love to bitch piss and moan about ICANN/IANA, but they can't pick up a damned phone or write an email"
If you'd actually tried this you know how non-productive this idea is. I wasted 10 years of my life doing exactly this, only to watch a bloated and corrupt ICANN emerge in spite of everything hundreds of people did and now watch all our predictions about their future potential wrongdoings come true. I do not feel good about this.
When the US government was handing over IANA to "the new corporation" (ICANN), open-rsc (ORSC) was invited to "advise" them in the early days. What this amounted to was every time ICANN had a truly horrific idea and we pointed out what a bad idea this was ICANN simply took our adive by using it against us and found ways to work around our criticism by adding enough spin to makie it appear it wasn't a problem and of course they were prepared now to hear this criticism and had stock nonsensical answers for their PR machine.
The list of reasons why ICANN is an utter and abject failure is miles long. Put as succinctly as I can, ICANN is supposed to measure consensus and enact policy based on it. Anybody who as at or saw the Marina del Rey 2000 selection of the 7 new tlds knows how far from reality this actually is.
The video of this is still, I believe, available at the Berkman center. Worth a look...
As for conspiracy, I can give you names of people who have first hand evidence of it. Names you will recognize. It runs in the tens (hundreds) of millions of dollars and is he reason there are so few, and so lame, new tlds.
ICANN was born "behind the scenes" and has always operated that way. It gets more distane from reality every day. At some point it will implode.
Keep in mind ICANN, a $50M+ (and climbing) organization replaces what Jon Postel used to do as a part time "task" for about 30K a year. Except Jon could not be bought. Pity he died right before ICANN was formed. For the record, I first called him in 1994.
"No, we want a theft of services is bad law"
It already exists. Anything else?
"Since I have my phone number in the national do-not-call list, if you call me to to try to sell me something, that puts you in the same position as an e-mail spammer."
Thank you for proving his point that absent any declaration of intent to not receive these communications you're wide open.
I think a "do not spam" database would be a great idea. Let me know when that is done.
(Asserting the phone or mail systems aren't relevant does not make it so. I'd be interested in proof)
" Here's a newsflash for you, these networks are private and really, no matter what your opinion may be, they aren't open to anyone to use and/or abuse"
Hey, Vint Cerf says "The interent is for everyone ; this is published at IANA in RFC3271. It doesn't seem to say "except spammers".
(again, lest there be any confusion, I wish all spammers were beamed into a black hole)
If you turned on a mailserver to accept incoming connections from the Internet at large and were then surprised you got a lot of mail you don't want then you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how the Internet works these days.
If you only want to get mail from certain people then you can configure your mail daemon to so just that.
"Taking up 70% of your internet resources and infrastructure and a significant proportion of corporate IT effort is 'not unusual'?"
It was when Robert Morris unleashed the first worm. It is not unusual today by any stretch of the imagination. There are days when it's unusual because it's "only" 70%.
" get well over 100 spam a day to an address that I've NEVER given out."
(I get more than that an hour. No matter)
If you've never given it out then you can't get spammed by definition. EIther somebody who knows it sold it or you emailed somebody who caught a virus that picked it up, phoned home and gave the mothership your address. In this example (there are probably others) you have not disallowed anything.
Anything leaving the keyboard of a computer that may at any time be connected to the internet should be considered published and unable to be deleted. Never type anything in you don't want the whole world to see.
"Spam is not FREA SPEACH. Spam is THEFT. Theft of computer ressources, theft of bandwidth, theft of storage, THEFT OF PEOPLE'S TIME."
So is slashdot. No matter...
But here's my conundrum. I'd like every spammer to die a slow painful death. But, at the end of the day, I get mail like "Hi, I'm a clueless fuckwit and I'm on one of your mailing lists (or read your webpage, whatever) and I'd like you to spend an hour helping me". I can just delete it. I can say "no" or I can choose to help them (rolls eyes, oh boy, again)
If I get a piece of spam I delete it.
Now what's the difference? Both are unsolicited. Both use my computing resources, both cost me per-byte bandwidth charges.
The only difference as I see it is we all agree (hopefully) spam is "bad" and helping people is good, but that doesn't mesh well with the law.
Ban, say, commercial unsolicted speech and then some guy who might say "Hey, I saw you're looking for a racaltitrant pleby on your webpage, I have an old one in my garage, I don't use it and you can have it for the price of postage, cheers" might fave the same penalty as your average c|@lis haflwit spammer.
What we want is a "email that pisses me off is bad" law and that's a real slippery slope.
I'm not sure the law is going to be any use here at all. Some people like/use spam. Bah.
Now, if there was some way I could say "if you want to send me unsolicited commercial email about killifish or pre-1940's Lemania chronographs that's ok. The rest of you can die" I'd have a good case, I think, for going after the penis pill hawkers, and I'd get what *I want*. Whois seems a likely place to put this.
(I'm serious about the killifish and watch parts btw, I need 4 Lemania 15TL column wheels and SJO "Loe")
"Spam is not free speech. You keep saying it is, and you keep pointing that you're a lawyer, but at the end of the day, spam requires the use of MY resources, and I have to explicitly give permission to use those resources"
How? Say you have a home page on the World Wide Weebe and I saw something interesting and say I had some useful (noncommercial) information for you. Perhaps it answers a question - whatever. I can email you. How exactly do I need your permission to do this?
Like any sane person I'm vehemently anti-spam, but your argument seems week and kangarooski makes I think, a good point.
I thought it said "Google Cannibis".
Woah.
"MS is left having to pay $565 million, and they claim this a victory? What exactly would be a loss??"
Dude, if you have to ask you can't afford it.
Man you guys have low standards :-)
Something*Positive. Accept no substitutes.
I've never found anyuthing else worth reading.
Ok Randy, where's my $10?
A soft link "points" to an arbitraty string.
For example:works. Whether it does anything usefull is between you and your webserver code.
"Can any informed Europeans tell us why the Comission can just ignore what they've been told to do?"
Follow the money.
"Can any informed Europeans tell us why ICANN is so bad"
Follow the money.
"Can any informed Europeans tell us why the US invaded Iraq"
Follow the money.
*this is a recording*
"In California anyone over 18 is required to have ID on their person, and produce it at the request of a police officer. If you refuse you can, and probably will, be arrested. Whether you're driving, or just walking down the street, doesn't matter."
Can you show me the section of California law that's relevant?
There was a cae a few years back of some semi-famous black singer who liked to walk in Beverly Hills with no ID. This was tested in court. He won.
Have they changed the law?
" But, if you pulled the same thing with a highway patrol officer, I think you'd end up with handcuffs, not a copy of the law."
That's different. (At least in california) your drivers license is a contract between you and the state. Violate the terms of that contract and you are penalized.