Actually, the oldest Unix machine I own is an Altos 586. It's a machine with an 8086 processor and five serial ports to support five users on their terminals. It runs Xenix, from Microsoft, which was the first port of a Unix to the Intel x86 processor.
There were retail boxed versions to run on the IBM PC also, but my Altos box was the real stuff.
Microsoft Xenix was multiuser and networked and was set up for an environment where all the computers were connected together
Nope. You're wrong. I have a computer here in my collection. It has Microsoft (pre-SCO) Xenix installed on it. It has five RS-232c terminal jacks on it for five users to connect at once. There's an option for a network connection to be added, but it was very common at that time for such a machine to connect five users together and otherwise be a stand alone system. If you wanted larger 'global' email connectivity, you configured the mail system to transport over modems using UUCP.
The machine, which IS an example of a real historic UNIX system, was NOT networked directly to other UNIX systems.
Why would I need to encrypt my drive containing any of the above.
I agree that a firewall is mandatory for machines connected to the public internet. And I suppose if I lived in a dubiously locked dorm room or something that some of the other issues you raise would matter more. Anybody who gets physical access to my hard drive has physical access to a lot of paper records, too.
I don't think I'm naive for the above positions. I think a number of the people who encrypt their hard drives are both naive and paranoid.
Somebody mentioned motherboards with physical keys that encrypt your hard drive. Now THAT sounds like a damn fine way for a motherboard vendor to lock you in DAMN tight to their hardware with a hard drive you could otherwise easily transport from machine to machine.
I don't have anything to hide that needs that level of encryption. And I'm not interested in being part of a pool of people who needlessly encrypt their hard drives so that pedophiles and criminals have a pool of people to hide within.
I'm also not interested in accusing anybody in particular of anything, btw.
The only problem is, I couldn't get it to boot on my SparcStation.
Seriously, I got a SparcStation 10 at auction once that had a clean open install of Solaris on it, and null for a root password. It also had a professor's home directory with all his stuff (which I wiped out). I believe that box STILL has that copy of Solaris on it.
If it's a drive you are sending in for repair, that won't be possible. If the electronics are out, at the repair depot they can slap on another card and read your data. If they have the interest in doing so. Not sure why they would...
if Microsoft doesn't release Office anymore, suddenly their files are pretty much useless without expensive reverse engineering.
You mean, expensive reverse engineering like it's now necessary to open up the Excel Spreadsheet I keep my checking account balanced in? Expensive as in 'install OpenOffice on my NetBSD box' (or compile it there, if you're talking about an obscure arch)?
For most purposes the Reverse Engineering has already been done. And Microsoft's Office is such a 'big target' format, it will ALWAYS be reverse engineered en-masse and for free.
And remember that in the late-90s, Linux was still a little more primitive than Solaris. They'd have been better off spending money on Solaris x86 back then instead of almost abandoning it.
In the mid to late 90's Linux was damned primative comparied to Solaris. Solaris is/was highly targeted toward a much more limited hardware base, but it's actually engineered. Linux has become more 'engineered' than in the past, but the 'distros' sill seem thrown-together, witness the uneven documentation and man pages you cite.
Sun hardware has been 64 bit for so long that you can get old 64-bit Sun gear for pennies now. I got 5 64-bit Ultra 10 boxes at auction recently for $15 each and I paid more than I would have had to (I started at $15 because I really wanted them, then nobody bid against me and nothing else in the lot being bid on sold for more than $5).
If you want to experiment with 64 bit hardware beyond the new Wintel bling, get some Ultrasparc hardware.
Sun has almost never had control over the full stack. They sold you the hardware with a free (as in beer) operating system on it.
Not hardly. I remember how exciting it was when Sun started 'giving away' Solaris 7, so long as you weren't going to use it for commercial purposes. Otherwise, it was pretty expensive. And I am talking about Solaris 7. None of the previous versions of Solaris were ever free.
What if your only programming experience was ten years of (not Visual) Basic, and suddenly you were faced with learning Java? The concepts of object-oriented programming would be completely foreign to a person coming from a language that doesn't even have user-definable data structures.
Are you implying that people who program in Basic don't define their own data structures? There's no mechanism in Basic that designs, so it's pretty much up to the user to define the data structure.
'object oriented programming' 'structured programming' blah blah. What will be the buzzwords twenty years from now?
I agree, there are a diverse number of tools for program development. I'm just not content to toss around buzzwords oriented around 'concepts' that are universal, if not 'Universal.'
Sometimes some of us program micros that have 2-8K of program memory and 64-256 bytes of RAM. Obviously, in a specific Assembly Language.
Data structures? Yep. Nice tight data structures. Every bit of every word counts.
You choose the applications you need to run, in order to get whatever job you need done, and then you choose an operating system based on those applications.
You are discounting labor, which would be huge, and the difficulties of dealing with a car not designed to be a hybrid being altered to work as a hybrid.
Based on your analysis, all those custom cars and restored vintage cars should be priced in the medium six figures. Not all labor is billable at full hourly rates. It's a hobby project.
Why would I cover my car roof? I'd cover the garage's roof. And if that wasn't enough area I could dedicate a quarter acre or so of the pasture out behind the house to it.
If the vehicle is already paid for, it only costs him $4000 (your figure) to do the conversion. That's the only cost and he presumably gets a new engine and drive train for that money. Which would be a good deal.
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Actually, the oldest Unix machine I own is an Altos 586. It's a machine with an 8086 processor and five serial ports to support five users on their terminals. It runs Xenix, from Microsoft, which was the first port of a Unix to the Intel x86 processor.
There were retail boxed versions to run on the IBM PC also, but my Altos box was the real stuff.
Just for fun, I did an Altavista search on 'Googles Slogan'.
... " in the body.
The first (sponsored) link provided is captioned:
"Goggles Blowout"
Several of the other high links include the text:
"He says Google's slogan may be "Do No Evil", but it also
An item captioned "Google's 'Haphazard' Ad Policy" is also highly ranked.
Microsoft Xenix was multiuser and networked and was set up for an environment where all the computers were connected together
Nope. You're wrong. I have a computer here in my collection. It has Microsoft (pre-SCO) Xenix installed on it. It has five RS-232c terminal jacks on it for five users to connect at once. There's an option for a network connection to be added, but it was very common at that time for such a machine to connect five users together and otherwise be a stand alone system. If you wanted larger 'global' email connectivity, you configured the mail system to transport over modems using UUCP.
The machine, which IS an example of a real historic UNIX system, was NOT networked directly to other UNIX systems.
Well, the whole UUCP mechanism was developed over time. Allowing dial-up access between machines to transport big bunchlets of email and what-not.
But in the early days, most UNIX software was transported around on tape. Proverbally in the back of station wagons.
UNIX was originally set up for all the user to be connected together.
To one computer.
Connected by dumb terminals.
Networking UNIX computers together was a long drawn-out evolution. Just like connecting Pee Cees together.
Why would I need to encrypt my drive containing any of the above.
I agree that a firewall is mandatory for machines connected to the public internet. And I suppose if I lived in a dubiously locked dorm room or something that some of the other issues you raise would matter more. Anybody who gets physical access to my hard drive has physical access to a lot of paper records, too.
I don't think I'm naive for the above positions. I think a number of the people who encrypt their hard drives are both naive and paranoid.
Somebody mentioned motherboards with physical keys that encrypt your hard drive. Now THAT sounds like a damn fine way for a motherboard vendor to lock you in DAMN tight to their hardware with a hard drive you could otherwise easily transport from machine to machine.
A 'BSD' distro, for example, NetBSD, has a userland that's about 350 megs. That's a base X11 and a full binary userland.
Then you start adding packages and source code you want.
It's NOT the bloated mess than Linux distros have become (Slackware on two CDs... *grumble*)
A current NetBSD base will install comfortably on a 600 meg drive and give you all the tools to compile in anything else you want.
You can buy 2-5 gb hard drives on ebay in volume for a few dollars apiece.
I don't have anything to hide that needs that level of encryption. And I'm not interested in being part of a pool of people who needlessly encrypt their hard drives so that pedophiles and criminals have a pool of people to hide within.
I'm also not interested in accusing anybody in particular of anything, btw.
The only problem is, I couldn't get it to boot on my SparcStation.
Seriously, I got a SparcStation 10 at auction once that had a clean open install of Solaris on it, and null for a root password. It also had a professor's home directory with all his stuff (which I wiped out). I believe that box STILL has that copy of Solaris on it.
If it's a drive you are sending in for repair, that won't be possible. If the electronics are out, at the repair depot they can slap on another card and read your data. If they have the interest in doing so. Not sure why they would...
I'll just use it on the machines where it's suitable. It opens my spreadsheet files fine.
if Microsoft doesn't release Office anymore, suddenly their files are pretty much useless without expensive reverse engineering.
You mean, expensive reverse engineering like it's now necessary to open up the Excel Spreadsheet I keep my checking account balanced in? Expensive as in 'install OpenOffice on my NetBSD box' (or compile it there, if you're talking about an obscure arch)?
For most purposes the Reverse Engineering has already been done. And Microsoft's Office is such a 'big target' format, it will ALWAYS be reverse engineered en-masse and for free.
No, you're not correct. There are probably even people here who think the Nintendo 64 was '64 bit.'
This is the new Slashdot. There are even Mac enthusiasts here now who get taken seriously.
And remember that in the late-90s, Linux was still a little more primitive than Solaris. They'd have been better off spending money on Solaris x86 back then instead of almost abandoning it.
In the mid to late 90's Linux was damned primative comparied to Solaris. Solaris is/was highly targeted toward a much more limited hardware base, but it's actually engineered. Linux has become more 'engineered' than in the past, but the 'distros' sill seem thrown-together, witness the uneven documentation and man pages you cite.
Sun hardware has been 64 bit for so long that you can get old 64-bit Sun gear for pennies now. I got 5 64-bit Ultra 10 boxes at auction recently for $15 each and I paid more than I would have had to (I started at $15 because I really wanted them, then nobody bid against me and nothing else in the lot being bid on sold for more than $5).
If you want to experiment with 64 bit hardware beyond the new Wintel bling, get some Ultrasparc hardware.
Sun has almost never had control over the full stack. They sold you the hardware with a free (as in beer) operating system on it.
Not hardly. I remember how exciting it was when Sun started 'giving away' Solaris 7, so long as you weren't going to use it for commercial purposes. Otherwise, it was pretty expensive. And I am talking about Solaris 7. None of the previous versions of Solaris were ever free.
Are you implying that people who program in Basic don't define their own data structures? There's no mechanism in Basic that designs, so it's pretty much up to the user to define the data structure.
'object oriented programming' 'structured programming' blah blah. What will be the buzzwords twenty years from now?
I agree, there are a diverse number of tools for program development. I'm just not content to toss around buzzwords oriented around 'concepts' that are universal, if not 'Universal.'
Sometimes some of us program micros that have 2-8K of program memory and 64-256 bytes of RAM. Obviously, in a specific Assembly Language.
Data structures? Yep. Nice tight data structures. Every bit of every word counts.
If you want to study english lit. or finance, you go from high school to university..
Or you go to college, get a stable well paying job, then take up the study of English Lit on your own in your free time.
But if you want to hanker around academia for decades without having to work, by all means do nothing but go direct to 'University.'
You choose the applications you need to run, in order to get whatever job you need done, and then you choose an operating system based on those applications.
How do you know they did this?
Plus, for some insane reason, most of them were left-handed.
Can't deal with being in a 'left handed world' for a few minutes a day? Try being left handed in a right handed world 24/7.
You are discounting labor, which would be huge, and the difficulties of dealing with a car not designed to be a hybrid being altered to work as a hybrid.
Based on your analysis, all those custom cars and restored vintage cars should be priced in the medium six figures. Not all labor is billable at full hourly rates. It's a hobby project.
Why would I cover my car roof? I'd cover the garage's roof. And if that wasn't enough area I could dedicate a quarter acre or so of the pasture out behind the house to it.
If the vehicle is already paid for, it only costs him $4000 (your figure) to do the conversion. That's the only cost and he presumably gets a new engine and drive train for that money. Which would be a good deal.
You're nuts if you think 'the biggest roadblock' is some tacit conspiracy by IT staffers.