So you never visit sites like Yahoo, Google, Weather.com, Monster, Fox, US News, or the New York Times? All of these have been reported as serving up tainted ads at one time or another in the last couple of years.
There's much more to keeping secure than not visiting porn sites or clicking random links. Even CNET has been installing unwanted toolbars lately.
Are there any systems still around running Xerox CP-V or its descendant, Honeywell CP-6? They were both pretty slick systems for their day. CP-V was so stable and adaptable that in the early '80s Honeywell (who took over Xerox support) couldn't get their CP-V customers to migrate off their twenty-year-old Xerox mainframes onto modern Honeywell hardware running GCOS.
So Honeywell wrote CP-6 from scratch. They invented a language called PL-6 then wrote the entire CP-6 OS from the ground up. They liked PL-6 so well they rewrote their existing GCOS systems in it.
Unfortunately, Honeywell never figured out how to market CP-6, and dropped support for it within 10 years. Bummer.
I just collect quips — running feet and funny sigs off Slashdot, weird comments from wherever, twisted quotations (O dear User! I am ill at these numbers! I have not art to reckon my groans! Hamlet) — into one massive file. I have a tiny program that does nothing but pick a random quip from the file and display it (or send it to someone else on the network). Someday I'll make a screensaver out of it...
Funny (for me) that this should come up today. After typing the AutoCAD command 3DFACE (also all with the left hand) I found myself wondering something else:
What's the longest English word/command/whatever-strikes-you that can be typed on a calculator in hexadecimal mode?
FACED is five digits, FACADE and DECADE are six, ACCEDED and EFFACED are seven. Anything longer? (Make your own rules, but to me using zero for O or one for I is cheating.)
For some real vehicle distortion, remember Scanner Photography? Michael Golembewski built high-res cameras out of flatbed scanners; the model he described on this site took a 115-megapixel image--with each exposure.
I wish, I really truly wish, that Slashdot could have discussions of What's Wrong With Windows without them degenerating—every single time—into a Windows/Linux/Apple yelling match. Practically this entire thread is offtopic, yet post after post about Linux/Wine/Bill-Gates-is-Satan is rated Interesting or Informative. At time of this posting, I find exactly one post modded Offtopic, about OOXML.
I loathe Windows. But for reasons I'm not going to itemize yet again, I'm stuck with Windows for the time being. I know, from other discussions, that I'm not alone. But if I actually want to learn something about what Windows is up to from this discussion, I have to weed through at least a couple of hundred totally offtopic posts.
My wife loves her Apple. I'm sure Linux has a lot going for it. But please, can't the rest of you just shut up and leave the Windows topics to the Windows users?
Actually the service still runs, just the updates don't happen. You can how ever turn the service off in the service manager.
That's because even the Microsoft Update website requires the service. If you stop the Automatic Updates service completely, you're reduced to searching microsoft.com for patches, then downloading and installing them yourself.
That said, I agree with the handful of people who've said, "If I have 'Notify' or 'Download and notify' turned on, then I should have been asked for permission before even Windows Update was updated."
Also, add me to the handful of people who insist, "I have 'Turn off Automatic Updates' set on all machines I administer, and none of them updated until I went to the Microsoft Update website." However, it then took three updates to WU (and even a reboot on our Windows 2000 box) before I could install the latest round of patches.
The IBM 1130 had a FORTRAN compiler that could run in 4K "words" (8KB). It was somewhat limited—for instance, the arithmetic IF was the only branching statement available. But it could compile quite large programs, I was told; my school had a FORTRAN circuit-analysis program 20,000 cards long (5 full drawers in a card cabinet) that could allegedly be compiled successfully—over a period of several hours, presumably.
Seriously, this is a cool find (if a couple of years old). I first played Adventure in 1981, on a Xerox Sigma 7 running CP-V, in a FORTRAN implementation that had been customized a bit by the locals. (For instance, in the original game you could say "XYZZY" in the well house [or wherever] and bypass the locked grate; our version had that hole plugged.)
Later, around 1983-4, we had a Honeywell CP-6 system with an updated Adventure written in PL-6 (a pretty neat system language with customizable data structures and bit-level addressing). Somewhere, I may still have the PL-6 source for that one on 5.25" floppies. That system also included the pre-Zork Dungeon game; "the Tomb of the Implementers" and "Feel free" soon became catch-phrases around the office.
From glancing over the code, I can tell it's been a long time since I even thought seriously about writing FORTRAN (my first real language). I don't miss FORMAT statements, but I do miss the relative simplicity of most of the syntax (particularly when faced with a punctuation nightmare like LISP). In early FORTRAN, when a statement ended, it was over. You didn't have to count levels of punctuation or IF/DO/WHILE nesting across thousands of lines of code.
You only had to follow hundreds of GOTO statements....
If your horse is blind and has no sense of smell, how does it know the flipping water is there? Is it your horse's fault it doesn't drink, or God's fault for blunting its senses?
I actively pursued the Baptist faith when I was young. I let people lead me to the water. I attended meetings and revivals; I sang songs; I listened to witnesses; I tried to believe what others around me—including my first wife—believed. I said the words; I called to Jesus to forgive my sins and fill my heart and save me.
I tried to drink from the water. But no matter how often or how sincerely I tried, there wasn't any damn water.
If I never feel in my heart any of the things the people around me say I should feel, how can I believe what they believe? If God makes me deaf and blind to his presence, how dare he condemn me for failing to accept him?
I could fear the god you describe, but I could never respect any god who held me to such an irrational standard, much less worship him—all such a god deserves is contempt.
God is our parent. He asks us to follow the commandments. He does not strike us down if we don't.... If you do good and are good to people then you will be rewarded with the chance to progress. If you used your talents to harm others you will be dammed...
You know, it's always bugged me that 40% of the Commandments have to do with how you treat your God; only six of the ten say anything about how you treat your fellow man. If God really wrote the Commandments, they seem to speak of a considerable insecurity in his self-image. If Moses wrote them himself, they seem to speak of a considerable fear of retribution if God isn't handled carefully.
and how long is it before someone figures out how to turn off phones whenever they want? is a cool idea to be sure, but methinks it is far to much room for mischief.
Damn straight. I'll have one in my car, so that anybody using a cell phone in a car within a block of me will be instantly disconnected.
(Of course, as they get close to me they'll be looking down and cussing and poking at their phone, trying to figure out why it isn't working, so maybe...)
My all-time favorite was also the first "easter egg" I ever saw, more than twenty years before I first read the term as computer jargon. In the mid 1980's the Honeywell CP-6 operating system had a command-driven user interface that included pretty detailed online help. The syntax was simple, like the old MS-DOS help command:
HELP commandname
The help was pretty thorough and well-written, considering that CP-6 was a nearly new operating system. Every system command was there, with detailed syntax information. But if you typed HELP SAM, the screen printed out the complete text of the poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee".
... The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee!
A weird and inexplicable bit of whimsy, in a sharp and reliable mainframe OS that probably exists only in archives and memories like mine today.
There are numerous collections of Robinson short stories available, though they tend to overlap considerably. I tend to like Spider's short work better than his novels—he has a tendency to write good ideas to death. For instance, Stardance is a brilliant and heartbreaking novelette, but a somewhat disappointing novel.
On the other hand, Night of Power is an outstanding novel that tends to get overlooked, partly because it's not science fiction, partly because racial violence is not the most optimistic subject Spider ever chose.
Unfortunately, there were many reasons to put down most of the books [Heinlein] wrote after about 1970 when his health started to decline. Judge him by his best, in the 1940s-60s.
...Before he became such a bestselling powerhouse that no editor dared naysay him. His best work came when he had editors (such as John W. Campbell) strong enough to make him stick to his ideas and clean up his tendencies to ramble all over the landscape.
Not my theory—that of a friend who has the largest private SF & fantasy collection I've ever seen. But it rings true to me.
Remember that Space Cadet was published in 1948, just one year after Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury. In those days SF was almost exclusively a male market. Andre Norton had legally changed her name to disguise her gender from readers. Marion Zimmer Bradley was still several years from her first sale. Publishers weren't looking for female leads; they were still demanding John Campbell's "competent man."
In my opinion, Heinlein was one of the first writers to make a significant effort to include strong, intelligent, capable female characters. Compare his work in the '50s and '60s to Murray Leinster, whose female characters tended to be "the woman behind the man"; Heinlein's female characters were much more likely to be an equal partner. Heinlein's women are much more closely related to the female characters of modern writers like C.J. Cherryh than those of any other major writer of the Golden Age.
As for your post on Space Cadet below: I've always felt that all of Heinlein's characters were a bit two-dimensional. The classic example of that (for me) is The Number of the Beast, where I often lose track of which character is currently narrating, because they all sound so much alike.
There's the innovative new secret web site called 'Google'.
Where do you think I got the linux.org link? A search for linux "sheet nesting" returned a staggering 16 hits. Exactly one of them linked to sheet nesting software for Linux, and that software is for garment patterns, not for sheet metal. What are we supposed to do, hire some kid to write a Perl script to nest parts for our laser and plasma cutters?
I said pretty much everything I have to say on this subject about six months ago, but since I'm not a subscriber I can't find the comment again.
But you make a few points I'd like to answer:
So these hypothetical companies can afford to buy software, but can't afford some IT consulting?
All of the IT consultants we've found are: 1) Windows specialists; 2) incompetent; or 3) both. These are probably the same choices facing many other small companies in many other small cities like ours.
IT Managers buy Windows because they always have...
Again, I'm talking about companies that are too big or too technical to do everything with foolscap and quill, but too small to have an IT manager.
Ernie Ball moved his entire organisation over to open-source. So it can be done.
I'm happy for Ernie Ball, really. But does Ernie Ball use CNC programming software? linux.org doesn't list that many choices for CAD/CAM software. In fact, the only listing for sheet nesting software, PN4000, links to a dead site. If we switch to OSS, what guarantee do we have that a critical specialty application won't go unsupported next week?
Slashdot Mirror
It's all about which sites one visits.
So you never visit sites like Yahoo, Google, Weather.com, Monster, Fox, US News, or the New York Times? All of these have been reported as serving up tainted ads at one time or another in the last couple of years.
There's much more to keeping secure than not visiting porn sites or clicking random links. Even CNET has been installing unwanted toolbars lately.
Are there any systems still around running Xerox CP-V or its descendant, Honeywell CP-6? They were both pretty slick systems for their day. CP-V was so stable and adaptable that in the early '80s Honeywell (who took over Xerox support) couldn't get their CP-V customers to migrate off their twenty-year-old Xerox mainframes onto modern Honeywell hardware running GCOS.
So Honeywell wrote CP-6 from scratch. They invented a language called PL-6 then wrote the entire CP-6 OS from the ground up. They liked PL-6 so well they rewrote their existing GCOS systems in it. Unfortunately, Honeywell never figured out how to market CP-6, and dropped support for it within 10 years. Bummer.
I just collect quips — running feet and funny sigs off Slashdot, weird comments from wherever, twisted quotations (O dear User! I am ill at these numbers! I have not art to reckon my groans! Hamlet) — into one massive file. I have a tiny program that does nothing but pick a random quip from the file and display it (or send it to someone else on the network). Someday I'll make a screensaver out of it...
And so you come to Slashdot?
Funny (for me) that this should come up today. After typing the AutoCAD command 3DFACE (also all with the left hand) I found myself wondering something else: What's the longest English word/command/whatever-strikes-you that can be typed on a calculator in hexadecimal mode?
FACED is five digits, FACADE and DECADE are six, ACCEDED and EFFACED are seven. Anything longer? (Make your own rules, but to me using zero for O or one for I is cheating.)
What I'm waiting for is a Mimmoth (see center panel)
"But did you have to blow up the whole planet?!"
"Well it was a lot easier than trying to find the one guy who sold me this lousy watch."
No—it can't be true! The Hubble has managed to photograph the Time Cube! The joke really is on us...
For some real vehicle distortion, remember Scanner Photography? Michael Golembewski built high-res cameras out of flatbed scanners; the model he described on this site took a 115-megapixel image--with each exposure.
I wish, I really truly wish, that Slashdot could have discussions of What's Wrong With Windows without them degenerating—every single time—into a Windows/Linux/Apple yelling match. Practically this entire thread is offtopic, yet post after post about Linux/Wine/Bill-Gates-is-Satan is rated Interesting or Informative. At time of this posting, I find exactly one post modded Offtopic, about OOXML.
I loathe Windows. But for reasons I'm not going to itemize yet again, I'm stuck with Windows for the time being. I know, from other discussions, that I'm not alone. But if I actually want to learn something about what Windows is up to from this discussion, I have to weed through at least a couple of hundred totally offtopic posts.
My wife loves her Apple. I'm sure Linux has a lot going for it. But please, can't the rest of you just shut up and leave the Windows topics to the Windows users?That's because even the Microsoft Update website requires the service. If you stop the Automatic Updates service completely, you're reduced to searching microsoft.com for patches, then downloading and installing them yourself.
That said, I agree with the handful of people who've said, "If I have 'Notify' or 'Download and notify' turned on, then I should have been asked for permission before even Windows Update was updated."
Also, add me to the handful of people who insist, "I have 'Turn off Automatic Updates' set on all machines I administer, and none of them updated until I went to the Microsoft Update website." However, it then took three updates to WU (and even a reboot on our Windows 2000 box) before I could install the latest round of patches.The IBM 1130 had a FORTRAN compiler that could run in 4K "words" (8KB). It was somewhat limited—for instance, the arithmetic IF was the only branching statement available. But it could compile quite large programs, I was told; my school had a FORTRAN circuit-analysis program 20,000 cards long (5 full drawers in a card cabinet) that could allegedly be compiled successfully—over a period of several hours, presumably.
The Da Vinci source code?
Seriously, this is a cool find (if a couple of years old). I first played Adventure in 1981, on a Xerox Sigma 7 running CP-V, in a FORTRAN implementation that had been customized a bit by the locals. (For instance, in the original game you could say "XYZZY" in the well house [or wherever] and bypass the locked grate; our version had that hole plugged.)
Later, around 1983-4, we had a Honeywell CP-6 system with an updated Adventure written in PL-6 (a pretty neat system language with customizable data structures and bit-level addressing). Somewhere, I may still have the PL-6 source for that one on 5.25" floppies. That system also included the pre-Zork Dungeon game; "the Tomb of the Implementers" and "Feel free" soon became catch-phrases around the office.
From glancing over the code, I can tell it's been a long time since I even thought seriously about writing FORTRAN (my first real language). I don't miss FORMAT statements, but I do miss the relative simplicity of most of the syntax (particularly when faced with a punctuation nightmare like LISP). In early FORTRAN, when a statement ended, it was over. You didn't have to count levels of punctuation or IF/DO/WHILE nesting across thousands of lines of code.
You only had to follow hundreds of GOTO statements....
If your horse is blind and has no sense of smell, how does it know the flipping water is there? Is it your horse's fault it doesn't drink, or God's fault for blunting its senses?
I actively pursued the Baptist faith when I was young. I let people lead me to the water. I attended meetings and revivals; I sang songs; I listened to witnesses; I tried to believe what others around me—including my first wife—believed. I said the words; I called to Jesus to forgive my sins and fill my heart and save me.
I tried to drink from the water. But no matter how often or how sincerely I tried, there wasn't any damn water.
If I never feel in my heart any of the things the people around me say I should feel, how can I believe what they believe? If God makes me deaf and blind to his presence, how dare he condemn me for failing to accept him?
I could fear the god you describe, but I could never respect any god who held me to such an irrational standard, much less worship him—all such a god deserves is contempt.
(Of course, as they get close to me they'll be looking down and cussing and poking at their phone, trying to figure out why it isn't working, so maybe...)
My all-time favorite was also the first "easter egg" I ever saw, more than twenty years before I first read the term as computer jargon. In the mid 1980's the Honeywell CP-6 operating system had a command-driven user interface that included pretty detailed online help. The syntax was simple, like the old MS-DOS help command:
... The Northern Lights have seen queer sights,
HELP commandname
The help was pretty thorough and well-written, considering that CP-6 was a nearly new operating system. Every system command was there, with detailed syntax information. But if you typed HELP SAM, the screen printed out the complete text of the poem "The Cremation of Sam McGee".
But the queerest they ever did see
Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge
I cremated Sam McGee!
A weird and inexplicable bit of whimsy, in a sharp and reliable mainframe OS that probably exists only in archives and memories like mine today.
There are numerous collections of Robinson short stories available, though they tend to overlap considerably. I tend to like Spider's short work better than his novels—he has a tendency to write good ideas to death. For instance, Stardance is a brilliant and heartbreaking novelette, but a somewhat disappointing novel.
On the other hand, Night of Power is an outstanding novel that tends to get overlooked, partly because it's not science fiction, partly because racial violence is not the most optimistic subject Spider ever chose.
Not my theory—that of a friend who has the largest private SF & fantasy collection I've ever seen. But it rings true to me.
Remember that Space Cadet was published in 1948, just one year after Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury. In those days SF was almost exclusively a male market. Andre Norton had legally changed her name to disguise her gender from readers. Marion Zimmer Bradley was still several years from her first sale. Publishers weren't looking for female leads; they were still demanding John Campbell's "competent man."
In my opinion, Heinlein was one of the first writers to make a significant effort to include strong, intelligent, capable female characters. Compare his work in the '50s and '60s to Murray Leinster, whose female characters tended to be "the woman behind the man"; Heinlein's female characters were much more likely to be an equal partner. Heinlein's women are much more closely related to the female characters of modern writers like C.J. Cherryh than those of any other major writer of the Golden Age.
As for your post on Space Cadet below: I've always felt that all of Heinlein's characters were a bit two-dimensional. The classic example of that (for me) is The Number of the Beast, where I often lose track of which character is currently narrating, because they all sound so much alike.
That's definitely not the lesser of two weevils.
(My wife is an incorrigible punster. I try not to incorrige her.)
But you make a few points I'd like to answer:
All of the IT consultants we've found are: 1) Windows specialists; 2) incompetent; or 3) both. These are probably the same choices facing many other small companies in many other small cities like ours.
Again, I'm talking about companies that are too big or too technical to do everything with foolscap and quill, but too small to have an IT manager.
I'm happy for Ernie Ball, really. But does Ernie Ball use CNC programming software? linux.org doesn't list that many choices for CAD/CAM software. In fact, the only listing for sheet nesting software, PN4000, links to a dead site. If we switch to OSS, what guarantee do we have that a critical specialty application won't go unsupported next week?
And according to a recent Gallup poll, 3 out of 4 people make up 75% of the population.