Actually it *did* start on the Amiga. The author was Clint Woltjein and I was one of the testers way back when Clint was developing the program. It's nice to see he did a port to Windows although I imagine the screen part of the programs sucks rocks. Now the calculation part of the rendering engine probably rocks on a good P4/AMD chip though.
Nice to see it still around. It's a wickedly good program at what it does and proved that a Motorola chip (mine was a 40 MHz 68030) could hold it's own against the big iron at that time.
Actually it's reached that point already IMNSHO. I'm seriously underwhelmed by what's left so far, and we still aren't anywhere close to release. Killing managed code (.NET 2.0) as part of the OS was the last straw. I don't need just another pretty desktop, I already have that (Konfabulator, Stardock, etc.).
I'm so underwhelmed it'll never get near one of my machines and I'm using Windows Server 2003 Enterprise SP1 as my development workstation here. Heck of a better dev platform than XPSP2 btw.
Somewhere I have a fully regged copy of Acrobat 5 that I dig out about once an eon, stuff in a virtual machine, and use exactly once. No Adobe allowed anywhere near a real machine. Acroread can bring my supercharged machine to a crippling halt. Wonderful stuff (i.e. manure) that they put out there.
Off-topic but, pending regulatory approval, now that they are the new masters of Macromedia I will run screaming for the horizon before anything new from them gets put on my boxen. And I used to be one of their regular testers. Sad day. I did like DW, somewhat. (Flash can die though).
Nirvana was spending all my free time logged into the CompuServe AmigaTech forum working on software with fellow Amigans. We were coding and jiving 24/7 in those days and it was people around the world, including the designers (fond memories of Jay Miner and Dale Luck). It beat the snot out of my day (well, afternoon/eve) job working on ATC and writing dbase-2/3+/4 and C code on brain-dead-designed PC's.
BTW, it didn't matter that I could have added dang near a new Amiga a month (and I'm talking the A2000, A500's need not apply!) for what I was paying for the privilege, it was fraggin' worth it!! What a machine. What a fantastic crowd.
{Sigh} Take this PC and stuff it. I want mi Amiga-3000++ back!
Sorry about two replies, but "The Prisoner" for about $50 wouldn't be out of line either. Damn good series that actually made you think! (I don't like mindless entertainment;-). )
Even two or three dollars, although five might be stretching it, isn't unreasonable. On the other hand (I'm an economist, so forgive me!), you won't know what the market is like until you test it. So far all the channels haven't even bothered to test the market to see what kind of sales result from various price points. They set a price point, as near as I can tell, based on what they want and then expect sales to result. Well, as any economist will tell you, some sales will result but you have no idea of what the supply-demand curves look like unless you are willing to experiment. We've seen zero experimentation from the **AA's of the world. Instead we have to look to Apple as a leader in this field and they haven't experimented very much either but they have been a roaring success. I might even put what they've done in the save the company category.
{Shrug} It's a new publishing paradigm and either they get it or they get out of business. Frankly I don't care which. However I still recall what happened to the scribes when Gutenberg came along. They all went to work for the Church or the King/Queen, thus creating bureaucrats. Ugh! Be ever mindful of historical forces:-)
Yep, you've got the idea here. I, for one, would not mind at all paying about $1 per hour for some of the several TV-series over the years that I've loved but seen die (probably because I loved them {sigh}). "The Nightstalker" (hokey but neat), Babylon-5 before it became very weird, CSI, heck there are hundreds if not close to a thousand shows out there that I would love to own on DVD, and I'm sure I'm not the only one out there.
The **AA doesn't get the new paradigm and frankly I don't think they ever will get it until P2P or some other rival business drives them out of business entirely. We now have a printing press for all digital media. The thing they need to get is that they need to fire up the presses! Sure, you aren't going to make as much on the margin per particular recording, but geez, you can make a hell of a lot on volume. [Okay, someone take me out and shoot me, puhleeze!, now I sound like a bean-counter!]
"Even if I had broadband, and even when the file is free and legal, I certainly couldn't be bothered to locate, download, and burn a film that I could buy for a buck."
Actually I've been thinking on this for several years now (close to a decade actually). Personally, if I were designing a terrorist attack on the 'net I wouldn't use DNS at all as there are better architectures for the guidance system (or payload targeting, however you prefer). I won't go into it in a public forum but it is interesting to think about. BTW, I will say it has become far easier as the toolboxes have evolved than it used to be.
Not even hard to do as my DNS server is pointed at OpenNIC, my ISP's DNS, and gets the usual root hints from the US controlled root servers.
If it's really causes such terrible anguish to the international community they can set up their own root servers and then try to persuade the various ISP's and DNS servers not under ISP control to point to them. I wish them luck!
As I point out elsewhere, for the US to use DNS as a weapon would be economic (and therefore political) suicide. Not that I credit many politicians much in the brains department but they seem to have their own political self-interest high on their priority list.
Oh, yeah! Pull the plug on the root servers and watch the US economy, and the world economy for that matter, come to a screeching halt. Currently most all of the IMS, WMS, and other commerce related systems all depend on the Internet although many firms do maintain alternate means of access (phone, FAX, etc.) just in case of a situation similar to what happened to Pakistan recently. [Wouldn't have helped since the international phone system was toast as well except satellite links.] With the conversion to JIT manufacturing the inventories are no longer on hand to handle supply-chain disruptions of any significant length. Try something like this and Dell, WalMart, and a ton of other firms will be looking in the Yellow Pages for Assassins-R-Us. Campaign contribution? Yeah, right!
Pretty much this is what has happened to the GPS system, if you want a confirming trend. What started out as a military only system (which is how the Internet started... DARPA, right?) became a de facto civilian system that our economy is highly dependent on. Heck, even 911 is now dependent on it. Turn it off and lots of lives are lost, not just economic damage to the firms that are involved. They even gave up using the military only encryption setting. Nope, there is no going back.
As for trusting some international organization with DNS. Not if I have any choice in the matter. They are corrupt to the core, ICANN included. Is the US system corrupt? Yep. However I *trust* their corruption. I must since I did put my life on the line for a hell of a long time in support of it.
I've been running cron jobs on Windows for years. There are any number of utilities to do it, CygWin, and there is even the equivalent in Windows NT called the AT command, although to get real functionality you do have to learn how to really get down and dirty with Windows scripting. Six of one, half a dozen of another.
Hear, bloody hear! Mod me Troll but I couldn't agree more. Win'2K is now EOL'ed after five long years. I still use it, and support it, extensively here and I don't see that changing as it does some things I want very nicely and one of my development targets are all those individuals (one living with me) and businesses that still use it. However, it was five years. Most Linuxen don't even have five year EOL agreements. Heck, I know of only one, Debian, that does. The rest are three years or less. Oops! They can go whine somewhere else.
As for the new package, it is ideal for those libraries and other public access setups that need this type of thing and I can see that it would also be useful in home setups that don't have the default Administrator everything setup which is still an Achilles Heel (and all those programs that seem to require it which was stupid!). A Band-Aid, but it is something at least.
Unfortunately I haven't run into too many public access setups that are even running XP. That may change but somehow I don't think anytime soon as these institutions tend to run the machines until dead and when they get a new one they blow away the installed XP and place their own image on it. We'll have to wait and see what the adoption rate is it seems.
It's funny how many people push a certain agenda when they've never been anywhere else to see things for themselves. I've tromped over somewhere between a third and half this planet, lived with the people there, talked with them, learned the customs, and tried my best with the languages. Funny, I might have a better clue about what's happening out there than someone who relies on word of mouth or the media. Naw, couldn't be.
Cuba, a paradise? Nope. A hell-hole. Hell no. Does it need change? Yep. Is the embargo the right way to go about it? Nope. And it is interesting that the embargo is very selective as there are numerous firms, rather large ones at that with large campaign contributions, that are either now operating in Cuba or preparing to do so. I found that out only by reading the agricultural news in this country. Funny, that never made the mainstream press.
Have a Mai-Tai for me. You may see me in a few years and I'll join you then.
A lot of what we hear in the US is complete and utter crap and true of much of the rest of the world. We have one of the most insular media industries on the planet and I'm not talking just left or right, I mean the whole thing. That's why I try to read as many news sites around the world to try and determine the differing viewpoints.
As for the HIV issue, well there were some cases that I recall where people who had AIDS were continuing to have unprotected sex and were not notifying their partners and they were locked up. Frankly, I'd lock them up too, just as I'd isolate a pnuemonic plague carrier that was determined to expose everyone they contact. Unethical and immoral to say the least, should be illegal in any jurisdiction.
To go somewhat astray, I'd have lifted the embargo many years ago. It is historical fact that a prosperous and expanding middle-class has time and again brought about revolutionary change, as far back as you care to go. Not always change we, today, would agree with, but change. It seems they have a problem with whatever the current crop of elites who are running the place are doing if it is not in their interests. Funny that. In the case of China and Cuba, if the US is interested in fundamental change, it need only encourage the expansion of the middle-class and social forces will take care of the rest.
Now this isn't to say, to get back on-topic, that the free flow of information won't help a lot. It will. It sure helped a lot in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and a few other select places around the world. Why? Rising expectations, which goes back to the point in the previous paragraph.
My apologies for bending your ear on this, but it is a topic near and dear to my heart.
Probably pointless to even reply to this since you'll reject it out of hand but you might want to go ask the Kurds and the Iranians about whether Sadaam had WMD's. Oh, that's right, you can't. They're dead. They were killed by imaginary WMD's.
That we found no WMD's after the Second Gulf War does not mean that they did not exist before the war. We know they did since they were used on Iran and the Kurds. Where they went to is the operative question. I still think they were either given to the Iranians, for the same reason that Sadaam gave his fighters to the Iranians during the First Gulf War, or more likely they were given to the Syrians.
Yeah, right. Point to a May 2000 document that the author admits (in 2001) is in need of revision. While I am no MySQL fan-boy, heck I don't like much of it at all but it does fill the bill sometimes, it can be ACID compliant. All you need to do is use InnoDB. It's not even hard to do using something like MySQLAdmin.
To quote Microsloth, "get the facts" before you start whining about something that is so history it ain't even funny.
Oh yes, about the other whines on that page, MySQL 5 seems to address most all of them. As I said elsewhere, I'm waiting to see the gold version before I review it, but it is looking promising.
I've found that people can code sloppy in any language just like engineers can do sloppy designs, cooks can do sloppy meals, etc. ad nauseum. Sure, the examples may be (heck ARE) terrible. I've also seen terrible examples many other places on the web or in books, even by recognized experts at their particular profession. Enough times that I've wanted to line up the people and shoot them (or use small thermonuclear weapons). *Shrug* Examples, nor the characteristics of a language do not make a bad engineer/developer. Bad practices do. That we do not have really good books, well read books (!), on the subject says volumes about our industry. That we do not have mandatory, self-imposed (I'm an anarchist in that respect) standards speaks even louder.
As for security, we don't want to go there. That's not just a PHP or MySQL issue, IMNSHO. That's an industry-wide/profession-wide problem. PHP/MySQL seem to get quite few more notices here, but even supposedly secure apps over ten years old do as well. Security is my religion; it is what I preach. I don't find many converts. I don't think I ever will.
Actually it is very believable. I've been validating inputs for some 30+ years, long before injection attacks came along, just a good practice. You always validate all your gozintas and your gozoutas, if you are an engineer. Since the software development community doesn't have a clue when it comes to engineering, safe practices, or mathematical validation of their models, why should this be any surprise?
Then again, there hasn't been much call for it either on the vendor/user side either. Yep, we the geek community bitch and whine but when it comes down the business/user communities, they shrug and move on.
You expect better? I don't, not in my lifetime. Not that I haven't already exceeded that measure.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice to see it still around. It's a wickedly good program at what it does and proved that a Motorola chip (mine was a 40 MHz 68030) could hold it's own against the big iron at that time.
I'm so underwhelmed it'll never get near one of my machines and I'm using Windows Server 2003 Enterprise SP1 as my development workstation here. Heck of a better dev platform than XPSP2 btw.
Off-topic but, pending regulatory approval, now that they are the new masters of Macromedia I will run screaming for the horizon before anything new from them gets put on my boxen. And I used to be one of their regular testers. Sad day. I did like DW, somewhat. (Flash can die though).
BTW, it didn't matter that I could have added dang near a new Amiga a month (and I'm talking the A2000, A500's need not apply!) for what I was paying for the privilege, it was fraggin' worth it!! What a machine. What a fantastic crowd.
{Sigh} Take this PC and stuff it. I want mi Amiga-3000++ back!
Sorry about two replies, but "The Prisoner" for about $50 wouldn't be out of line either. Damn good series that actually made you think! (I don't like mindless entertainment ;-). )
{Shrug} It's a new publishing paradigm and either they get it or they get out of business. Frankly I don't care which. However I still recall what happened to the scribes when Gutenberg came along. They all went to work for the Church or the King/Queen, thus creating bureaucrats. Ugh! Be ever mindful of historical forces :-)
The **AA doesn't get the new paradigm and frankly I don't think they ever will get it until P2P or some other rival business drives them out of business entirely. We now have a printing press for all digital media. The thing they need to get is that they need to fire up the presses! Sure, you aren't going to make as much on the margin per particular recording, but geez, you can make a hell of a lot on volume. [Okay, someone take me out and shoot me, puhleeze!, now I sound like a bean-counter!]
**AA, you listening?
Actually I've been thinking on this for several years now (close to a decade actually). Personally, if I were designing a terrorist attack on the 'net I wouldn't use DNS at all as there are better architectures for the guidance system (or payload targeting, however you prefer). I won't go into it in a public forum but it is interesting to think about. BTW, I will say it has become far easier as the toolboxes have evolved than it used to be.
Pssst... you may want to look at some accurate GDP/GNP numbers some time. It ain't the US economy that is sliding.
Don't apologize! I wish I had thought of that. Give this person bonus Karma by the truckload.
I love a multi-level pun/joke.
If it's really causes such terrible anguish to the international community they can set up their own root servers and then try to persuade the various ISP's and DNS servers not under ISP control to point to them. I wish them luck!
As I point out elsewhere, for the US to use DNS as a weapon would be economic (and therefore political) suicide. Not that I credit many politicians much in the brains department but they seem to have their own political self-interest high on their priority list.
Ooooo! New tagline! ;-).
Thanks for the ref to anonet. Looks interesting!
Pretty much this is what has happened to the GPS system, if you want a confirming trend. What started out as a military only system (which is how the Internet started... DARPA, right?) became a de facto civilian system that our economy is highly dependent on. Heck, even 911 is now dependent on it. Turn it off and lots of lives are lost, not just economic damage to the firms that are involved. They even gave up using the military only encryption setting. Nope, there is no going back.
As for trusting some international organization with DNS. Not if I have any choice in the matter. They are corrupt to the core, ICANN included. Is the US system corrupt? Yep. However I *trust* their corruption. I must since I did put my life on the line for a hell of a long time in support of it.
I've been running cron jobs on Windows for years. There are any number of utilities to do it, CygWin, and there is even the equivalent in Windows NT called the AT command, although to get real functionality you do have to learn how to really get down and dirty with Windows scripting. Six of one, half a dozen of another.
As for the new package, it is ideal for those libraries and other public access setups that need this type of thing and I can see that it would also be useful in home setups that don't have the default Administrator everything setup which is still an Achilles Heel (and all those programs that seem to require it which was stupid!). A Band-Aid, but it is something at least.
Unfortunately I haven't run into too many public access setups that are even running XP. That may change but somehow I don't think anytime soon as these institutions tend to run the machines until dead and when they get a new one they blow away the installed XP and place their own image on it. We'll have to wait and see what the adoption rate is it seems.
Cuba, a paradise? Nope. A hell-hole. Hell no. Does it need change? Yep. Is the embargo the right way to go about it? Nope. And it is interesting that the embargo is very selective as there are numerous firms, rather large ones at that with large campaign contributions, that are either now operating in Cuba or preparing to do so. I found that out only by reading the agricultural news in this country. Funny, that never made the mainstream press.
Have a Mai-Tai for me. You may see me in a few years and I'll join you then.
As for the HIV issue, well there were some cases that I recall where people who had AIDS were continuing to have unprotected sex and were not notifying their partners and they were locked up. Frankly, I'd lock them up too, just as I'd isolate a pnuemonic plague carrier that was determined to expose everyone they contact. Unethical and immoral to say the least, should be illegal in any jurisdiction.
To go somewhat astray, I'd have lifted the embargo many years ago. It is historical fact that a prosperous and expanding middle-class has time and again brought about revolutionary change, as far back as you care to go. Not always change we, today, would agree with, but change. It seems they have a problem with whatever the current crop of elites who are running the place are doing if it is not in their interests. Funny that. In the case of China and Cuba, if the US is interested in fundamental change, it need only encourage the expansion of the middle-class and social forces will take care of the rest.
Now this isn't to say, to get back on-topic, that the free flow of information won't help a lot. It will. It sure helped a lot in Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and a few other select places around the world. Why? Rising expectations, which goes back to the point in the previous paragraph.
My apologies for bending your ear on this, but it is a topic near and dear to my heart.
That we found no WMD's after the Second Gulf War does not mean that they did not exist before the war. We know they did since they were used on Iran and the Kurds. Where they went to is the operative question. I still think they were either given to the Iranians, for the same reason that Sadaam gave his fighters to the Iranians during the First Gulf War, or more likely they were given to the Syrians.
They did exist. Where did they go?
Now you know why I'm looking around the world for a new place to live. Unfortunately, it doesn't look so good anywhere else.
To quote Microsloth, "get the facts" before you start whining about something that is so history it ain't even funny.
Oh yes, about the other whines on that page, MySQL 5 seems to address most all of them. As I said elsewhere, I'm waiting to see the gold version before I review it, but it is looking promising.
As for security, we don't want to go there. That's not just a PHP or MySQL issue, IMNSHO. That's an industry-wide/profession-wide problem. PHP/MySQL seem to get quite few more notices here, but even supposedly secure apps over ten years old do as well. Security is my religion; it is what I preach. I don't find many converts. I don't think I ever will.
You mean when you are Slashdotted? *g,d,rvvvf!*
Then again, there hasn't been much call for it either on the vendor/user side either. Yep, we the geek community bitch and whine but when it comes down the business/user communities, they shrug and move on.
You expect better? I don't, not in my lifetime. Not that I haven't already exceeded that measure.