Re:Living On Mars? A Little Dose Of Reality
on
Ice Lake on Mars
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· Score: 1
First off, why do you have to develop a heavy lift capacity? One already exists (actually, two if you count the Saturn V), it is called Energiya and it can lift a lot. The shuttle is a general purpose space truck and does nothing well. A poorly designed truck at that.
As for the physiological effects, we know what they are, they've been studied to death, including long term studies by the Russians. How much more study do we need? Sheesh!
Back to your first points, we know all about the requirements for long term voyages. We know due to our deployment of ballistic missile submarines which stay out, completely submerged, for four to six months or longer, if there is a crisis, at a pop. They don't do hydroponics and with the exception of water, all other issues are well understood, including exercise. You just have to bring a big, reliable, power supply along.
Which gets to one of your other points, fuel. Why do you ass-u-me that such a mission will use coventional fuels? I don't see any reason why it should at all. Actually idiotic, although I wouldn't put anything past NASA these days. A nuclear powered ion drive would be far more efficient, require tons less fuel (heck, you could use waste products even), and would at least give you the advantage of having microgravity. Furthermore, why do you ass-u-me that this will be a zero-g ship? It doesn't have to be. The lander would be but the actual ship? Come on!
Lastly, for building materials for the ship, why do they all have to come from earth? The last time I looked there is readily available aluminum (and oxygen) on the moon. Strip mine it, refine it, ship it to orbit via magnetic catapult. That's not even an original idea ("Moon is a Harsh Mistress" R. A. Heinlein). The gravity well is a lot less steep.
My point is that everything in this problem domain is known with two exceptions. Zero-g hydroponics and extreme, long term water recycling. The first we could start experimenting on now. The later would require some thought on how to simulate although apparently the Japanese are doing exactly this as I type.
Hate to burst your bubble, but I've been looking at this all my life and I'd volunteer in a heartbeat even if it were a one-way trip.
I don't see why you would regret it. I have messages and emails going back to 1987 here. I keep one set of backups in a directory on one of my file server hard drives. I also have everything backed up to to CD's (well, DVD's now) and I make sure that I reburn them once a year and have two copies of which one is stored in a nice safe place off-site.
It's very handy, especially for all those registration keys and informative messages with neat hacks/fixes in them that I've accumulated over the years. Some of those messages are literally priceless.
Nice catch! I especially like the Tangent in the "First Article". Sometimes I think I get more repeat business due to the fact that I know most all the simple, cheap/free solutions out there and won't hesitate to recommend them, especially as I rarely get a kickback (okay, channel partner fee) on most things. However, I also won't hesitate to spec something larger as required, and frequently I do the engineering and integration for a rather large fee.
I've also associated with the second and third tier and FUD seems to be a primary selling point. I don't do FUD. I do solutions that the client can afford and does what they want.
On your last point, agreed. Attitude is everything in this biz. Clients won't take you seriously unless you take yourself seriously. Just keeping up with what happens in this industry is a significant investment in and of itself. I spend about half my time doing nothing but reading journals, newsletters, and a regular raft of sites on a daily basis. Now I would do that anyway, but since clients are as much buying my knowledge as my handiwork....
I agree with slasher. Dead on and accurate. You have to be fast at the diagnosis and find the quickest route to repairs. I really like the software problem solution. Wish I had thought of that earlier.
Amen to that! One thing I make sure relatively early in any conversation with a potential client is my level of experience and I've found that is what gets around by word of mouth. It doesn't hurt showing up with CD and disk wallets with dang near anything MS has ever done either. Another little item I've done is a New Owner CD which contains all the software that I usually install, plus a bunch of other useful utilities and such, with a nice little guide on it, which I hand them as I'm ready to leave. Only a few cents to reproduce, and a few minutes a month to update, but that seems to impress the client the most, whether home or business.
Nope, no nifty certification letters after my name. Just documented experience and a ton of golden referrals.
Actually I've done computer support for the US Navy (575+ desktops plus who knows how many laptops, several mainframes and a few mini's) and in the civilian world on a more personal basis (and online in various fora). He's right. Most of my time is spent in removing various malware, virii, and in data recovery, and has been for over twenty years, ever since the little darlings came out. Occasionally, and this seems to be picking up a bit, I get to set up a wireless home network (and lock it down!) but this won't be your repeat business.
Now ideally, you'll be allowed to set up all aspects of a system (virus protection, firewall, spyware monitoring/removal) so you won't have to go back to a computer time and time again. However this isn't an ideal world. I set this kind of thing up for people all the time, completely hands off from the user standpoint, and find that time and again some salesman or other idiot convinces them to remove the safeguards I put in place. (Just had another phone call from a id10t who's id10t friend ripped out and replaced my stuff with Norton and they are infected, AGAIN {sigh}.) Get used to it. Charge accordingly.
As for pricing, I'm not one to address that as I'm under certain restrictions. [Don't ask.] Generally I've seen that many people charge somewhere between $50 and $75, just to look at the machine and put in one hour of work. Data recovery can go up rather high, but compared to what OnTrack charges.... Home users are generally less able to afford you so be careful not to price yourself out of the market. You'll have to experiment for a while to get it dialed in right (and classify your customers carefully). YMMV
BTW, I get a LOT of reading done online and off when doing this stuff.
Actually, if you want all those licenses, go over to the Microsoft Partners site, sign up to become a registered member, and then order the Action Pack for $299. I've been a partner for years now and have dang near everything they've put out since the year 2000. It won't get you Visual Studio, although I am playing with the betas for that, but on the OS/Applications side, yep. They are also very good about getting betas and release candidates into the hands of partners so we know what the frag we are talking about on release day. I have more licenses than I know what to do with, so it is definitely worth a look.
Combine that with the basic MSDN and you have a good foundation to work from if you have to deal with MS stuff (okay, crap for the/. crowd) on a daily basis before you come home to a rational universe.
Don't worry if you feel like you are missing something. That's normal. It really depends on how you use your browser. If you normally go from site to site, one or a few windows are fine for your usage pattern. However, if you are like me and are working on multiple sites at the same time, a tabbed browser can save you from playing the "which window is that dang site in" game. For instance, in content creation, it's a huge plus. I spend a lot of time referring to multiple sites and taking content, or linking content more usually, from one site to another (blogs for instance). I'd be buried hip deep in windows here if I tried that with IE or any other non-tabbed browser. With FF, everything is in one windows and a simple click or keystroke pops me from tab to tab, and then it is simple cut and paste. It also comes in handy when I'm developing as quite a bit of my documentation (40 GB and counting) is in the form of HTML documents, and I don't know a developer alive that has just one document open at a time.
What I'd actually kill for, and I'm going over to MS to suggest it to them, is a tabbed interface in the MSDN documentation. Nothing irks me more than having to flip from place to place in the docs just to figure out how to implement something. True, you can use bookmarks, but I've already got over five thousand of the damn things (neatly organized) but dammit, having to load multiple instances of the docs is just plain stupid, let alone having to remember where I was before six steps back and then having to flip forward and back. That's what computers are for, neatly organizing information and presenting it in a usable format.
Apologies for the rant as it really isn't directed at you. The point remains, it all depends on how you use your machine. I know a lot of people, my Internet living Dad for one, that just don't get it, and probably never will.
Actually they do have several projects underway to do something just like that. Do a search on F# if you want just one example of something completely different. I have a rather large collection of.NET languages here, well beyond the stock C++, C#, etc. that come with VS.NET 2003. You just have to be willing to nose around a bit to find them as they aren't "pushed". I guess that is due to lack of interest in the mediocre development community as MS has put them front and center on the Visual Studio center.
Me? I do real software engineering which means using the right tool for the job rather than making every problem look like a nail.
Actually, the chances are pretty good that someone will try exactly this, if they are intent on breaking into the network or trying to steal access. True, social engineering is the preferred method of choice, but I've read any number of articles that this is one of the techniques used. Once you have a machine in place on the network, you can break out your preferred cracking tools of choice and 0wn the network outright in a few seconds to a few minutes.
As people are finding out more and more, it is the the internal threats that are far more deadly to your information security than external threats. External threats are (fairly) easy to protect against if you have a clue about what you are doing. I've been locking down networks for over two decades now against external threats. It wasn't until the mid-90's that I made it a regular practice to identify and secure against as many internal threats as I could, which also had a postitive benefit since penetrating the perimeter got you exactly nothing. You use all the methods you can lay your hands on, even minor ones, to prevent as many vectors of attack as possible.
BTW, I read an excellent article, I guess about a year ago, by a guy who does penetration testing for firms. This was one of his vectors of choice.
Are you paranoid if they really are out to get you?
Just because they have the same "name" does not mean to Windows that they are the same machine. Not at all. It's bright enough to know that two machines may have the same name on the network, but not really be the same machine. (This is where the SAM comes in btw.) Which when you really think about it from a security standpoint as I must 24/7, makes a whole hell of a lot of sense. You wouldn't want some cracker coming along and spoofing a machine that happens to be disconnected or offline for some reason.
Heck, I did that to our own Navy one time in an exercise. Recorded certain signals, waited for a ship to drop out of a net, and jumped right in at the right time and fed them spoofed signals right into their net. Confused them to a fair-the-well. Meanwhile, we snuck in and put some (simulated) missiles into the side of one of those billion dollar flattops. We were playing Red Force;-).
This "feature" of AD is one of the few times, the SAM, that Windows got something a bit right wrt security. Then they had to go and frag it all up by rendering it insecure {sigh}.
A good part of the problem here is that MS is getting desperate to find something, anything, to get business into an upgrade cycle to create a revenue stream. The other part is that they have to come up with something, again anything, to justify their Software Assurance licensing scheme. Business however is basically risk-averse, which should be no surprise to anyone with an ounce of economics training, so they want to only go with what is known to be stable, known to work, and whose problems are known as well as the solutions. Which is why you find business still using EOL'd operating systems and applications despite assurances from MS that the latest and greatest thing since the invention of the BLT sandwich will "fix what ills you."
I don't see business adoption for at least three years after Vista Server, or whatever they are going to call it, it out and that's supposedly at least a year after Vista desktop. Sorry, Microsoft. Once burned, twice shy.
All he had to do was rename my new machine with the same name as the old one, shut down my old one, hook up the new one, and log on.
And there's your answer. Your delightful sysadmin didn't RTFM. You have to add the computer by name to the "Users And Computers" in AD. I wonder what part of "Users And Computers" isn't understood. {Sigh}
Strange, I have no problems setting up a new domain or adding either a DC or any other server to a domain on any network, and it is dead easy on Server 2003. I just use the bloody wizards and follow the stupid prompts. Heck, I keep waiting for the banana to fall out the front of the machine after it finishes. The hardest part of the whole process is picking what book to read while I'm waiting for it to create/replicate the AD schema.
The problem they are having is in their network configuration(s), not in Windows itself. I'll leave it at that since I don't do freebies. Networks are a LOT harder to get right than Windows any day of the week. I speak from experience. Windows Server, *nix, Solaris, all the same here. I should point out that your sysadmins really need to sit down with the built-in help documentation on networking and go through it step by step. I was part of the beta-test and I poured over all those docs extensively to make sure they were right. It should steer them to their problem *if* they are willing to follow the docs and the troubleshooters.
BTW, I'm forever changing things around on the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise & Web Edition machines here. They take a real beating as I do extensive system configuration changes, experimental setups, and beta testing. Literally dozens of programs being installed and removed each month. I've never seen them hose up yet. Actually, I'm covered to a fair-thee-well if they do, but nary a glitch. In some cases, *nix is far more fragile, but on the server side it wasn't designed for you to retool the whole configuration every couple of hours;-).
As they kept telling me when I was a Linux n00b, RTFM. That's what it's there for.
From the DSM VI:
"Ballmeritis: A delusional condition whereby the patient erroneously believes products as released by Microsoft to be innovative. Frequently the patient also exhibits various symptoms of paranoia in conjunction with said condition."
No argument there from me. Perl is usually one of the first things to go on my systems here, Windows or whatever, right after a fresh install. I'd like to see Python and Ruby as well, although I haven't done much with either yet. I really do like them from a purist and hacker context.
As for Java, well you can take it out and nuke it for all I care. It doesn't come near any of my systems, period. Not due to security concerns, although there have been some concerns in the past, and some still remain. Just on general principle. I'm agnostic about a lot of things but that language, as with anything designed by a committee, is a horror. Speaking as a software engineer, among other things, even.NET is better designed!
Just don't bring PHP to the party until version 5 settles out and they clean up their security act. And before anyone jumps me, {grin}, I like it as well.
And that's the big question I have from RTFA. No mention of what is going to happen on the Windows side and I just started using Konfabulator here 15 days ago (just go my registration warning). Personally I like it a lot more than DesktopX, both in terms of the widgets and in terms of programming accessibilty, but I that's my preference. I just hope the Windows version will be free. We'll see tomorrow (later today, actually).
I believe you are on to something here. Frankly, I won't do Flash, I won't do Java, and I certainly WON'T do ActiveX. With the exception of ActiveX, all involve rather large, separate downloads whereas Javascript is just there. Also look at Ajax. It just works without anything special being added and it works very well.
Now admittedly, Javascript as a language sucks rocks but you can depend on it working cross-browser, cross-OS, cross-dang-near-anything, and the user doesn't have to do a thing to get it to work. That meets the Grandmother standard that I use these days for measuring user utility. [Not to put down Grandma's. My 76 y.o. mother rocks at programming!]
[Actually, it's rather funny that I figured out how to do Ajax back in 2000 while mucking around in the MSDN's I had and stumbled across XMLHTTPResponse(). I posted what I found all over the place and nobody did a damn thing with it. Now it's the hot tamale. Weird world.]
Yes, the Picasso did rock. Heck, it's still the emulation of choice! Personally, I had a Retina which seemed to like my system better than the Picasso, but some machines had their quirks, and Lyza was really picky about what hardware she worked with back then. Fer instance, she never would work right with the 386 BridgeBoard, which wasn't a big deal at the time as I'd just do the floppy-shuffle with the school machines;-)
BTW, I still hack my machines, it just requires a bit more effort and specialized tools. The settings on my North and Southbridge are not standard, which is part of why this machine still rocks even after two years. It's just harder.
I hate to pick a few nits, but here goes. You did forget true device independence, either in you code or from the command-line. You didn't have to care what the device was, just use the names and route dang near anything to anywhere. I used to use that all the time from the CLI.
Another nit is that alhtough there was no memory protection per se, it wasn't difficult to implement. Simply add MungWall or Enforcer (or both as I did) to your startup and poof! True memory protection. Buffer overflows, just as one example, were stopped dead in their tracks. We used to use this all the time when checking files that were new additions to the libraries so people were warned about sloppy coders.
Lastly, I used to run virtual memory all the time on my GVP equipped machines. There was a hack, true it was a hack, that patched the OS to add virtual memory. That you could even pull off such a hack, and very easily too, was a testament to the design of the 68010 and beyond and that of the OS itself. I believe it was called VMem, but I'd have to dig out my copy of the libraries to confirm.
What I loved about it at the time was the sheer level of documentation that was available at a fairly cheap price. My idea of light reading was perusing the ROM Kernal manuals or the Hardware manual to see what neat hacks you could do.
You forgot BSD Unix, which I used to fire up all the time on mi Amigas. Yes, I had several, with not a 500 in the lot (those went to my sister and Mom).
The funny thing at the time was that every time I tried to use a Mac at the UC computer labs, the bloody things would cherry-bomb. I don't think they liked Amigans very much. Very strange since I'd been using computers for over 20 years by then. I had to wait in line to use the NeXT computers in order to get my labs done. Still, Macs, especially with the latest version of OS/X are pretty sweet and were on my short list until they went to Intel. [This is an all Intel house, never again.]
I still miss mi Amigas and every once in a rare while will fire up the emulator just in a fit of melancholy.
Gotta put that smiley in thar;-). Mi Amiga could still run circles, performance-wise, around this customed engineered rig here that runs circles around stock Intel machines even after two years. And that's sad. I question the Apple decision as a result. We need something better.
Cell-based desktop, with gobs of co-processors, anyone???
Slashdot Mirror
As for the physiological effects, we know what they are, they've been studied to death, including long term studies by the Russians. How much more study do we need? Sheesh!
Back to your first points, we know all about the requirements for long term voyages. We know due to our deployment of ballistic missile submarines which stay out, completely submerged, for four to six months or longer, if there is a crisis, at a pop. They don't do hydroponics and with the exception of water, all other issues are well understood, including exercise. You just have to bring a big, reliable, power supply along.
Which gets to one of your other points, fuel. Why do you ass-u-me that such a mission will use coventional fuels? I don't see any reason why it should at all. Actually idiotic, although I wouldn't put anything past NASA these days. A nuclear powered ion drive would be far more efficient, require tons less fuel (heck, you could use waste products even), and would at least give you the advantage of having microgravity. Furthermore, why do you ass-u-me that this will be a zero-g ship? It doesn't have to be. The lander would be but the actual ship? Come on!
Lastly, for building materials for the ship, why do they all have to come from earth? The last time I looked there is readily available aluminum (and oxygen) on the moon. Strip mine it, refine it, ship it to orbit via magnetic catapult. That's not even an original idea ("Moon is a Harsh Mistress" R. A. Heinlein). The gravity well is a lot less steep.
My point is that everything in this problem domain is known with two exceptions. Zero-g hydroponics and extreme, long term water recycling. The first we could start experimenting on now. The later would require some thought on how to simulate although apparently the Japanese are doing exactly this as I type.
Hate to burst your bubble, but I've been looking at this all my life and I'd volunteer in a heartbeat even if it were a one-way trip.
It's very handy, especially for all those registration keys and informative messages with neat hacks/fixes in them that I've accumulated over the years. Some of those messages are literally priceless.
I've also associated with the second and third tier and FUD seems to be a primary selling point. I don't do FUD. I do solutions that the client can afford and does what they want.
On your last point, agreed. Attitude is everything in this biz. Clients won't take you seriously unless you take yourself seriously. Just keeping up with what happens in this industry is a significant investment in and of itself. I spend about half my time doing nothing but reading journals, newsletters, and a regular raft of sites on a daily basis. Now I would do that anyway, but since clients are as much buying my knowledge as my handiwork....
I agree with slasher. Dead on and accurate. You have to be fast at the diagnosis and find the quickest route to repairs. I really like the software problem solution. Wish I had thought of that earlier.
Nope, no nifty certification letters after my name. Just documented experience and a ton of golden referrals.
Now ideally, you'll be allowed to set up all aspects of a system (virus protection, firewall, spyware monitoring/removal) so you won't have to go back to a computer time and time again. However this isn't an ideal world. I set this kind of thing up for people all the time, completely hands off from the user standpoint, and find that time and again some salesman or other idiot convinces them to remove the safeguards I put in place. (Just had another phone call from a id10t who's id10t friend ripped out and replaced my stuff with Norton and they are infected, AGAIN {sigh}.) Get used to it. Charge accordingly.
As for pricing, I'm not one to address that as I'm under certain restrictions. [Don't ask.] Generally I've seen that many people charge somewhere between $50 and $75, just to look at the machine and put in one hour of work. Data recovery can go up rather high, but compared to what OnTrack charges.... Home users are generally less able to afford you so be careful not to price yourself out of the market. You'll have to experiment for a while to get it dialed in right (and classify your customers carefully). YMMV
BTW, I get a LOT of reading done online and off when doing this stuff.
Combine that with the basic MSDN and you have a good foundation to work from if you have to deal with MS stuff (okay, crap for the /. crowd) on a daily basis before you come home to a rational universe.
What I'd actually kill for, and I'm going over to MS to suggest it to them, is a tabbed interface in the MSDN documentation. Nothing irks me more than having to flip from place to place in the docs just to figure out how to implement something. True, you can use bookmarks, but I've already got over five thousand of the damn things (neatly organized) but dammit, having to load multiple instances of the docs is just plain stupid, let alone having to remember where I was before six steps back and then having to flip forward and back. That's what computers are for, neatly organizing information and presenting it in a usable format.
Apologies for the rant as it really isn't directed at you. The point remains, it all depends on how you use your machine. I know a lot of people, my Internet living Dad for one, that just don't get it, and probably never will.
Me? I do real software engineering which means using the right tool for the job rather than making every problem look like a nail.
As people are finding out more and more, it is the the internal threats that are far more deadly to your information security than external threats. External threats are (fairly) easy to protect against if you have a clue about what you are doing. I've been locking down networks for over two decades now against external threats. It wasn't until the mid-90's that I made it a regular practice to identify and secure against as many internal threats as I could, which also had a postitive benefit since penetrating the perimeter got you exactly nothing. You use all the methods you can lay your hands on, even minor ones, to prevent as many vectors of attack as possible.
BTW, I read an excellent article, I guess about a year ago, by a guy who does penetration testing for firms. This was one of his vectors of choice.
Are you paranoid if they really are out to get you?
Heck, I did that to our own Navy one time in an exercise. Recorded certain signals, waited for a ship to drop out of a net, and jumped right in at the right time and fed them spoofed signals right into their net. Confused them to a fair-the-well. Meanwhile, we snuck in and put some (simulated) missiles into the side of one of those billion dollar flattops. We were playing Red Force ;-).
This "feature" of AD is one of the few times, the SAM, that Windows got something a bit right wrt security. Then they had to go and frag it all up by rendering it insecure {sigh}.
I don't see business adoption for at least three years after Vista Server, or whatever they are going to call it, it out and that's supposedly at least a year after Vista desktop. Sorry, Microsoft. Once burned, twice shy.
And there's your answer. Your delightful sysadmin didn't RTFM. You have to add the computer by name to the "Users And Computers" in AD. I wonder what part of "Users And Computers" isn't understood. {Sigh}
The problem they are having is in their network configuration(s), not in Windows itself. I'll leave it at that since I don't do freebies. Networks are a LOT harder to get right than Windows any day of the week. I speak from experience. Windows Server, *nix, Solaris, all the same here. I should point out that your sysadmins really need to sit down with the built-in help documentation on networking and go through it step by step. I was part of the beta-test and I poured over all those docs extensively to make sure they were right. It should steer them to their problem *if* they are willing to follow the docs and the troubleshooters.
BTW, I'm forever changing things around on the Windows Server 2003 Enterprise & Web Edition machines here. They take a real beating as I do extensive system configuration changes, experimental setups, and beta testing. Literally dozens of programs being installed and removed each month. I've never seen them hose up yet. Actually, I'm covered to a fair-thee-well if they do, but nary a glitch. In some cases, *nix is far more fragile, but on the server side it wasn't designed for you to retool the whole configuration every couple of hours ;-).
As they kept telling me when I was a Linux n00b, RTFM. That's what it's there for.
From the DSM VI: "Ballmeritis: A delusional condition whereby the patient erroneously believes products as released by Microsoft to be innovative. Frequently the patient also exhibits various symptoms of paranoia in conjunction with said condition."
As for Java, well you can take it out and nuke it for all I care. It doesn't come near any of my systems, period. Not due to security concerns, although there have been some concerns in the past, and some still remain. Just on general principle. I'm agnostic about a lot of things but that language, as with anything designed by a committee, is a horror. Speaking as a software engineer, among other things, even .NET is better designed!
Just don't bring PHP to the party until version 5 settles out and they clean up their security act. And before anyone jumps me, {grin}, I like it as well.
And that's the big question I have from RTFA. No mention of what is going to happen on the Windows side and I just started using Konfabulator here 15 days ago (just go my registration warning). Personally I like it a lot more than DesktopX, both in terms of the widgets and in terms of programming accessibilty, but I that's my preference. I just hope the Windows version will be free. We'll see tomorrow (later today, actually).
Now admittedly, Javascript as a language sucks rocks but you can depend on it working cross-browser, cross-OS, cross-dang-near-anything, and the user doesn't have to do a thing to get it to work. That meets the Grandmother standard that I use these days for measuring user utility. [Not to put down Grandma's. My 76 y.o. mother rocks at programming!]
[Actually, it's rather funny that I figured out how to do Ajax back in 2000 while mucking around in the MSDN's I had and stumbled across XMLHTTPResponse(). I posted what I found all over the place and nobody did a damn thing with it. Now it's the hot tamale. Weird world.]
That's just my $.02, FWIW.
BTW, I still hack my machines, it just requires a bit more effort and specialized tools. The settings on my North and Southbridge are not standard, which is part of why this machine still rocks even after two years. It's just harder.
{Sigh} The good old days.
Actually it was Misha. I spent a day with her and Jay. Quite a lively dog and very affectionate.
Another nit is that alhtough there was no memory protection per se, it wasn't difficult to implement. Simply add MungWall or Enforcer (or both as I did) to your startup and poof! True memory protection. Buffer overflows, just as one example, were stopped dead in their tracks. We used to use this all the time when checking files that were new additions to the libraries so people were warned about sloppy coders.
Lastly, I used to run virtual memory all the time on my GVP equipped machines. There was a hack, true it was a hack, that patched the OS to add virtual memory. That you could even pull off such a hack, and very easily too, was a testament to the design of the 68010 and beyond and that of the OS itself. I believe it was called VMem, but I'd have to dig out my copy of the libraries to confirm.
What I loved about it at the time was the sheer level of documentation that was available at a fairly cheap price. My idea of light reading was perusing the ROM Kernal manuals or the Hardware manual to see what neat hacks you could do.
Still, great post!
The funny thing at the time was that every time I tried to use a Mac at the UC computer labs, the bloody things would cherry-bomb. I don't think they liked Amigans very much. Very strange since I'd been using computers for over 20 years by then. I had to wait in line to use the NeXT computers in order to get my labs done. Still, Macs, especially with the latest version of OS/X are pretty sweet and were on my short list until they went to Intel. [This is an all Intel house, never again.]
I still miss mi Amigas and every once in a rare while will fire up the emulator just in a fit of melancholy.
Cell-based desktop, with gobs of co-processors, anyone???
It's one of the best I've seen and dead on target. Just ask anyone who's served in the military.
Don't remind me! I still have nightmares involving that monster. [I used to work at a VA as a programmer-analyst.]