It is shamefull for a democratic government to be acting in such a way. A democracy hears its citizens, accepts critique and initiate change whereever reasonable.
Where do you live? I live in the USA, which was instantiated with the intent of creating a constitutional republic, but which has mutated into a corporate oligarchy, primarily via legislative and judicial action. We can have no such expectations here, not if we're paying attention, anyway.
Let me enlighten you about Van Gogh's art and motivation using the traditional slashdot car analogy.
Van Gogh's finest art is functionally equivalent to NASCAR: 24 hours of continuously turning left, if done well, he hoped would result in a snuggle from a ring girl, specifically, Rachel. In order to enhance his left turns, he removed his left ear, thus creating a ground-hugging vacuum on the left and so enhancing his turning ability.
This made him quite dizzy; the result was "Starry Starry Night", a veritable opus of left turns, which of course we now treat as a cultural treasure.
Alas, Rachel, who was left holding the ear, was not so easily impressed.
It is my understanding that under certain circumstances, goos can get into cunts. Best to beware of goos, I'm thinking, if one is blessed with ladybits.
Well, insofar as there *were* flags and size and file types, you could control those, and various listing formats. But sure, nix files are much more complex beasties. Still, 80k? I'm thinking a person with an assembler could do it in a lot less. That's how all the 6809 commands were built. Of course, a person writing in assembler is spending their time all on one platform... and that's why we don't do it any longer.
And yeah, when we get to OO apps.... they're incredibly weighty.
Anyway OS/9 did ok for the size and speed of the computer it ran on. We had accounting, spreadsheets, assemblers, compilers, text processors, and some really decent text editing (keeping in mind that the output was a daisy wheel printer, lol.) I can still use that editor. It runs not only under 6809 OS/9, but also under 6809 Flex, which I have ready on the desktop at all times. Makes for a very nice text editor, I use it to kick 6809 assembler around. Used to use them a lot. 6809's, I mean.
I don't have a problem with the artists, if I don't have to listen to there(sic) noise.
"their"
At least someone can explain to me why they like a certain hip hop song without a twenty minute discussion of music theory and jazz history.
Did it ever occur to you that if you had a few years of musical education, such an explanation could be a short, concise event? There are terms and concepts that cover why one likes, or doesn't, jazz, classical, etc. They just don't boil down to "not 'nuff skanky hos" or "that shit don't rock my sub, man."
Personally, if they completely cancelled football and actually taught music and music theory instead so people could create and/or appreciate music on more than a surface level when they heard it, I think we'd all be much better off. Certainly when I hear a "pop" music station, I think so.:/
But... hey. Who am I to stand in the way of Little Billy's busted spleen? Rah. Rah. And stuff.
I speak and read Chinese, with a particular interest in classical characters. I've read, with considerable interest, the Tao te Ching in its near-original form, and also numerous English translations. I'm a martial artist, so such an expounding on "the way" is of great interest. I even suffered through a reading by Ursula Le Guin. Man, was that ever annoying. Then I had a few beers to try to forget. And I like her fiction. And I don't particularly like beer. Anyway...
In the translations, in an attempt to make the content lyrical in English terms, and sometimes to rhyme, and sometimes to map to a particular agenda, the meaning is badly mangled — to be kind about it. The original can say something entirely mundane, and the translation gets all spiritual and freaky. It's enough to make me turn a little green sometimes.
I wonder if these Kyrgz translations are more of the same.
In the case of English and Chinese, the languages don't have anything even remotely resembling a 1:1 map once you get any further into them than "Ni hao", and even then... Someone probably, somewhere, might have told you Ni hao means hello... that's a very common start. What it actually means, though, is "you good" as an implied question that they do NOT expect you to answer... but if you go for "Ni hao ma" that's actually asking "you good?" whereas the first form doesn't indicate a need for an answer (compare to asking someone "how ya doin?", and they start telling you, while you groan to yourself "it was RHETORICAL, please SHUT UP!") It's not hello and it doesn't mean hello, it's just used where we would use hello. Ni hao maps a lot closer to an uninflected (non-questioning) "how ya doin" and ni hao ma to an inflected "how ya DOIN?." But you rarely get taught that, you sort of figure it out later. Well, some do.
These mapping issues get much stronger as you get into any deeper meanings. In Chinese, that is. So... when I see translations of poetry and particularly when attempts are made to rhyme in another language... I get a little (more) cynical.:) Somehow I doubt that Kyrgyz ramblings make much sense at all in modern English, no matter what you do to 'em. That is to say, if you do enough to get them to make sense, they no longer map back to the original well.
I can guarantee that's the case for English translations of the Tao te Ching. If you actually want to understand it, you've got a whole culture to learn, and THEN you've got to come to grips with centuries of change.
Not so ludicrous -- the commands were only a few k each. You could do a lot.
I'll tell ya what seems ludicrous to me... 50 megabytes for a silly, one function utility or a little game. I'll grant you that when the processor has words and instructions 4x the width of a 6809, then I'll readily buy that any one comparable app or command could be 4x the size (though you'd think those instructions would be more sophisticated and buy you more), but I see sizes that can only be explained by incredibly bad software technology at some level; language, or tools, or actual design.
Check this out.
ls, a basic "dir" shell command on my mac, is 80k.
dir, a reasonably comparable 6809 command, is about 600 bytes. That's over 130x smaller. And that's pretty typical. So you can think of the memory under OS/9 as being that much more useful.
OS/9 also supported various means of extending memory -- I had a 256k SS-50 memory card, and it worked fine, paging memory in and out in 4k chunks.
It really was an effective, useful OS, within the limitations of what you can do in a shell, which is a lot more than many people realize, frankly. Graphics were strictly an outside-the-OS afterthought on a per-program and per-card basis.
In the book it was a big Amarone, not a nice Chianti, btw.
You think that's bad, go read "Make Room, Make Room" by Harry Harrison, and then go subject yourself to "Soylent Green."
That is the bloody poster child for Hollywood fapping not only all over the book's story, but also the meaning of the story, the order of the story, the characters in the story... worst SF movie ever made, hands down, because it didn't just suck, it was the magical transformation from a book that most definitely did not suck, to a movie with absolutely no redeeming value whatsoever that was *also* an insult to its inspiration. Horrific.
UNIX preemptively multitasked in 1969. Kinda predates Amiga.
But not on a PC, which was the criteria here, right? So, perhaps not.
I do, however, have a predates-Amiga candidate: OS/9 for 6809. From 1979. The Amiga was 1985.
OS/9 6809 was spectacular for its day. For a 1 mhz system to run a whole bunch of terminals (which could just as easily be other computers... I used SS50 systems with graphics cards and keyboards attached to a parallel port on the CPU card), each client with access to the OS/9 machine's various I/O and other facilities... and using almost no memory... just awesome. Had a really decent scheduler, too -- guaranteed even the lowest priority process would get at least a little time.
I oughta drag that sucker out and set it up and run it.:)
Just try buying a pre-assembled mass-market PC without any of the money to Microsoft. I dare you.
Apple. Or, I can walk down to my local computer store and take a linux machine right off the shelf. Or I can get one with no OS at all and put my own on there.
Your argument is empty. There have always been trivially easy to obtain alternatives to Microsoft software, and hardware that would run same without any trouble.
You see, you don't need to actually be an MS user for them to control the OS market. It's sufficient for them to extort money from you when buying hardware.
That is utter nonsense. If I can install any OS I like, they're not controlling the OS market. Period. Also, I think you'd have them ROTFL at Apple.:)
Yeah, MSDOS stands for Microsoft's version of a disk operating system. For which there have been alternatives all along, from CPM and FLEX and OS9 through AmigaDOS up to todays linux shell, Mac shell, and the presently cooking BeOS clone.
I didn't miss anything. You simply don't know what you're talking about.
No. They're the portion of the country that keeps us swilling oil. Look at any oil production map:
Texas, Montana, North Dakota... etc.: red states.
It wouldn't matter a bit, though -- they'd still want to sell oil.
What intrigues me in Texas' case, is that they have been screwing up school books for some time now, and it would be a real boon to the country if somehow, secession resulted in our books being more reality-based. They can keep their "no sex toy" laws and immigrant hating, too... be good to get those kinds of influences out of the country.
For Montana (my state) I'm not sure secession is really any serious goal; first of all, we've got a Democrat governor and senator, and part of the reason we have a Republican congress-critter is gerrymandering. There are some really "red" areas in the state, but there are some really blue ones, too. I expect these petitions are coming from the red areas and won't amount to a thing, even should others succeed (which I doubt, but that's another issue.)
But... we've got a good state constitution, and our legislators and courts have demonstrated -- repeatedly -- that they're willing to abide by it, instead of making up bullshit at the drop of a hat the way SCOTUS does. We have oil, mineral resources, timber and grain. We raise cattle, too. What we don't have is a lot of people. Maybe that would change if coming here meant that you no longer had to worry (for instance) about the government taking your property to build a mall, pretending you have no right to arms, surveilling your communications and banking without warrants, etc.
One thing I honestly think about the US as a whole right now is that it is no longer a constitutional republic. I'd describe it more as a corporate-driven plutocracy. It's not pretty.
OTOH, I don't think a bunch of little countries here would be pretty, either. I give it a rousing "ain't gonna happen":)
Microsoft never had a monopoly. They had a majority market penetration, and anyone was perfectly free to step outside that and use something else. There were always alternatives starting with MSDOS and working right up to today. I have never been forced to use Microsoft, and usually laugh when someone assumes that I do, or that my various undertakings did. I've run more than one successful enterprise under other operating systems, with not an MS machine in sight. There were many benefits.
Monopoly is not the same as majority market penetration.
Does it actually though? I would simply point out that we have extraordinarily effective armed forces, a nuclear deterrent, all the resources we could ever possibly really need, and our borders are geographically convenient only for Mexico and Canada, neither of which poses a credible threat.
I think it's entirely possible that the US could up and say "Yeah, about that. Not gonna pay. All dents are zeroed. Sorry." The capability is objectively there. The will? Perhaps not. But it isn't inconceivable.
Slashdot Mirror
Where do you live? I live in the USA, which was instantiated with the intent of creating a constitutional republic, but which has mutated into a corporate oligarchy, primarily via legislative and judicial action. We can have no such expectations here, not if we're paying attention, anyway.
We put them to work in government.
Let me enlighten you about Van Gogh's art and motivation using the traditional slashdot car analogy.
Van Gogh's finest art is functionally equivalent to NASCAR: 24 hours of continuously turning left, if done well, he hoped would result in a snuggle from a ring girl, specifically, Rachel. In order to enhance his left turns, he removed his left ear, thus creating a ground-hugging vacuum on the left and so enhancing his turning ability.
This made him quite dizzy; the result was "Starry Starry Night", a veritable opus of left turns, which of course we now treat as a cultural treasure.
Alas, Rachel, who was left holding the ear, was not so easily impressed.
* There's gonna be a quiz tomorrow
It's a PIN, you bloody heathen!
It is my understanding that under certain circumstances, goos can get into cunts. Best to beware of goos, I'm thinking, if one is blessed with ladybits.
Really... I mean, after all, MacDougal's bog.
"Pict squeezins are the only good squeezins."
Oh, no. That's not anger, son. That's pity. For the music and the spleen.
Well, insofar as there *were* flags and size and file types, you could control those, and various listing formats. But sure, nix files are much more complex beasties. Still, 80k? I'm thinking a person with an assembler could do it in a lot less. That's how all the 6809 commands were built. Of course, a person writing in assembler is spending their time all on one platform... and that's why we don't do it any longer.
And yeah, when we get to OO apps.... they're incredibly weighty.
Anyway OS/9 did ok for the size and speed of the computer it ran on. We had accounting, spreadsheets, assemblers, compilers, text processors, and some really decent text editing (keeping in mind that the output was a daisy wheel printer, lol.) I can still use that editor. It runs not only under 6809 OS/9, but also under 6809 Flex, which I have ready on the desktop at all times. Makes for a very nice text editor, I use it to kick 6809 assembler around. Used to use them a lot. 6809's, I mean.
"their"
Did it ever occur to you that if you had a few years of musical education, such an explanation could be a short, concise event? There are terms and concepts that cover why one likes, or doesn't, jazz, classical, etc. They just don't boil down to "not 'nuff skanky hos" or "that shit don't rock my sub, man."
Personally, if they completely cancelled football and actually taught music and music theory instead so people could create and/or appreciate music on more than a surface level when they heard it, I think we'd all be much better off. Certainly when I hear a "pop" music station, I think so. :/
But... hey. Who am I to stand in the way of Little Billy's busted spleen? Rah. Rah. And stuff.
And is the translation any good?
I speak and read Chinese, with a particular interest in classical characters. I've read, with considerable interest, the Tao te Ching in its near-original form, and also numerous English translations. I'm a martial artist, so such an expounding on "the way" is of great interest. I even suffered through a reading by Ursula Le Guin. Man, was that ever annoying. Then I had a few beers to try to forget. And I like her fiction. And I don't particularly like beer. Anyway...
In the translations, in an attempt to make the content lyrical in English terms, and sometimes to rhyme, and sometimes to map to a particular agenda, the meaning is badly mangled — to be kind about it. The original can say something entirely mundane, and the translation gets all spiritual and freaky. It's enough to make me turn a little green sometimes.
I wonder if these Kyrgz translations are more of the same.
In the case of English and Chinese, the languages don't have anything even remotely resembling a 1:1 map once you get any further into them than "Ni hao", and even then... Someone probably, somewhere, might have told you Ni hao means hello... that's a very common start. What it actually means, though, is "you good" as an implied question that they do NOT expect you to answer... but if you go for "Ni hao ma" that's actually asking "you good?" whereas the first form doesn't indicate a need for an answer (compare to asking someone "how ya doin?", and they start telling you, while you groan to yourself "it was RHETORICAL, please SHUT UP!") It's not hello and it doesn't mean hello, it's just used where we would use hello. Ni hao maps a lot closer to an uninflected (non-questioning) "how ya doin" and ni hao ma to an inflected "how ya DOIN?." But you rarely get taught that, you sort of figure it out later. Well, some do.
These mapping issues get much stronger as you get into any deeper meanings. In Chinese, that is. So... when I see translations of poetry and particularly when attempts are made to rhyme in another language... I get a little (more) cynical. :) Somehow I doubt that Kyrgyz ramblings make much sense at all in modern English, no matter what you do to 'em. That is to say, if you do enough to get them to make sense, they no longer map back to the original well.
I can guarantee that's the case for English translations of the Tao te Ching. If you actually want to understand it, you've got a whole culture to learn, and THEN you've got to come to grips with centuries of change.
Not so ludicrous -- the commands were only a few k each. You could do a lot.
I'll tell ya what seems ludicrous to me... 50 megabytes for a silly, one function utility or a little game. I'll grant you that when the processor has words and instructions 4x the width of a 6809, then I'll readily buy that any one comparable app or command could be 4x the size (though you'd think those instructions would be more sophisticated and buy you more), but I see sizes that can only be explained by incredibly bad software technology at some level; language, or tools, or actual design.
Check this out.
ls, a basic "dir" shell command on my mac, is 80k.
dir, a reasonably comparable 6809 command, is about 600 bytes. That's over 130x smaller. And that's pretty typical. So you can think of the memory under OS/9 as being that much more useful.
OS/9 also supported various means of extending memory -- I had a 256k SS-50 memory card, and it worked fine, paging memory in and out in 4k chunks.
It really was an effective, useful OS, within the limitations of what you can do in a shell, which is a lot more than many people realize, frankly. Graphics were strictly an outside-the-OS afterthought on a per-program and per-card basis.
You think that's bad, go read "Make Room, Make Room" by Harry Harrison, and then go subject yourself to "Soylent Green."
That is the bloody poster child for Hollywood fapping not only all over the book's story, but also the meaning of the story, the order of the story, the characters in the story... worst SF movie ever made, hands down, because it didn't just suck, it was the magical transformation from a book that most definitely did not suck, to a movie with absolutely no redeeming value whatsoever that was *also* an insult to its inspiration. Horrific.
ok, so Xenix in 1980, 1 year after OS/9; Interactive Unix in 1985, 6 years later; Coherent in 1983, 4 years later.
Predates the Amiga, but not OS/9.
Anyone else?
But not on a PC, which was the criteria here, right? So, perhaps not.
I do, however, have a predates-Amiga candidate: OS/9 for 6809. From 1979. The Amiga was 1985.
OS/9 6809 was spectacular for its day. For a 1 mhz system to run a whole bunch of terminals (which could just as easily be other computers... I used SS50 systems with graphics cards and keyboards attached to a parallel port on the CPU card), each client with access to the OS/9 machine's various I/O and other facilities... and using almost no memory... just awesome. Had a really decent scheduler, too -- guaranteed even the lowest priority process would get at least a little time.
I oughta drag that sucker out and set it up and run it. :)
Are you in need of some fava beans? Perhaps a nice Chianti?
RTFM, dammit
It's not all of us. Really, it's not. The system is, admittedly, very broken. But there are many, many citizens who are not.
Quite right. My apologies. Total brain fart. Too much election, not enough sleep.
Apple. Or, I can walk down to my local computer store and take a linux machine right off the shelf. Or I can get one with no OS at all and put my own on there.
Your argument is empty. There have always been trivially easy to obtain alternatives to Microsoft software, and hardware that would run same without any trouble.
That is utter nonsense. If I can install any OS I like, they're not controlling the OS market. Period. Also, I think you'd have them ROTFL at Apple. :)
Yeah, MSDOS stands for Microsoft's version of a disk operating system. For which there have been alternatives all along, from CPM and FLEX and OS9 through AmigaDOS up to todays linux shell, Mac shell, and the presently cooking BeOS clone.
I didn't miss anything. You simply don't know what you're talking about.
No. They're the portion of the country that keeps us swilling oil. Look at any oil production map:
Texas, Montana, North Dakota... etc.: red states.
It wouldn't matter a bit, though -- they'd still want to sell oil.
What intrigues me in Texas' case, is that they have been screwing up school books for some time now, and it would be a real boon to the country if somehow, secession resulted in our books being more reality-based. They can keep their "no sex toy" laws and immigrant hating, too... be good to get those kinds of influences out of the country.
For Montana (my state) I'm not sure secession is really any serious goal; first of all, we've got a Democrat governor and senator, and part of the reason we have a Republican congress-critter is gerrymandering. There are some really "red" areas in the state, but there are some really blue ones, too. I expect these petitions are coming from the red areas and won't amount to a thing, even should others succeed (which I doubt, but that's another issue.)
But... we've got a good state constitution, and our legislators and courts have demonstrated -- repeatedly -- that they're willing to abide by it, instead of making up bullshit at the drop of a hat the way SCOTUS does. We have oil, mineral resources, timber and grain. We raise cattle, too. What we don't have is a lot of people. Maybe that would change if coming here meant that you no longer had to worry (for instance) about the government taking your property to build a mall, pretending you have no right to arms, surveilling your communications and banking without warrants, etc.
One thing I honestly think about the US as a whole right now is that it is no longer a constitutional republic. I'd describe it more as a corporate-driven plutocracy. It's not pretty.
OTOH, I don't think a bunch of little countries here would be pretty, either. I give it a rousing "ain't gonna happen" :)
http://www.3d-u.es/
Microsoft never had a monopoly. They had a majority market penetration, and anyone was perfectly free to step outside that and use something else. There were always alternatives starting with MSDOS and working right up to today. I have never been forced to use Microsoft, and usually laugh when someone assumes that I do, or that my various undertakings did. I've run more than one successful enterprise under other operating systems, with not an MS machine in sight. There were many benefits.
Monopoly is not the same as majority market penetration.
o Education -- if you can pass course A, you can move up to course B
o Healthcare -- a healthy country is a more productive country. and I don't want your bloody typhoid.
o Transport infrastructure
o Communications infrastructure
o (really) Basic housing (imagine availability of a warm or adequately cool, secure concrete room with a bed, a toilet, and a shower)
o (really) Basic minimum feed (imagine a tasteless, watery gruel with all the vitamins and nutrients you need)
o water and sewage management and supply
o rules against causing each other bodily harm
o rules against pollution and about waste disposal
o a stable currency
o a strong military that is disallowed from crossing the border outward unless we are attacked within those same borders
Does it actually though? I would simply point out that we have extraordinarily effective armed forces, a nuclear deterrent, all the resources we could ever possibly really need, and our borders are geographically convenient only for Mexico and Canada, neither of which poses a credible threat.
I think it's entirely possible that the US could up and say "Yeah, about that. Not gonna pay. All dents are zeroed. Sorry." The capability is objectively there. The will? Perhaps not. But it isn't inconceivable.