The bottom line is that PHP is a much better implementation of the approach shown in ASP.
You mean, ASP is a poor implementation of the approach shown by PHP, don't you?
Cost. You need NT to run it.
And not just the up-front cost. You're running it on "tell me where to go today" IIS (I hope it's not V4?) plus "reboot me weekly" NT.
Actually, that last is a bit mean. It's fairly safe to reboot about every ten days with most NT servers (-: g, d, r:-). If I work at a site that features NT boxes, I set up a script on a Linux (or *BSD) box to check them all and send email to an administrator when one dies, pointedly signing it "such-and-such Linux Server" or "such-and-such FreeBSD Server".
I actually have a simple PHP script for reporting on the aliveness of IIS (or any other HTTP for that matter) servers.
Ever thought about how much New Jersey weighs? This asteroid would be a few orders of magnitude heavier, and you want to change it's velocity by how much?
Cockroaches (big ones, like 1-1.5 inches long) were everywhere.
Perth is such a healthy place that I have seen the building across Milligan Street from Fast Eddy's emit 3in (7 to 8cm) roaches. You could just about harness the buggers and use them in a no-batteries radio-controlled vehicle.
BTW, these were imported-from-Europe roaches, not the prettier, cleaner native roaches, which seem to be going the way of the native bees.
Well, I got to the first part, about treating him calmly, just fine. I calmly flamed him.
He needs it. He's the jerk who set up the hackpcweek farce, inviting MS to install/tune their server and then not so much as visiting RedHat's update site by clicking on the update icon right there on the default desktop.
But to answer your question, "does it matter if the black box is accessed over the web?" -- I think it does, or to be more specific, it matters if the program is running the memory space of my black box versus your black box.
Nice, simple and clear-cut. Hee-hee.
If you run (say) PatheticWriter at an ASP's site, you will be using an X server on your machine to do it. PW will send icons (as bitmaps) and other data to your X server to be displayed and maybe clicked on. The icon now lives in your machine. It has been "distributed" to you. It is a part of the program. Has the program been "distributed" to you, or not?
Fine it down some more. You run Word at an ASP using Terminal Server (or some other near equivalent like VNC). You see an icon on your screen. There is a conceptual difference here, as the icon has not been sent to your machine as a separate bitmap. Nevertheless, it has been "distributed" to you. Same questions as above.
BTW, you can move your mouse cursor over the icon, and the cursor turns into a little hand. The hand _has_ been distributed to you. You click. Word crashes. Lo, identical functionality! (-: sorry, couldn't resist:-)
Fine it up a little more. It is the future. You are running a Java interface within your browser to access a Word descendent (say Word 13) at your ASP. Word 13 contains GPLed code, but the Java interface doesn't. An icon comes up as before, presented to you by the proprietary Java interface. It is visually indistinguishable from the previous two cases, and the Java interface, while a separate component, needs Word 13 to be useful. Has any software component of a program containing GPLed code been distributed to you?
A separate but related issue: the ASP has had a GPL-containing program distributed to them, in the form of Word 13, therefore the ASP must have free and unrestricted access to the full source for Word 13, yes?
Let's see how thin we can get these hairs! One day a court will be doing the same thing, and we want to know ahead of time how it turns out.
I can't see even the most out-of-touch judge supporting the idea that an item can be used by many people and yet not have been distributed to those people.
I cite the example of the US Constitution itself. Not only can people use it without actually having it, they can use it without actually having the information in it. Yes, I know the cases are different, but you can bet that a similar argument will turn up in court one day. Are we ready?
I can also see some meathead arguing that the users only run certain parts of it, so they only need to distribute the source for the parts which the user has actually used _and_ are Open Source, and will the user be so kind as to clearly identify these parts, please?
Also, UCITA and friends (or should I say, "and business partners"?) would make it illegal to distribute any proprietary modifications with the open source. This is because the modifications aren't inherently Free (RMS's definition), it's only that the GPL says that they must be made free if they are made to GPLed code... or does it?
Perhaps GPL-III (Grandson of GPL) can be phrased in such a manner that modifications to GoGPL'ed code are inherently blessed (made "holy", ie Free) as they happen?
I also hope to avoid the day when someone ships GPL source for an original, plus a proprietary program which applies encrypted proprietary patches to the GPL source as it is compiled. In this way, the patches are distributed non-GPL ("mere aggregation" does not implicitly GPL them) rather than modified GPL code being distributed, so they escape the "virality" of the GPL.
Law sucks. I dearly wish common sense were universally enforceable.
BTW, a good example of this is the second amendment. It guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, but a "civil" right is the right not to get shot. The constitutional right would be the right to shoot back. Which is more important, and which is more feasable to guarantee?
It's pretty obvious that the civil right is extremely difficult to police at all, let alone fairly. The Constitutional right seems to be in the process of being phased out, by burial in apathy and the death of a thousand laws and regulations.
I guess that leaves us with the right to get shot, whether or not we bear arms.
It seems to me that RMS is on the side of Constitutional, and opensource.org is on the side of Civil. For one thing, not a lot of people can really see the difference between the two sides, the differences in inevitable consequences of taking either position. For another, defenders of Constitutional rights and RMS are both generally viewed as slightly nutty and difficult to get on with.
RMS is a religious fundamentalist in his own way. He'd probably be upset to hear that, but there is no behavioural difference: he holds an uncommon fundamental belief, and I don't know if he'd die to protect it, but he'd come a lot closer than 99.99% of people would. The only difference in principle between RMS and a kris-waving Jihad participant is in methods.
The world would be much nicer if all religious fundamentalists limited themselves to spreading their ideas by debate and assertion, rather than with swords(*) and the kind of political cheating that always leads to wars and massacres.
But it was not foretold so, and of course it is not working out so. I think RMS's example of doing the best that he can with what there is, is a good one.
(*) and poinards, garrots, etc. See a transcript of the Jesuit Oath for a comprehensive list.
I really don't care whether people steal musician's incomes through Napster (they do) or whether CDs are sold that would not be sold if Napster weren't there (they are).
My own opinion of that battle is that most of the thieves would be too cheap to buy the CDs anyway, would simply borrow/hire the physical CDs and clone them - and that while sales are made as a result of the "deep preview" made available through Napster, they are not large. Storm in a teacup.
Traditional media and their distribution methods are essentially dead, they just haven't hit the ground yet and won't for a long time. Whether they were killed by the new media and methods being inherently better, or their greed (overpricing) makes it suicide will be an unending debate.
HOWEVER, lumping stealers-of-craft together with those who willingly give their craft (Open Source authors) and those who willingly accept it (Open Source users) is a biiiig mistake. They are ethical chalk and cheese. It would be like saying that stealing commercial software has merit (*). Don't do it, Jon!
The Open Source authors give their craft to the world, sometimes, as do some musicians, sometimes. These same authors often write commercial software, whether closed-source or not. Their Open Source projects are fair game, their commercial efforts are a protected species. Why should it be any different with music?
* Note: of course, stealing something like Windows is doubly stupid. Kind of like stealing horses from a knacker's yard...
A Mavica with an LS-120 would store a useful number of hi-res pictures, but it would still die in short order if used in the Australian outback at all. Solid state storage is an absolute must where the dreaded red dust proliferates.
I've just finished a whirlwind tour of the Pilbara, toting a Sony DSC-F505 (1600x1200, manual everything if required, auto everything if not, also does short videos and sound bites). The ability to pick up a small, light, digital camera from a mouse-mat behind the gearstick and have a viewfinder-aligned picture in seconds, as compared with the time involved unpacking a decent but large and heavy optical camera and getting it steady, has won me many photos from subjects who would otherwise have been long gone. I met a geologist in my travels, with a nice film Nikon and a great set of filters that cost exactly as much as my 505 and 32MB RAM stick. Most of his pictures will look better than most of mine, but I'll get pictures that he won't, and get them faster. In the tradeoff between grain and pixellisation, film still wins (well, serious film still wins), but won't for long. Each year's new generation of cameras seems to up the number of pixels by the golden ratio at no increase in real price, where film seems to be hitting the design envelope. Film, like glow-in-the-dark valves, will be a very long time dying, but the writing is on the wall.
I drive a Honda, and I love my Honda. I do not spend most of my waking hours evangalizing about why Toyotas are inferior cars. I'm content to drive the car I want to drive.
I drive a Peugeot 504D. I challenge you and your Honda to a duel. In particular, to a joust. (-:
Would you have a PIII650 with 256MB if it wasnt for Windows being directly responsible for expanding the user base of PC's and thereby lowering the prices for everyone
Prophetic. "Would you have cheap fuel if it hadn't been for gas-guzzlers?" I guess what you're trying to say here is that Windows == Edsel, Linux == V-Tech?
BTW, we don't have cheap fuel, it now costs about $5 a gallon in Perth, Western Australia, but most people haven't noticed that because it's sold by the litre here. It also contains enough benzene to defoliate the entire Amazon basin. The parallels with DOS-heritage software are hard to ignore.
my tools of choice are: Win2000 (which works great)
...on selected hardware and with selected applications. Here was I thinking that WINE was bad... oh, well, live and learn. Or just live, it's always your choice. (-:
Give me an account on your system and then we'll take turns deleting files, and whoever deletes something that makes the system crash loses.
Microsoft already have something like that. SETUP.EXE, I believe it's called.
In the Bad Old Days, we would take turns writing random words into random locations withing a live system's kernel memory space. Last user to write a word wins. The game was called "Bomber" and was written in AlphaBASIC to run on an Alpha Micro AM-100.
Perhaps we should implement/dev/kickme for the Linux kernel - any write to it "drops a bomb" into the kernel's memory space (outbound dirty disk buffers would be good). You could get nice reactions by making copies of/dev/null with that name, once the word got around. (-:
What OS did you start on, when you first touched a PC?
Define "PC". If I can use my definition, I first touched AMOS, then RSX-11-M-PLUS (without DCL, thank you), then proprietary horrors like the NEC-8023B's OS (unload the heads, seek, load the heads) and the Hitachi Peach. Later, I tried CP/M-80 (2.0 then 2.2, although I did get to work for a while in 1.4). MS-DOS was an unheralded and generally unwanted ever-growing pile of bandaids lurking in the future. And Windows built on this pile (NT was the best thing to ever happen to Windows, and MS are steadily working around that).
[MS] DO make good software at times.
Define "make". NT is an interesting blend of MICA, OS/2 and some other parts, and you could not clearly prove that Microsoft wrote the majority of the code in it. Most, possibly all, of their useable applications were bought in whole or in part (and in most cases, let the seller beware - think "SpyGlass Systems") the applications were not "made" by MS in the normal sense of the word. Bill actually admitted to getting started by stealing other peoples' (buggy! no change there) code out of rubbish bins at Uni, but now sues people for stealing his. To quote Gus the robot, "Oh, now this is fair...".
It's not as if the States is short of fear, uncertainty and doubt.
The proposed measures ring of the Third Reich; they're also the exact same methods used by the Holy Office of the Inquisition - Torquemada would be pleased to see his old methods still in use - and they'll trash the broken remains of that self-respect which still survives in non-mob-mentality students.
If students weren't crowded, essentially against their wills, into ever more packed schools and away from family and in many cases friends, in other words away from all of our normal social development agents, far fewer people would "go off." Adding "Pinkerton Pressure" and more peer back-stabbing to the social mix is beyond stupid.
There are moves afoot to extend school hours in the name of reducing street crime - putting out the fire with gasoline.
I believe that the best answer is to leave children in their families for longer, and instead of teaching them a mixture of mostly useless rote material and vague, fuzzy, new-age group emoting techniques, first put them in an environment where they can learn how to figure things out for themselves.
Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime. And the corollaries:
* teach a man to think and figure things out, feed/house/clothe him and many others for a life time;
* force-feed a man fish for ten to twelve years and wonder why he grows up hating fish...?
And finally, I bet Pinkerton aren't exactly crying all the way to the bank over this...
Now if they get together with those 10GB-on-a-scotch-tape-roll people, we can fit, oooh, let's see... (waves thumb at pic) maybe 150GB inside that little tube, then power and optic sockets on one end for rack mounting (LOBOWR, Lots Of Batons On Wine Racks), solar cells on the case and on the rear of the screens for portability, IR and wireless out the other end, and there you have a dream computer.
No, wait, we need a 3-megapixel camera and zoom lens in on end, so have to stick the IR and wireless in the power/fibre end too.
Uh, one more thing, let's squeeze in a laser for measuring distances, pointing at things, and line-of-sight comms. (-:
I know there is at least one guy on the Mandrake mailing list who runs Mandrake on his 486.
I run Mandrake 6.1 on a 486SLC40, which is a 386 wannabe 486 (no FPU, kind of like a 486SX but in actuality a stretched 386). It would need an FPU to install, so I rebuilt the kernel for FPU emulation by plugging the drive into a 486, installing there, and doing make menuconfig etc. No other software was recompiled. It runs ferpectly. (-:
The warnings on 7.0 are no more dire than on 6.1, so expect the same technique to work with it.
See this website for pix of the machine. It is about to suffer a brain transplant (to permit more RAM) so I can use it as a cached, filtering proxy.
MacOS maybe. Hearing that distinctive tinkling noise from Windows after hours of keying notes can be more than a bit upsetting, especially if it's a late night bit of genius and you can't quite remember what you did...
Besides, paying more for an OS that crashes than for your synth has an odd "suckered" kind of feeling to it.
In recycling second-hand machines, I find that many of them are unreliable, and when I can investigate, I find out that they always have been - but because they ran Windows, which they accepted as being crashey, the users never twigged. This is (one reason) why Windows isn't ready for the desktop.
Nice, but even the 2Mb products (and yes, there is no 2MB wireless LAN product, someone (marketroid?) just made an error there somewhere, only 2Mb) are $US209 per end and not including PCMCIA-(ISA|PCI) adapter... like, in practice, probably $US90-120 per end more than Lucent, who are ouchy enough at about $Oz500 an end already.
The 600W of a standard microwave is emitted inside a Faraday cage (shield), and I'm note sure that the WaveLAN card puts out as much as 100mW continuously.
Given the amount of power than an Athlon sucks now (two fans and a block of Al that weighs more than some notebooks), by the time we get to 2GHz CPUs you'll be able to heat your coffee bimodally - both by fan-forced convection and microwave - if only we can convince case makers to put the appropriate dent in, and CPU-cooler makers to make hollow fans that suck air through the heatsink instead of blowing.
Perhaps we could patch RC5 for temperature control? You know, feedback from the CPU temperature sensors, that kind of thing, wouldn't be hard to figure out from the heatsink temperature drop that a cold cup of coffee had been put down on it, and play a kettle-whistle sound bite when the cup was up to the right temperature.
Slashdot Mirror
That makes... mmm... let me see... about 10E17 hypothetical universe lifetimes to the first Mills & Boone novel. Shakespeare? Not a chance. (-:
And since you don't have to escape a lot of gravity at launch, the rocket would be able to bring ridiculous amounts of material to Earth.
I want to be in the other hemisphere, a loooong way from any oceans, when it lands...
The bottom line is that PHP is a much better implementation of the approach shown in ASP.
:-). If I work at a site that features NT boxes, I set up a script on a Linux (or *BSD) box to check them all and send email to an administrator when one dies, pointedly signing it "such-and-such Linux Server" or "such-and-such FreeBSD Server".
You mean, ASP is a poor implementation of the approach shown by PHP, don't you?
Cost. You need NT to run it.
And not just the up-front cost. You're running it on "tell me where to go today" IIS (I hope it's not V4?) plus "reboot me weekly" NT.
Actually, that last is a bit mean. It's fairly safe to reboot about every ten days with most NT servers (-: g, d, r
I actually have a simple PHP script for reporting on the aliveness of IIS (or any other HTTP for that matter) servers.
Ever thought about how much New Jersey weighs? This asteroid would be a few orders of magnitude heavier, and you want to change it's velocity by how much?
Cockroaches (big ones, like 1-1.5 inches long) were everywhere.
Perth is such a healthy place that I have seen the building across Milligan Street from Fast Eddy's emit 3in (7 to 8cm) roaches. You could just about harness the buggers and use them in a no-batteries radio-controlled vehicle.
BTW, these were imported-from-Europe roaches, not the prettier, cleaner native roaches, which seem to be going the way of the native bees.
Well, I got to the first part, about treating him calmly, just fine. I calmly flamed him.
He needs it. He's the jerk who set up the hackpcweek farce, inviting MS to install/tune their server and then not so much as visiting RedHat's update site by clicking on the update icon right there on the default desktop.
More napalm! We need more napalm!
But to answer your question, "does it matter if the black box is accessed over the web?" -- I think it does, or to be more specific, it matters if the program is running the memory space of my black box versus your black box.
:-)
Nice, simple and clear-cut. Hee-hee.
If you run (say) PatheticWriter at an ASP's site, you will be using an X server on your machine to do it. PW will send icons (as bitmaps) and other data to your X server to be displayed and maybe clicked on. The icon now lives in your machine. It has been "distributed" to you. It is a part of the program. Has the program been "distributed" to you, or not?
Fine it down some more. You run Word at an ASP using Terminal Server (or some other near equivalent like VNC). You see an icon on your screen. There is a conceptual difference here, as the icon has not been sent to your machine as a separate bitmap. Nevertheless, it has been "distributed" to you. Same questions as above.
BTW, you can move your mouse cursor over the icon, and the cursor turns into a little hand. The hand _has_ been distributed to you. You click. Word crashes. Lo, identical functionality! (-: sorry, couldn't resist
Fine it up a little more. It is the future. You are running a Java interface within your browser to access a Word descendent (say Word 13) at your ASP. Word 13 contains GPLed code, but the Java interface doesn't. An icon comes up as before, presented to you by the proprietary Java interface. It is visually indistinguishable from the previous two cases, and the Java interface, while a separate component, needs Word 13 to be useful. Has any software component of a program containing GPLed code been distributed to you?
A separate but related issue: the ASP has had a GPL-containing program distributed to them, in the form of Word 13, therefore the ASP must have free and unrestricted access to the full source for Word 13, yes?
Let's see how thin we can get these hairs! One day a court will be doing the same thing, and we want to know ahead of time how it turns out.
I can't see even the most out-of-touch judge supporting the idea that an item can be used by many people and yet not have been distributed to those people.
I cite the example of the US Constitution itself. Not only can people use it without actually having it, they can use it without actually having the information in it. Yes, I know the cases are different, but you can bet that a similar argument will turn up in court one day. Are we ready?
I can also see some meathead arguing that the users only run certain parts of it, so they only need to distribute the source for the parts which the user has actually used _and_ are Open Source, and will the user be so kind as to clearly identify these parts, please?
Also, UCITA and friends (or should I say, "and business partners"?) would make it illegal to distribute any proprietary modifications with the open source. This is because the modifications aren't inherently Free (RMS's definition), it's only that the GPL says that they must be made free if they are made to GPLed code... or does it?
Perhaps GPL-III (Grandson of GPL) can be phrased in such a manner that modifications to GoGPL'ed code are inherently blessed (made "holy", ie Free) as they happen?
I also hope to avoid the day when someone ships GPL source for an original, plus a proprietary program which applies encrypted proprietary patches to the GPL source as it is compiled. In this way, the patches are distributed non-GPL ("mere aggregation" does not implicitly GPL them) rather than modified GPL code being distributed, so they escape the "virality" of the GPL.
Law sucks. I dearly wish common sense were universally enforceable.
Text is not intense, no matter how big the font.
Ooooh, I dunno... red 200-point bold Verdana can get pretty intense inside a tag pair. (-:
BTW, a good example of this is the second amendment. It guarantees the right to keep and bear arms, but a "civil" right is the right not to get shot. The constitutional right would be the right to shoot back. Which is more important, and which is more feasable to guarantee?
It's pretty obvious that the civil right is extremely difficult to police at all, let alone fairly. The Constitutional right seems to be in the process of being phased out, by burial in apathy and the death of a thousand laws and regulations.
I guess that leaves us with the right to get shot, whether or not we bear arms.
It seems to me that RMS is on the side of Constitutional, and opensource.org is on the side of Civil. For one thing, not a lot of people can really see the difference between the two sides, the differences in inevitable consequences of taking either position. For another, defenders of Constitutional rights and RMS are both generally viewed as slightly nutty and difficult to get on with.
RMS is a religious fundamentalist in his own way. He'd probably be upset to hear that, but there is no behavioural difference: he holds an uncommon fundamental belief, and I don't know if he'd die to protect it, but he'd come a lot closer than 99.99% of people would. The only difference in principle between RMS and a kris-waving Jihad participant is in methods.
The world would be much nicer if all religious fundamentalists limited themselves to spreading their ideas by debate and assertion, rather than with swords(*) and the kind of political cheating that always leads to wars and massacres.
But it was not foretold so, and of course it is not working out so. I think RMS's example of doing the best that he can with what there is, is a good one.
(*) and poinards, garrots, etc. See a transcript of the Jesuit Oath for a comprehensive list.
I really don't care whether people steal musician's incomes through Napster (they do) or whether CDs are sold that would not be sold if Napster weren't there (they are).
My own opinion of that battle is that most of the thieves would be too cheap to buy the CDs anyway, would simply borrow/hire the physical CDs and clone them - and that while sales are made as a result of the "deep preview" made available through Napster, they are not large. Storm in a teacup.
Traditional media and their distribution methods are essentially dead, they just haven't hit the ground yet and won't for a long time. Whether they were killed by the new media and methods being inherently better, or their greed (overpricing) makes it suicide will be an unending debate.
HOWEVER, lumping stealers-of-craft together with those who willingly give their craft (Open Source authors) and those who willingly accept it (Open Source users) is a biiiig mistake. They are ethical chalk and cheese. It would be like saying that stealing commercial software has merit (*). Don't do it, Jon!
The Open Source authors give their craft to the world, sometimes, as do some musicians, sometimes. These same authors often write commercial software, whether closed-source or not. Their Open Source projects are fair game, their commercial efforts are a protected species. Why should it be any different with music?
* Note: of course, stealing something like Windows is doubly stupid. Kind of like stealing horses from a knacker's yard...
A Mavica with an LS-120 would store a useful number of hi-res pictures, but it would still die in short order if used in the Australian outback at all. Solid state storage is an absolute must where the dreaded red dust proliferates.
I've just finished a whirlwind tour of the Pilbara, toting a Sony DSC-F505 (1600x1200, manual everything if required, auto everything if not, also does short videos and sound bites). The ability to pick up a small, light, digital camera from a mouse-mat behind the gearstick and have a viewfinder-aligned picture in seconds, as compared with the time involved unpacking a decent but large and heavy optical camera and getting it steady, has won me many photos from subjects who would otherwise have been long gone. I met a geologist in my travels, with a nice film Nikon and a great set of filters that cost exactly as much as my 505 and 32MB RAM stick. Most of his pictures will look better than most of mine, but I'll get pictures that he won't, and get them faster. In the tradeoff between grain and pixellisation, film still wins (well, serious film still wins), but won't for long. Each year's new generation of cameras seems to up the number of pixels by the golden ratio at no increase in real price, where film seems to be hitting the design envelope. Film, like glow-in-the-dark valves, will be a very long time dying, but the writing is on the wall.
I drive a Honda, and I love my Honda. I do not spend most of my waking hours evangalizing about why Toyotas are inferior cars. I'm content to drive the car I want to drive.
I drive a Peugeot 504D. I challenge you and your Honda to a duel. In particular, to a joust. (-:
Would you have a PIII650 with 256MB if it wasnt for Windows being directly responsible for expanding the user base of PC's and thereby lowering the prices for everyone
Prophetic. "Would you have cheap fuel if it hadn't been for gas-guzzlers?" I guess what you're trying to say here is that Windows == Edsel, Linux == V-Tech?
BTW, we don't have cheap fuel, it now costs about $5 a gallon in Perth, Western Australia, but most people haven't noticed that because it's sold by the litre here. It also contains enough benzene to defoliate the entire Amazon basin. The parallels with DOS-heritage software are hard to ignore.
my tools of choice are: Win2000 (which works great)
...on selected hardware and with selected applications. Here was I thinking that WINE was bad... oh, well, live and learn. Or just live, it's always your choice. (-:
Give me an account on your system and then we'll take turns deleting files, and whoever deletes something that makes the system crash loses.
/dev/kickme for the Linux kernel - any write to it "drops a bomb" into the kernel's memory space (outbound dirty disk buffers would be good). You could get nice reactions by making copies of /dev/null with that name, once the word got around. (-:
Microsoft already have something like that. SETUP.EXE, I believe it's called.
In the Bad Old Days, we would take turns writing random words into random locations withing a live system's kernel memory space. Last user to write a word wins. The game was called "Bomber" and was written in AlphaBASIC to run on an Alpha Micro AM-100.
Perhaps we should implement
What OS did you start on, when you first touched a PC?
Define "PC". If I can use my definition, I first touched AMOS, then RSX-11-M-PLUS (without DCL, thank you), then proprietary horrors like the NEC-8023B's OS (unload the heads, seek, load the heads) and the Hitachi Peach. Later, I tried CP/M-80 (2.0 then 2.2, although I did get to work for a while in 1.4). MS-DOS was an unheralded and generally unwanted ever-growing pile of bandaids lurking in the future. And Windows built on this pile (NT was the best thing to ever happen to Windows, and MS are steadily working around that).
[MS] DO make good software at times.
Define "make". NT is an interesting blend of MICA, OS/2 and some other parts, and you could not clearly prove that Microsoft wrote the majority of the code in it. Most, possibly all, of their useable applications were bought in whole or in part (and in most cases, let the seller beware - think "SpyGlass Systems") the applications were not "made" by MS in the normal sense of the word. Bill actually admitted to getting started by stealing other peoples' (buggy! no change there) code out of rubbish bins at Uni, but now sues people for stealing his. To quote Gus the robot, "Oh, now this is fair...".
It's not as if the States is short of fear, uncertainty and doubt.
The proposed measures ring of the Third Reich; they're also the exact same methods used by the Holy Office of the Inquisition - Torquemada would be pleased to see his old methods still in use - and they'll trash the broken remains of that self-respect which still survives in non-mob-mentality students.
If students weren't crowded, essentially against their wills, into ever more packed schools and away from family and in many cases friends, in other words away from all of our normal social development agents, far fewer people would "go off." Adding "Pinkerton Pressure" and more peer back-stabbing to the social mix is beyond stupid.
There are moves afoot to extend school hours in the name of reducing street crime - putting out the fire with gasoline.
I believe that the best answer is to leave children in their families for longer, and instead of teaching them a mixture of mostly useless rote material and vague, fuzzy, new-age group emoting techniques, first put them in an environment where they can learn how to figure things out for themselves.
Give a man a fish, feed him for a day; teach a man to fish, feed him for a lifetime. And the corollaries:
* teach a man to think and figure things out, feed/house/clothe him and many others for a life time;
* force-feed a man fish for ten to twelve years and wonder why he grows up hating fish...?
And finally, I bet Pinkerton aren't exactly crying all the way to the bank over this...
Now if they get together with those 10GB-on-a-scotch-tape-roll people, we can fit, oooh, let's see... (waves thumb at pic) maybe 150GB inside that little tube, then power and optic sockets on one end for rack mounting (LOBOWR, Lots Of Batons On Wine Racks), solar cells on the case and on the rear of the screens for portability, IR and wireless out the other end, and there you have a dream computer.
No, wait, we need a 3-megapixel camera and zoom lens in on end, so have to stick the IR and wireless in the power/fibre end too.
Uh, one more thing, let's squeeze in a laser for measuring distances, pointing at things, and line-of-sight comms. (-:
I know there is at least one guy on the Mandrake mailing list who runs Mandrake on his 486.
I run Mandrake 6.1 on a 486SLC40, which is a 386 wannabe 486 (no FPU, kind of like a 486SX but in actuality a stretched 386). It would need an FPU to install, so I rebuilt the kernel for FPU emulation by plugging the drive into a 486, installing there, and doing make menuconfig etc. No other software was recompiled. It runs ferpectly. (-:
The warnings on 7.0 are no more dire than on 6.1, so expect the same technique to work with it.
See this website for pix of the machine. It is about to suffer a brain transplant (to permit more RAM) so I can use it as a cached, filtering proxy.
That's what Windows and MacOS are for.
MacOS maybe. Hearing that distinctive tinkling noise from Windows after hours of keying notes can be more than a bit upsetting, especially if it's a late night bit of genius and you can't quite remember what you did...
Besides, paying more for an OS that crashes than for your synth has an odd "suckered" kind of feeling to it.
In recycling second-hand machines, I find that many of them are unreliable, and when I can investigate, I find out that they always have been - but because they ran Windows, which they accepted as being crashey, the users never twigged. This is (one reason) why Windows isn't ready for the desktop.
Nice, but even the 2Mb products (and yes, there is no 2MB wireless LAN product, someone (marketroid?) just made an error there somewhere, only 2Mb) are $US209 per end and not including PCMCIA-(ISA|PCI) adapter... like, in practice, probably $US90-120 per end more than Lucent, who are ouchy enough at about $Oz500 an end already.
Ok but how much performance do you lose when encrypting the link? Is it enough to drop you to a 1mb/s from the ideal 11mb/s?
Not unless you're using something like a 386SX... the cost (with FreeS/WAN) is in processor power within the nodes, not in bandwidth.
I would hope that the MCUs in the cards could (en|de)crypt fast enough to not slow the link either, using the card-based encryption.
Have you been taking English lessons from Tarzan?
:-)
No, cobber, from Manuel Garcia O'Kelly. (-: Dial MYCROFTXXX for more information
Linux has, at last count, six different was of encrypting IP traffic, not counting ssh, PGP and the like. Who cares what the card itself does?
The 600W of a standard microwave is emitted inside a Faraday cage (shield), and I'm note sure that the WaveLAN card puts out as much as 100mW continuously.
Given the amount of power than an Athlon sucks now (two fans and a block of Al that weighs more than some notebooks), by the time we get to 2GHz CPUs you'll be able to heat your coffee bimodally - both by fan-forced convection and microwave - if only we can convince case makers to put the appropriate dent in, and CPU-cooler makers to make hollow fans that suck air through the heatsink instead of blowing.
Perhaps we could patch RC5 for temperature control? You know, feedback from the CPU temperature sensors, that kind of thing, wouldn't be hard to figure out from the heatsink temperature drop that a cold cup of coffee had been put down on it, and play a kettle-whistle sound bite when the cup was up to the right temperature.