Well, isn't that exactly what some paranoid lunatics want to believe about the moon flights? Except that then there wasn't much digital engineering.
There's also a film, I believe its name's Capricorn One, where some astronauts are allegedly sent to Mars, but actually just videotaped in the desert. In the end, when they should be returning to Earth, their ship is reported to have been destroyed in the atmosphere, and the men escape from the base to avoid getting really killed. Unrealistic. I would have silenced those guys even before declaring on every tv channel that they have been killed...
Re:New platform introduced with v2.2.14 (S/390)
on
Linux Kernel 2.2.14
·
· Score: 1
if just anyone could port Linux to VAX, things would be chilling.
There's a port in the works, latest patches were sent today (if it's 4.1. 2000 in where you're from).
There's this cable TV channel called Moon TV, specialised in computer/video game reviews and music. They displayed whole last night a series of Y2K puns like "This channel has been hacked" and stuff. And, oh yeah, the "Your TV needs a blabla plugin to view this program". Kind of funny the first time round...
So what would you expect a bunch of geeky guys to do on new years's night but play Half-Life and Action Q2, watch Babylon 5 original pilot and read comics? Well, there was this 1-meter long, 3" inner diameter home made cannon and the illegal professional-quality fireworks. I carried the damn tube strapped under my trenchcoat for an hour in a crowd and after finding a safe place & shooting the bombs we slipped away just when the police arrived.
And running HURD on top of Linux would be senseless.
That's just my point. But Linux is so hot right now that people seem to try to use it for just about anything. Linux may become a legacy just like DOS; you cannot write a new operating system for the same user group without a Linux compatibility mode.
Of course this doesn't apply to real gurus, who anyway compile all their binaries themselves and have a dozen computer architectures represented in their 1-room apartment, but the average Linux user. Those that use the system and buy the books and the expensive versions of the distros. And they will be important from the market point of view, too - and yes, the business side matters even in the open source business and will matter more and more.
Is Linux's popularity a threat to other open OS projects? Even now, it seems all other free (and even non-free, I guess) unices will want to have binary compatibility with Linux. And as more and more users just use binary software distributions, there will probably soon be no reason for anybody to actually create BSD, Hurd or whatnot binaries. Except that Hurd doesn't run Linux binaries at the moment... right:)
Linux has been made to run on top of a microkernel and one of Hurd's frequently asked questions seems to be if Hurd could be run using Linux as microkernel. The answer doesn't actually say it couldn't.
What about the EROS operating system? I read once about it in Slashdot and on holidays I've spent some time reading its documentation. Seems very interesting, the whole capability system concept, no traditional filesystems, persistence and all. Yeah, they seem to be designing a Linux environment hosted under Eros or something like that.
But what if Linux people just somehow weave the capability model and persistence into the Linux kernel? What will that do to EROS? Is Linux so popular, that people would blindly use it also for tasks for which it doesn't suite at all?
As a GPL-protected project, Linux can never become a new Windows, but could it become a threat to natural diversity in the open source world?
Another really flaky webmail service with a really terrible interface, poor programming ("you didn't log out last time you used this service, click here to fix this problem, blah blah") but a cool domain name, get a mail account here.
I used to have a spam address there, probably still have, but the downtimes are incredible and it's slow and they shove you screenfuls of smut ads.
Here in Finland there has just been introduced the new so-called WAP services for mobile phones. They seem gllued-together crap to me, although I haven't enough interest to go to a phone store to check them out. The services, such as some sort of email and some information services, are all text-based and they work on top of traditional GSM SMS text messages. And all of them seem to be proprietary and work only on one operator's network.
The scary part is, the advertisers refer to WAP services as new Internet. "See www.sonera.fi or wap.sonera.fi!" Notice also that the people should know how to get the services just by looking at the prefix. The guy who first named a web server www.domain.suffix should be hanged by his/her balls...
"For someone running Linux on a low memory 486 or Pentium, Opera may still be the better choice. Since a lot of Linux boxes appear to be 'recycled', there may actually be a good market for Opera here."
Hey, I don't know about normal people, but I find Netscape 4.5 still fine and usable on a 486/80 with 32 megabytes RAM. Slow it might be, but so are most other programs on the same hardware. I just want to use an up-to-date browser with which most pages seem right.
There is no reason for the general public to run Unix. Do you understand me? Why should they use Solaris or Linux or BSD or whatever?
There is no reason for them to run Windows either. Windows in itself is too big and scary for many users, and Word and Excel are just plain awful. A really easy to use OS would, I guess, be persistent (system state stored on the disk, as in EROS, all programs being always up and running. Then there would be a menu with big icons for word processor, spreadsheet, www client etc, and always a way to pop that menu back up. All the standard programs would be "running" all the time, all of them would take up all the display while being used. As easy as a PDA or cell phone (at least older Nokias are pretty simple to use, surprisingly the new ones seem more irrational to me).
No use to tell people that command line is fine, when even the freedom given by Windows is too much for many of them.
Re:No, programmers are modern day sorcerers
on
License to Surf
·
· Score: 1
>Oh yeah, whisk any programmer back to the middle >ages and see what career he decides >upon. I'll wager he'll become a sorcerer or >alchemist, and may well end up burned at the >stake as a result.
Oh yeah. My roommate there once said, "if my programs were physical objects, I would not have hands anymore." It's much safer to be an alchemist these days.
>However, we might expect them to politely stop >the six-year-old from wandering into >the art section where are kept the books of human >figure photography. It's easy, after all, for a
Why? Is this some kind of American thing?
A Better Analogy, if I may tell you, is to keep the six-year-old away from the drooling pervert between the shelves. Probably even call the police so they can pick him/her up. The pervert I mean.
Privacy on the Net, what about the Real World?
on
License to Surf
·
· Score: 1
>uniquely and provide assorted marketing >information. The >end of anonymity, coming soon to a Web near you
Here in Finland, the country's biggest newspaper just today (oops, yesterday by now) had this article on a book about privacy in the modern Finnish society. Nothing about the Net, at least in the article, but quite scary scenarios about the use of different ID cards, bonus cards, registers, and even surveillance cameras. We have the second most surveillance cameras in Europe, and the crappiest privacy laws, btw. The book was written by two legal and privacy experts, both very pessimistic about our privacy in the future.
What does the Net matter anymore? Here, at least, the banks know how and where you use your different cards, the shops know what kind of stuff you buy, the police can (ironically) keep registers on anything you've done *except* the criminal register, which for most crimes is purged after some time. In the cities, there are enough cameras to track anybody down through half the city, and that's not exaggerating. Every Finn is listed in 100-300 registers, that can easily be combined to form profiles. And the legislation is only doing this easier.
The idea is, that people are willing to give authorities rights to get the criminals caught. In (Finnish) real life, they want to give the social authorities access to individuals' bank accounts to determine whether monetary help is needed. In the Net, everybody agrees that almost any amount of measures is fine to get pedophiles and perverts arrested. But always, after some time, the exceptions on the criminals are expanded to caver normal people also. In the name of equality or something. The society is turning into a prison.
I'm writing a paper for my university (no, I'm writing it in Finnish, I can express myself much better in Finnish:)) about user profiling and intelligent agents. Most of the stuff is pretty scary.
--- NOSPAM@NOSPAM.REMOVETHIS.NO.SPAM - you'll find the real address somewhere
After reading that scam, I just had to try it out myself. I was so disappointed to find out it was all crap (I found out when they talked about an SX-25 and anything-over-50 MHz).
After some time, one charred motherboard and a lot of trying, I got a stable 150 MHz AMD 486. Overclocked only from 120, but the board won't allow for any more speed... If I ever get my hands on those 5x86's, I'll make one run on 200 MHz.
Of course I could try to freeze the damn thing and insert a 100 MHz AMD, so I'd get a 150% speed increase... or try an Intel 486/33 on the 50 MHz speed. It worked fine for months clocked on 40 MHz, no heat sink, no fan. Who knows what it can take.
"If you have flaky hardware", it said somewhere in the kernel configurator's help... what the hell does flaky hardware mean anyway?
This competition is going to be the best thing that's happend to browsers, on any platform.
This kind of competition brought us the bloated, monstrous Netscape & IE. Both getting new features and crap, both eating up more memory and cpu time. The more complicated web pages have to be separately designed for both browsers. Wouldn't it be nice, if instead of two browsers, everybody would have to support four to eight browsers? And do not forget the bug workarounds and tricks to make the content readable on at least some older versions too.
Competition is not good, when it's about trying to be one step ahead of one another. The same applies to office applications, operating systems, cars, houses and anything that should be just there, easily accessible for daily use.
Following standards is good; improving speed & reliability is good. Quickly creating one's own "standards" (like the first HTML imagemaps, and tables, and whatnot) just to get to implement some nice feature before anybody else, now that's BAD. BAD BAD BAD.
If the only thing to develop in a web browser is adding more bells & whistles, then there's no point in developing them at all.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, isn't that exactly what some paranoid lunatics want to believe about the moon flights? Except that then there wasn't much digital engineering.
There's also a film, I believe its name's Capricorn One, where some astronauts are allegedly sent to Mars, but actually just videotaped in the desert. In the end, when they should be returning to Earth, their ship is reported to have been destroyed in the atmosphere, and the men escape from the base to avoid getting really killed. Unrealistic. I would have silenced those guys even before declaring on every tv channel that they have been killed...
There's a port in the works, latest patches were sent today (if it's 4.1. 2000 in where you're from).
Address is http://www.mssl.ucl.ac.uk/~atp/linux-vax/ and there's a link to all source and cross-tools and the patches.
However, there's always NetBSD.
Gee, thanks. I almost remembered to repair my modified scripts.. hope nobody has posted anything yet.
There's this cable TV channel called Moon TV, specialised in computer/video game reviews and music. They displayed whole last night a series of Y2K puns like "This channel has been hacked" and stuff. And, oh yeah, the "Your TV needs a blabla plugin to view this program". Kind of funny the first time round...
So what would you expect a bunch of geeky guys to do on new years's night but play Half-Life and Action Q2, watch Babylon 5 original pilot and read comics? Well, there was this 1-meter long, 3" inner diameter home made cannon and the illegal professional-quality fireworks. I carried the damn tube strapped under my trenchcoat for an hour in a crowd and after finding a safe place & shooting the bombs we slipped away just when the police arrived.
That's just my point. But Linux is so hot right now that people seem to try to use it for just about anything. Linux may become a legacy just like DOS; you cannot write a new operating system for the same user group without a Linux compatibility mode.
Of course this doesn't apply to real gurus, who anyway compile all their binaries themselves and have a dozen computer architectures represented in their 1-room apartment, but the average Linux user. Those that use the system and buy the books and the expensive versions of the distros. And they will be important from the market point of view, too - and yes, the business side matters even in the open source business and will matter more and more.
Is Linux's popularity a threat to other open OS projects? Even now, it seems all other free (and even non-free, I guess) unices will want to have binary compatibility with Linux. And as more and more users just use binary software distributions, there will probably soon be no reason for anybody to actually create BSD, Hurd or whatnot binaries. Except that Hurd doesn't run Linux binaries at the moment... right :)
Linux has been made to run on top of a microkernel and one of Hurd's frequently asked questions seems to be if Hurd could be run using Linux as microkernel. The answer doesn't actually say it couldn't.
What about the EROS operating system? I read once about it in Slashdot and on holidays I've spent some time reading its documentation. Seems very interesting, the whole capability system concept, no traditional filesystems, persistence and all. Yeah, they seem to be designing a Linux environment hosted under Eros or something like that.
But what if Linux people just somehow weave the capability model and persistence into the Linux kernel? What will that do to EROS? Is Linux so popular, that people would blindly use it also for tasks for which it doesn't suite at all?
As a GPL-protected project, Linux can never become a new Windows, but could it become a threat to natural diversity in the open source world?
Another really flaky webmail service with a really terrible interface, poor programming ("you didn't log out last time you used this service, click here to fix this problem, blah blah") but a cool domain name, get a mail account here.
I used to have a spam address there, probably still have, but the downtimes are incredible and it's slow and they shove you screenfuls of smut ads.
Here in Finland there has just been introduced the
new so-called WAP services for mobile phones. They seem gllued-together crap to me, although I haven't enough interest to go to a phone store to check them out. The services, such as some sort of email and some information services, are all text-based and they work on top of traditional GSM SMS text messages. And all of them seem to be proprietary and work only on one operator's network.
The scary part is, the advertisers refer to WAP services as new Internet. "See www.sonera.fi or wap.sonera.fi!" Notice also that the people should know how to get the services just by looking at the prefix. The guy who first named a web server www.domain.suffix should be hanged by his/her balls...
Hey, I don't know about normal people, but I find Netscape 4.5 still fine and usable on a 486/80 with 32 megabytes RAM. Slow it might be, but so are most other programs on the same hardware. I just want to use an up-to-date browser with which most pages seem right.
There is no reason for them to run Windows either. Windows in itself is too big and scary for many users, and Word and Excel are just plain awful. A really easy to use OS would, I guess, be persistent (system state stored on the disk, as in EROS, all programs being always up and running. Then there would be a menu with big icons for word processor, spreadsheet, www client etc, and always a way to pop that menu back up. All the standard programs would be "running" all the time, all of them would take up all the display while being used. As easy as a PDA or cell phone (at least older Nokias are pretty simple to use, surprisingly the new ones seem more irrational to me).
No use to tell people that command line is fine, when even the freedom given by Windows is too much for many of them.
>Oh yeah, whisk any programmer back to the middle
>ages and see what career he decides
>upon. I'll wager he'll become a sorcerer or
>alchemist, and may well end up burned at the
>stake as a result.
Oh yeah. My roommate there once said, "if my programs were physical objects, I would not have hands anymore." It's much safer to be an alchemist these days.
>However, we might expect them to politely stop >the six-year-old from wandering into
>the art section where are kept the books of human
>figure photography. It's easy, after all, for a
Why? Is this some kind of American thing?
A Better Analogy, if I may tell you, is to keep the six-year-old away from the drooling pervert between the shelves. Probably even call the police so they can pick him/her up. The pervert I mean.
>uniquely and provide assorted marketing >information. The
:)) about user profiling and intelligent agents. Most of the stuff is pretty scary.
>end of anonymity, coming soon to a Web near you
Here in Finland, the country's biggest newspaper just today (oops, yesterday by now) had this article on a book about privacy in the modern Finnish society. Nothing about the Net, at least in the article, but quite scary scenarios about the use of different ID cards, bonus cards, registers, and even surveillance cameras. We have the second most surveillance cameras in Europe, and the crappiest privacy laws, btw. The book was written by two legal and privacy experts, both very pessimistic about our privacy in the future.
What does the Net matter anymore? Here, at least, the banks know how and where you use your different cards, the shops know what kind of stuff you buy, the police can (ironically) keep registers on anything you've done *except* the criminal register, which for most crimes is purged after some time. In the cities, there are enough cameras to track anybody down through half the city, and that's not exaggerating. Every Finn is listed in 100-300 registers, that can easily be combined to form profiles. And the legislation is only doing this easier.
The idea is, that people are willing to give authorities rights to get the criminals caught. In (Finnish) real life, they want to give the social authorities access to individuals' bank accounts to determine whether monetary help is needed. In the Net, everybody agrees that almost any amount of measures is fine to get pedophiles and perverts arrested. But always, after some time, the exceptions on the criminals are expanded to caver normal people also. In the name of equality or something. The society is turning into a prison.
I'm writing a paper for my university (no, I'm writing it in Finnish, I can express myself much better in Finnish
---
NOSPAM@NOSPAM.REMOVETHIS.NO.SPAM - you'll find the real address somewhere
After reading that scam, I just had to try it out myself. I was so disappointed to find out it was all crap (I found out when they talked about an SX-25 and anything-over-50 MHz).
After some time, one charred motherboard and a lot of trying, I got a stable 150 MHz AMD 486. Overclocked only from 120, but the board won't allow for any more speed... If I ever get my hands on those 5x86's, I'll make one run on 200 MHz.
Of course I could try to freeze the damn thing and insert a 100 MHz AMD, so I'd get a 150% speed increase... or try an Intel 486/33 on the 50 MHz speed. It worked fine for months clocked on 40 MHz, no heat sink, no fan. Who knows what it can take.
"If you have flaky hardware", it said somewhere in the kernel configurator's help... what the hell does flaky hardware mean anyway?
This kind of competition brought us the bloated, monstrous Netscape & IE. Both getting new features and crap, both eating up more memory and cpu time. The more complicated web pages have to be separately designed for both browsers. Wouldn't it be nice, if instead of two browsers, everybody would have to support four to eight browsers? And do not forget the bug workarounds and tricks to make the content readable on at least some older versions too.
Competition is not good, when it's about trying to be one step ahead of one another. The same applies to office applications, operating systems, cars, houses and anything that should be just there, easily accessible for daily use.
Following standards is good; improving speed & reliability is good. Quickly creating one's own "standards" (like the first HTML imagemaps, and tables, and whatnot) just to get to implement some nice feature before anybody else, now that's BAD. BAD BAD BAD.
If the only thing to develop in a web browser is adding more bells & whistles, then there's no point in developing them at all.
Related: A Segfault story
- hautis