Central NFS server with home directories on;/home mounted at startup on all the clients. That's the easy bit. At the time that we initially did it, setting up OpenLDAP was a real pain in the neck, but the more recent distributions have made it much easier - with RH8 at least everything you need comes pre-installed and it's just a matter of changing a couple of lines in a configuration file. The server side is a bit more tricky, but not much: set up OpenLDAP, tell it the (standard, provided) schema to use and then (sigh) write your scripts to add and modify users... Of course, by now, there will probably be countless management tools available, but we had to make up our own. I'd assumed that this was all nicely documented somewhere, too, but if it's not, I'll try to dig out the instructions we wrote out and send them on.
We were in the same position; I was one of the founding members of our Computer Society, which has since been flourishing - here's what we did.
First and foremost, the absolute requirement is to have a sizeable number of people who are interested. I'm afraid that in my experience 'build it and they will come' does not cut much ice in this area - we had about a dozen people, which is enough to fill a small-ish room and so make meetings to voice support seem well-attended and popular:-) Basically, by asking nicely, and by getting the support of a Computing teacher, we managed to persuade the Powers That Be to grant us the use of a lab - complete with Ethernet & power around the room - outside lesson times to do what we liked with. We also managed to scrounge a few machines that were going spare - old Macs, mostly. From little acorns...
We used to hang around in there and experiment a bit, and very quickly the mini-network we had established (totally separate, as an imposed requirement, from the then-repressive school one - and so without any internet connectivity etc.) began to grow. People donated parts or computers; someone's Dad's surgery was clearing stuff out, so we got a server and a whole bunch of Vectras; we picked up arcane things like ancient Suns and SGIs; we bought a bunch of decent Compaq desktops off a failed.com for 25 quid each. We soon had more computers - a few dozen - than space, plus a good collection of books, bits, software, etc.
We all helped set things up, fix broken things, install software, build a proper network with roamng home directories, unified LDAP logons across multiple platforms, etc. (mostly Linux, but a few other Unices and a bit of Windows and classic Mac OS on the side...) It became actually usable as a resource, and people who weren't initially interested started to use our systems to learn to program, etc., which was very hard to do elsewhere. We lent them books, helped where we could, and so on. We ran projects, like robocode competitions, which were popular even with younger members of the school. We experimented with new things, like beta releases of Mac OS X, and Windows remote desktop things, so that we now provide all of the Windows applications from one application server to the Linux desktops. And so on, and so forth. We got up to all sorts of things (like this), wrote various neat bits of code and taught ourselves a great deal in the process.
A few of us wrote some software which turned out to be very useful to the school (a fairly advanced web-based content management system) and fought long political battles over how far pupils were to be trusted with such matters - would we put secret backdoors in, and so on. We finally reached an agreement which now promotes this sort of activity (previously frowned upon but now with more projects in the pipeline), and, as a bonus, guaranteed us the continued use of our lab and an internet connection.
Anyway, I hope this gives you some idea of what it was like for us and was vaguely helpful... Let me know if you have any questions.
As you ride your indoor trainer, Gamebike reads
your speed and steering and gives you a full function handlebar-mounted controller, putting you into your favorite driving game.
So it picks up your speed from the trainer rollers on the rear wheel, steering is via the front wheel sensor and everything else via buttons on a handlebar-mounted controller. Sounds about right to me - how could this be done better?
No - I thought exactly the same thing! Furthermore, the sound effects as the brooms whizzed past were rather similar to the X-Wing noises... or perhaps that's just my imagination:-)
End credits said it was done by Industrial Light & Magic, which is a division of Lucas Digital... Perhaps that explains it. "Hey, we can save a load of work if we just lift..."
Demonstration of a 'chip pan fire' - ignite a small crucible-full of cooking oil, stand well back, squirt with water from squeezy bottle. Fireballs up to the ceiling if you get it right:-)
Also the custard bomb (demonstrating speed of reaction increases with surface area) - can't remember the specifics, but it involved a spark in a custard tin with a small amount of very fine powder in it: big bang, lid blown off etc.
> Backup: $40 online backup - does anyone do this? Whats wrong w/ burning your 'keeper' stuff to a CDR? You certainly wont have room to store your apps/OS, whats the point?Besides, to you want Apple in possession of your personal data - they have nosy admins also you know...
I quote (emphasis mine):
Backup software to back up your files to iDisk, CD, or DVD
The $40 is their estimate of how much a standard backup application would cost; their one it seems will let you back up either to their servers or to a CD-R etc. as normal.
As I understand it, it's not just using checksums, which I agree could still be open to attack. It's requiring all the packages it installs to be cryptographically signed - i.e. Apple must sign all packages they release with THEIR private key and the Software Update client has a copy of Apple's public key in order to be able to verify the signatures. If the signature can't be verified, it won't install the package - i.e. for a malicious third party to be able to install something on a user's machine via Software Update not only would he have to DNS spoof as before but he would also have to obtain Apple's private key from somewhere, which I would hope/expect is fairly difficult. This is the same practise as RH, Ximian et al. use...
It probably would work, but I'd just be really nervous about taking something with a spinning disk running. No doubt unfounded fears, but I can just see in my minds eye me slipping or jolting it too suddenly and the head going straight through the platter...
The iPod has 32MB of RAM, as far as I know, which it fills with the next x songs as a cache before spinning the disk down. If it was possible to _force_ it to spin down the disk and just play from there I'd be happier. Perhaps just having a playlist 32MB would have this effect... Without trying it I can't say.
I was in exactly the same position, trying to decide between an iPod and a Nex II. Advantages of the iPod:
sexy
larger capacity
faster transfers
the interface is excellent (playlist support etc.)
On the other hand, making one work on Linux looked like being a real pain, I'd be worried about taking it running/cycling and they're expensive, so in the end, as I had a 1GB Microdrive lying around, I went for the Nex II. It arrived yesterday. Haven't had much of a chance to fiddle with it yet, but it seems good so far. It's smaller and lighter than an iPod, the screen and interface is good and (without the Microdrive) it's shock-proof. And it was very cheap... ($200 is a rip-off. Try this list of online retailers - you can one from $79).
Furthermore, there's a great and responsive online community/mailing list for the thing here on Yahoo! Groups.
Hope this helps a bit. If you have specific questions feel free to ask...
I had pretty much exactly the same criteria as you did when choosing a camera, except I wasn't so bothered about the media type: basically, I was after something as SLR-like as possible with changeable lenses and manual control over everything without spending thousands and thousands. The main two contenders seemed to be the Fuji 6900 and the Canon PowerShot G2, both of which were highly recommended in group tests and reviews, but after playing with both of them in a camera shop I decided that the Canon just didn't feel right for me - no doubt it's a great camera, but I much preferred the Fuji's SLR-like look and feel over the Canon's. The only trouble with the Fuji was that it ONLY took SmartMedia; however, just as I was about to buy it Fuji released the new S602 Zoom, which is basically the same but with dual slots for both CompactFlash and SmartMedia, so it'll take a Microdrive as well, a slightly better sensor and AA batteries instead of a proprietary, expensive one. I jumped at it and for my purposes it's been ideal. If you liked the 6900, its replacement is definitely the camera for you.
If you're interested, there are a few reviews here, here and here which influenced my decision.
I love my 602 and certainly wouldn't have gone for anything else - if you've got any questions feel free to give me a shout.
But you always hear people saying that looking into deep space is like looking through a time machine.
I think that what they're referring to is the fact that because the stars you can see are so far away it takes light emitted from them a very long time (think: millions of years for some...) to reach us; hence what we see when we look up at night at a particular star is the way that star looked millions of years ago, not the way it is now. For all we know it could well no longer exist - in that sense we're looking at the past.
I don't see a problem with your policy at all. Of course people shouldn't be allowed to install pirated games on school computers (or indeed legal games, for that matter...) - but you at least sanctioned massive Xpilot games... Here, you can get done for playing chess(!) on a computer - but walking two classrooms down the corridor and playing it on a chessboard is legitimate. The main problem our school has is people playing Java/Flash games, or single-EXE freeware downloadables - not causing any technical problems (or problems to other students), just against the rules. Fine, if you break the rules, you get punished - but the rules are somewhat stupid. For example, I could understand a 'no games at all during school hours' rule - but why shouldn't people be allowed to play AFTER THE END OF TERM, for goodness' sake, or play Solitaire while waiting for a music concert/play rehearsal/whatever after school?
Re:Not exactly outdoor, but out of the house
on
Geek Outdoor Hobbies?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Hmm. Laser Quest is fun - but nowhere near as fun as paintballing. Laser Quest involves being inside buildings painted all in black and shooting at people at close range with cheesy sound effects; there's no physical aspect to it at all. Sure, it's a laugh, but it's pretty much the same all the time... Paintballing is outdoors; it involves crawling around in mud a lot in my experience:-) Still, you get much, much more of an adrenaline rush hiding with a mate behind a tree/log as millions of paintballs whistle over your heads trying to get down covering fire as teammates go for their flag, etc. - or sprinting for home through the undergrowth with The Bad Guys in hot pursuit. Much more in the way of tactics, much more in the way of teamwork, much work in the way of physical exercise.
Laser Quest isn't as fun - but it's not anywhere near as expensive, either. After charging plenty for entry they hit you with huge bills for the ammunition as well. Ouch.
Hmm... Very odd... Never seen that before (and I've run it on two Dell laptops similar to yours...) You might want to try the support forum and see if anyone there can help you out...
The IT policy is indeed fairly oppressive (as is the way its enforced) - but the Computer Society is the ray of hope here. We fought long and hard to establish it and its one of the few ways of actually learning anything about how computers work as opposed to how to use them as a means to an end. We've set up our own network of a couple of dozen machines of all types running every OS under the sun for people to take apart, fiddle with, code on, whatever; all run by pupils with minimal staff intervention. It's worked really well so far...
We've tried persuading the Powers That Be of this one, but to no avail. Logic has no effect in this particular matter. "Oh no," they cry, "because if one person is playing a game, everybody else in the room will be tempted to and soon nobody will ever do any work!"
Mmm. We were playing this on our own dedicated Linux network which we have set up, but on the main school network (Win2k only, everywhere...) other people have great fun trying to hide things like Liero in places where they won't be found... The job is made easier by the fact that there's a 'public' share which everyone has read/write access to, so the current trick-of-the-day is make about 100 nested folders (sufficiently deep that nobody ever bothers clicking enough to get to the bottom!), putting file in there renamed to something.xls and pasting full path in a file (and renaming it back when they wanted to play)...
The game needs X, though, and on those machines X was always on 7 - 1 was just a plain, ordinary, bog-standard terminal. You'd have to go to a fair bit of effort to move X to 1 - and nobody (who had the root password) would want to/bother, so were were OK on that front. Far more worrying were the people who forgot to run the daemon before playing and so had to hurriedly do Ctrl+Alt+F1 on hearing the door open:-)
You're right, of course, it wouldn't really work in that environment. You'd have to have a person with a good view of potential boss entry routes push a big red button to switch everyone's terminals or something:-) Still, the unified everyone-switches-at-once is quite fun... (The daemon we wrote itself is quite entertaining, especially when you send commands like 'eject' to a room full of 30 machines...)
People walking past was the difficulty - we had to spend a while fiddling with camera aim, focus etc. so people walking PAST the door (it's got a window thing in it) didn't trigger it:-)
At my school there is an absolute no-games-on-computers, ever policy in force; at the end of term though we all felt desperately in need of some BZFlag action. Being the Computer Society, we decided the way ahead was to set up a USB QuickCam connected to a Linux machine with motion detecting software (apt-get install...) aiming right at the bottom of the door; we then wrote a quick app to be executed when motion was detected which would send a specific broadcast packet on the network and a daemon to run on the client (also Linux) workstations which, on receiving the packet, would execute 'chvt 1' immediately. Having set all of this up (in about half an hour - frenzied coding!) and opened emacs/top/something-important-looking on virtual console 1, we all got down to playing BZFlag - and lo and behold, as soon as anybody walked in the door every single screen simultaneously switched to the text console and we all looked deeply studious... Worked like a charm:-)
Nobody seems to mention or pay much attention to other types of software that are available as abandonware - more usually with the blessing of the original parent company. For example, have a look at:
there are plenty more examples if you have a look around. Sure, having old games available is good for nostalgia, but things like this can actually be useful, especially if you're looking for stuff to run on older hardware or if you're after a feature that new software Just Doesn't Have (or the new software is not available on your platform etc.) - I know I've found this in various circumstances.
Um... I hardly think that it's going to be stuck up on some website somewhere with a message saying, "Here ya go, do what you like with it." What seems far and away the most likely thing is that it will be given to a very small number of 'independent experts' who have signed highly restrictive NDAs; if it leaks out from them, my comments apply. Alternatively, it might be released in the same way as the source to WinCE was released (fat chance!) but look at the license there: again, my comments hold - if you look at that code, you basically can't write any similar open-source software and get away with it. The ONLY situation in which this could be of direct use is if it was released under GPL/BSD/public domain licenses which quite frankly is just not going to happen.
Once the corporate secret is public knowledge, it can
be used by wine/samba/openoffice/whatever for higher compatability rates
Not that easy, I'm afraid. You say that you couldn't use the code directly, which is certainly true, but it goes deeper than that. If you so much as looked at the Microsoft source code you wouldn't be able to contribute to Samba/Wine/whatever (I believe that the Samba group actually put out a statement to that effect) because Microsoft lawyers would come down on you like a ton of bricks, and with some justification. They'd claim that the GPL'd code you wrote for whatever Open Source Project was based on theirs in that you discovered how to write it by looking at how they'd done it. Notice that in order to download the WinCE source that they've made available, you need to have a Passport to identify you... Anyway, it shouldn't be too hard for them to notice the patch that suddenly makes Wine work 100% or whatever.
The only way around this AFAIK is the way that Compaq (I think?) used to clone IBM's original PC BIOS: a clean-room implementation whereby you have one group of people who study the original BIOS, or in this case the MS source code, and who document every single function call etc. extremely thoroughly; this documentation is then given to a second group who have not seen the source at all and who re-implement it based only on what the first group have told them about it. Long, difficult, tedious, painstaking, but fairly safe...
Slashdot Mirror
Central NFS server with home directories on; /home mounted at startup on all the clients. That's the easy bit. At the time that we initially did it, setting up OpenLDAP was a real pain in the neck, but the more recent distributions have made it much easier - with RH8 at least everything you need comes pre-installed and it's just a matter of changing a couple of lines in a configuration file. The server side is a bit more tricky, but not much: set up OpenLDAP, tell it the (standard, provided) schema to use and then (sigh) write your scripts to add and modify users... Of course, by now, there will probably be countless management tools available, but we had to make up our own. I'd assumed that this was all nicely documented somewhere, too, but if it's not, I'll try to dig out the instructions we wrote out and send them on.
We were in the same position; I was one of the founding members of our Computer Society, which has since been flourishing - here's what we did.
First and foremost, the absolute requirement is to have a sizeable number of people who are interested. I'm afraid that in my experience 'build it and they will come' does not cut much ice in this area - we had about a dozen people, which is enough to fill a small-ish room and so make meetings to voice support seem well-attended and popular :-) Basically, by asking nicely, and by getting the support of a Computing teacher, we managed to persuade the Powers That Be to grant us the use of a lab - complete with Ethernet & power around the room - outside lesson times to do what we liked with. We also managed to scrounge a few machines that were going spare - old Macs, mostly. From little acorns...
We used to hang around in there and experiment a bit, and very quickly the mini-network we had established (totally separate, as an imposed requirement, from the then-repressive school one - and so without any internet connectivity etc.) began to grow. People donated parts or computers; someone's Dad's surgery was clearing stuff out, so we got a server and a whole bunch of Vectras; we picked up arcane things like ancient Suns and SGIs; we bought a bunch of decent Compaq desktops off a failed .com for 25 quid each. We soon had more computers - a few dozen - than space, plus a good collection of books, bits, software, etc.
We all helped set things up, fix broken things, install software, build a proper network with roamng home directories, unified LDAP logons across multiple platforms, etc. (mostly Linux, but a few other Unices and a bit of Windows and classic Mac OS on the side...) It became actually usable as a resource, and people who weren't initially interested started to use our systems to learn to program, etc., which was very hard to do elsewhere. We lent them books, helped where we could, and so on. We ran projects, like robocode competitions, which were popular even with younger members of the school. We experimented with new things, like beta releases of Mac OS X, and Windows remote desktop things, so that we now provide all of the Windows applications from one application server to the Linux desktops. And so on, and so forth. We got up to all sorts of things (like this), wrote various neat bits of code and taught ourselves a great deal in the process.
A few of us wrote some software which turned out to be very useful to the school (a fairly advanced web-based content management system) and fought long political battles over how far pupils were to be trusted with such matters - would we put secret backdoors in, and so on. We finally reached an agreement which now promotes this sort of activity (previously frowned upon but now with more projects in the pipeline), and, as a bonus, guaranteed us the continued use of our lab and an internet connection.
Anyway, I hope this gives you some idea of what it was like for us and was vaguely helpful... Let me know if you have any questions.
As you ride your indoor trainer, Gamebike reads your speed and steering and gives you a full function handlebar-mounted controller, putting you into your favorite driving game.
So it picks up your speed from the trainer rollers on the rear wheel, steering is via the front wheel sensor and everything else via buttons on a handlebar-mounted controller. Sounds about right to me - how could this be done better?
See here for a commercially-available product for interfacing turbo trainers and Playstation (2)s that has been around for a while...
No - I thought exactly the same thing! Furthermore, the sound effects as the brooms whizzed past were rather similar to the X-Wing noises... or perhaps that's just my imagination :-)
End credits said it was done by Industrial Light & Magic, which is a division of Lucas Digital... Perhaps that explains it. "Hey, we can save a load of work if we just lift..."
Demonstration of a 'chip pan fire' - ignite a small crucible-full of cooking oil, stand well back, squirt with water from squeezy bottle. Fireballs up to the ceiling if you get it right :-)
Also the custard bomb (demonstrating speed of reaction increases with surface area) - can't remember the specifics, but it involved a spark in a custard tin with a small amount of very fine powder in it: big bang, lid blown off etc.
I quote (emphasis mine):
- Backup software to back up your files to iDisk, CD, or DVD
The $40 is their estimate of how much a standard backup application would cost; their one it seems will let you back up either to their servers or to a CD-R etc. as normal.As I understand it, it's not just using checksums, which I agree could still be open to attack. It's requiring all the packages it installs to be cryptographically signed - i.e. Apple must sign all packages they release with THEIR private key and the Software Update client has a copy of Apple's public key in order to be able to verify the signatures. If the signature can't be verified, it won't install the package - i.e. for a malicious third party to be able to install something on a user's machine via Software Update not only would he have to DNS spoof as before but he would also have to obtain Apple's private key from somewhere, which I would hope/expect is fairly difficult. This is the same practise as RH, Ximian et al. use...
It probably would work, but I'd just be really nervous about taking something with a spinning disk running. No doubt unfounded fears, but I can just see in my minds eye me slipping or jolting it too suddenly and the head going straight through the platter...
The iPod has 32MB of RAM, as far as I know, which it fills with the next x songs as a cache before spinning the disk down. If it was possible to _force_ it to spin down the disk and just play from there I'd be happier. Perhaps just having a playlist 32MB would have this effect... Without trying it I can't say.
I was in exactly the same position, trying to decide between an iPod and a Nex II. Advantages of the iPod:
On the other hand, making one work on Linux looked like being a real pain, I'd be worried about taking it running/cycling and they're expensive, so in the end, as I had a 1GB Microdrive lying around, I went for the Nex II. It arrived yesterday. Haven't had much of a chance to fiddle with it yet, but it seems good so far. It's smaller and lighter than an iPod, the screen and interface is good and (without the Microdrive) it's shock-proof. And it was very cheap... ($200 is a rip-off. Try this list of online retailers - you can one from $79).
Furthermore, there's a great and responsive online community/mailing list for the thing here on Yahoo! Groups.
Hope this helps a bit. If you have specific questions feel free to ask...
If you're interested, there are a few reviews here, here and here which influenced my decision.
I love my 602 and certainly wouldn't have gone for anything else - if you've got any questions feel free to give me a shout.
But you always hear people saying that looking into deep space is like looking through a time machine.
I think that what they're referring to is the fact that because the stars you can see are so far away it takes light emitted from them a very long time (think: millions of years for some...) to reach us; hence what we see when we look up at night at a particular star is the way that star looked millions of years ago, not the way it is now. For all we know it could well no longer exist - in that sense we're looking at the past.
I don't see a problem with your policy at all. Of course people shouldn't be allowed to install pirated games on school computers (or indeed legal games, for that matter...) - but you at least sanctioned massive Xpilot games... Here, you can get done for playing chess(!) on a computer - but walking two classrooms down the corridor and playing it on a chessboard is legitimate. The main problem our school has is people playing Java/Flash games, or single-EXE freeware downloadables - not causing any technical problems (or problems to other students), just against the rules. Fine, if you break the rules, you get punished - but the rules are somewhat stupid. For example, I could understand a 'no games at all during school hours' rule - but why shouldn't people be allowed to play AFTER THE END OF TERM, for goodness' sake, or play Solitaire while waiting for a music concert/play rehearsal/whatever after school?
Hmm. Laser Quest is fun - but nowhere near as fun as paintballing. Laser Quest involves being inside buildings painted all in black and shooting at people at close range with cheesy sound effects; there's no physical aspect to it at all. Sure, it's a laugh, but it's pretty much the same all the time... Paintballing is outdoors; it involves crawling around in mud a lot in my experience :-) Still, you get much, much more of an adrenaline rush hiding with a mate behind a tree/log as millions of paintballs whistle over your heads trying to get down covering fire as teammates go for their flag, etc. - or sprinting for home through the undergrowth with The Bad Guys in hot pursuit. Much more in the way of tactics, much more in the way of teamwork, much work in the way of physical exercise.
Laser Quest isn't as fun - but it's not anywhere near as expensive, either. After charging plenty for entry they hit you with huge bills for the ammunition as well. Ouch.
Hmm... I think it was just called 'motion': http://motion.technolust.cx/ or apt-get install motion
Hmm... Very odd... Never seen that before (and I've run it on two Dell laptops similar to yours...) You might want to try the support forum and see if anyone there can help you out...
Private school, UK, ages 13-18.
The IT policy is indeed fairly oppressive (as is the way its enforced) - but the Computer Society is the ray of hope here. We fought long and hard to establish it and its one of the few ways of actually learning anything about how computers work as opposed to how to use them as a means to an end. We've set up our own network of a couple of dozen machines of all types running every OS under the sun for people to take apart, fiddle with, code on, whatever; all run by pupils with minimal staff intervention. It's worked really well so far...
We've tried persuading the Powers That Be of this one, but to no avail. Logic has no effect in this particular matter. "Oh no," they cry, "because if one person is playing a game, everybody else in the room will be tempted to and soon nobody will ever do any work!"
Sigh...
Mmm. We were playing this on our own dedicated Linux network which we have set up, but on the main school network (Win2k only, everywhere...) other people have great fun trying to hide things like Liero in places where they won't be found... The job is made easier by the fact that there's a 'public' share which everyone has read/write access to, so the current trick-of-the-day is make about 100 nested folders (sufficiently deep that nobody ever bothers clicking enough to get to the bottom!), putting file in there renamed to something.xls and pasting full path in a file (and renaming it back when they wanted to play)...
The game needs X, though, and on those machines X was always on 7 - 1 was just a plain, ordinary, bog-standard terminal. You'd have to go to a fair bit of effort to move X to 1 - and nobody (who had the root password) would want to/bother, so were were OK on that front. Far more worrying were the people who forgot to run the daemon before playing and so had to hurriedly do Ctrl+Alt+F1 on hearing the door open :-)
Thanks very much :-)
:-) Still, the unified everyone-switches-at-once is quite fun... (The daemon we wrote itself is quite entertaining, especially when you send commands like 'eject' to a room full of 30 machines...)
:-)
You're right, of course, it wouldn't really work in that environment. You'd have to have a person with a good view of potential boss entry routes push a big red button to switch everyone's terminals or something
People walking past was the difficulty - we had to spend a while fiddling with camera aim, focus etc. so people walking PAST the door (it's got a window thing in it) didn't trigger it
At my school there is an absolute no-games-on-computers, ever policy in force; at the end of term though we all felt desperately in need of some BZFlag action. Being the Computer Society, we decided the way ahead was to set up a USB QuickCam connected to a Linux machine with motion detecting software (apt-get install...) aiming right at the bottom of the door; we then wrote a quick app to be executed when motion was detected which would send a specific broadcast packet on the network and a daemon to run on the client (also Linux) workstations which, on receiving the packet, would execute 'chvt 1' immediately. Having set all of this up (in about half an hour - frenzied coding!) and opened emacs/top/something-important-looking on virtual console 1, we all got down to playing BZFlag - and lo and behold, as soon as anybody walked in the door every single screen simultaneously switched to the text console and we all looked deeply studious... Worked like a charm :-)
- VisiCalc
- Borland Turbo Pascal/C
- classic outliners e.g. Symantec MORE, ThinkTank
there are plenty more examples if you have a look around. Sure, having old games available is good for nostalgia, but things like this can actually be useful, especially if you're looking for stuff to run on older hardware or if you're after a feature that new software Just Doesn't Have (or the new software is not available on your platform etc.) - I know I've found this in various circumstances.Um... I hardly think that it's going to be stuck up on some website somewhere with a message saying, "Here ya go, do what you like with it." What seems far and away the most likely thing is that it will be given to a very small number of 'independent experts' who have signed highly restrictive NDAs; if it leaks out from them, my comments apply. Alternatively, it might be released in the same way as the source to WinCE was released (fat chance!) but look at the license there: again, my comments hold - if you look at that code, you basically can't write any similar open-source software and get away with it. The ONLY situation in which this could be of direct use is if it was released under GPL/BSD/public domain licenses which quite frankly is just not going to happen.
Once the corporate secret is public knowledge, it can be used by wine/samba/openoffice/whatever for higher compatability rates
Not that easy, I'm afraid. You say that you couldn't use the code directly, which is certainly true, but it goes deeper than that. If you so much as looked at the Microsoft source code you wouldn't be able to contribute to Samba/Wine/whatever (I believe that the Samba group actually put out a statement to that effect) because Microsoft lawyers would come down on you like a ton of bricks, and with some justification. They'd claim that the GPL'd code you wrote for whatever Open Source Project was based on theirs in that you discovered how to write it by looking at how they'd done it. Notice that in order to download the WinCE source that they've made available, you need to have a Passport to identify you... Anyway, it shouldn't be too hard for them to notice the patch that suddenly makes Wine work 100% or whatever.
The only way around this AFAIK is the way that Compaq (I think?) used to clone IBM's original PC BIOS: a clean-room implementation whereby you have one group of people who study the original BIOS, or in this case the MS source code, and who document every single function call etc. extremely thoroughly; this documentation is then given to a second group who have not seen the source at all and who re-implement it based only on what the first group have told them about it. Long, difficult, tedious, painstaking, but fairly safe...