I think used to be issues with NetInfo
back in NeXTSTEP 2.x days. Were I used to work
we had a large NeXT/Sun setup and the NIS hooks
didn't always work too well. We too sufferred
Netinfo screwing up its database. It sometimes
though I was a printer!
But it's fixable and a good thing if/when it
works.
I think it's a little paranoid to consider a
single company using such distributed surviellence
method. For one, why? (You know, with a camera
in the nose, if they got the dog imitation right they'll get lots of pictures of other
Aibo's PC card sockets!)
What is more worrying is this is the start of the
personal snooping dogs. Now people will send their dogs out to scout about the place and report back. If the wireless LAN stuff is IEEE-802.11 then it can already talk for a 400 yard/metre (pick one) radius or so.
Wait till the mechanicals get better and the look more lifelike. Will you trust that dog walking past the house on Sunday morning? Or the one sniffing about by the side of the bank?
We read case sensitively. THINGS LOOK DIFFERENT
when they ArE iN dIFfeRent cases now don't they.
Aren't we taught that "Bob" and "bob" are
different words?
Sounds like it could be one of the BSDs
with Samba and an admin front-end. Don't
know of anyone else with an implemented
soft updates in the works. They could've
implemented it themselves within some other
system but something tells me they didn't.
The book where David Korn et al describe a lot
of the things they built and use at AT&T research
I can't recall the name and my copy of the book
got "lost" at a previous job however there was
a software repository described that allowed
fuzzy searching on characteristics. It may have
some useful information in it. Even if that
isn't exactly what you want the book is valuable
source of information and ideas.
But it's all about 10 years too late as
NeXT did it all back then. Hopefully this
time around they won't drop the ball again.
Re:This *should* be a position at every University
on
Computer Historian?
·
· Score: 2
Exactly. Those who ignore the past...
There are a lot of
really good ideas have gone to waste over the
years since the h/w wasn't capable enough to
let people run what they wanted to run. Look
at what we're using today. Many of the major
ideas are very old. Many of the things thought
of as "new" had been talked about or at least
mentioned by the likes of Turing, von Neumann,
Zuse, et al.
It is very valuable to go back
and read some of the old papers. I have
a copy of Newman's "History of Mathematics"
which I inherited from my father. This has
lots of papers from major figures in computing.
Ever wanted to read George Boole on logic?
Or Turing's paper where he proposes the "Imitation Game"? This is a great set of books. There's
also some very good papers on general
mathematics in there too. It's a bit old now but is very interesting in any case.
Another good source of information is the ACM
SIGPLAN "History of Programming Langauages"
conferences. Alan Kay's "History of Smalltalk"
presentation at the 2nd is fascinating. And for
Unix devotes it also has Dennis Ritchie on the
history of C. This conference is one of the
best for historical recolection. The people who
did things are telling you about it.
I also often go through my old copies of
Dr.Dobbs from the 1970s and 1980s. Very interesting to see the types of thing people
where proposing for microprocessor based computers
Dr.Dobbs also got quite a few good papers from
well know CS types. For instance there's a paper
from Knuth on TeX in which he states "...I'm
going to write a book about the program..." (or
somesuch) and some nice articles by the Bell Labs
folks on C, Unix, algorithm design (Jon Bently).
Cool. Scan it and put it up somewhere. It shouldn't be lost. Was there ever an implementation? The bit about the mouse
isn't that correct as it was shown in what,
1967?. Is it older than that? (Not knowing
about it is okay, I'm not criticising that
at all, lots of people, including me mostly, don't know a lot about many things). You're
right about its logical model anyway. It's the "whatever" that's important, there's some kind of input, has to be, let's go on...
By "line segments" do you mean simple straight lines? Any more complex curve support? Fills?
(should wait for the scan I guess).
And one last thing, the old Tektronix
vector terminals had a stream protocol too.
Just over a serial line (probably HPIB as well,
can't recall and the ones I used only had a
serial i/f). But they're a bit more recent than this.
And to add yet another factor into the pot there's those of us who got such systems with Windows pre-installed, partitioned it, installed a free Unix (-like system for the pedantic) and then use VMWare to run Windows for a small number of things.
Most of the work is done using the primary OS on the machine, Unix, but it also runs Windows to do certain things at certain times. Doesn't affect the shipping counts but certainly should affect how vendors look at target platforms. Windows here is a legacy system (horrid marketing term, sorry).
The NeXTSTEP workspace mgr. did this. Applications are directories end in ".app"
Inside is the actual executable with the
same base name as the directory (minus.app).
The workspace mgr knew that double clicing
that.app icon ran X.app/X. Simple. Convention
can often take the place of rules (e.g, special
type of directory).
There was a shell (implemented as a shell script) that presented an Adventure style interface. You picked up files and put them down or fed them to the compiler monster. Etc... Fun for a couple of minutes and then a pain in the arse.
In the s/w world the US PTO is granting patents willy nilly. If you have to deal with patents in your life (as I have to for my work in R&D) you find a large number of obviously invalid s/w patents. There are numerous incredibly trival ones (today I was shown one on the method of loading an image file into a program and compressing it, then compressing it again, sending it somewhere and decompressing. That's it. I'll dig up the patent number if anyone wants it, an incredibly stupid patent, one of the worst I've ever seen).
Gregory Aharonian's Bust Patents site is a good place to find things. He's on a (good) mission to fight the stupidity of the US PTO in regards to s/w patents. Help him!
And how is the validation supposed to tell the difference between hacked clients and very good players? It's Turing's "Imitation Game" problem. There will be some things that are obviously wrong and can easily be detected but a skillful cheater will be able to game some advantage and remain undetected.
The change happened a long time ago (when was the RS6000 introduced?). I will never forget going to a computer show and seeing the IBM folks in jeans and sneakers and all the Apple people in suits. I wondered what universe I'd woken up in that day.
Slashdot Mirror
Mel Carnahan gets elected in Missouri.
He's dead.
You Americans have got a great sense of humour!
I think used to be issues with NetInfo back in NeXTSTEP 2.x days. Were I used to work we had a large NeXT/Sun setup and the NIS hooks didn't always work too well. We too sufferred Netinfo screwing up its database. It sometimes though I was a printer! But it's fixable and a good thing if/when it works.
Is their own hole let it happen. Ha ha ha.
Throw in something that does CSP-style concurrency. Occam, Limbo or Alef.
It's been attempted. Look for UNCOL and then look for ANDF and then download the Tendra C compiler and go for it.
Now we're calling a stack machine simulator "technology". Boy, that's pushing things.
My dog doesn't take PC Cards....well.
What is more worrying is this is the start of the personal snooping dogs . Now people will send their dogs out to scout about the place and report back. If the wireless LAN stuff is IEEE-802.11 then it can already talk for a 400 yard/metre (pick one) radius or so.
Wait till the mechanicals get better and the look more lifelike. Will you trust that dog walking past the house on Sunday morning? Or the one sniffing about by the side of the bank?
This is what we're going to do to back up 300GB of FreeBSD server. Disk is very cheap and fast these days. The reliability is pretty good too.
We read case sensitively. THINGS LOOK DIFFERENT when they ArE iN dIFfeRent cases now don't they. Aren't we taught that "Bob" and "bob" are different words?
It has some limitations though. Can't share a volume between NFS and SMB at the same time. Damm.
Sounds like it could be one of the BSDs with Samba and an admin front-end. Don't know of anyone else with an implemented soft updates in the works. They could've implemented it themselves within some other system but something tells me they didn't.
The book where David Korn et al describe a lot of the things they built and use at AT&T research I can't recall the name and my copy of the book got "lost" at a previous job however there was a software repository described that allowed fuzzy searching on characteristics. It may have some useful information in it. Even if that isn't exactly what you want the book is valuable source of information and ideas.
But it's all about 10 years too late as NeXT did it all back then. Hopefully this time around they won't drop the ball again.
There are a lot of really good ideas have gone to waste over the years since the h/w wasn't capable enough to let people run what they wanted to run. Look at what we're using today. Many of the major ideas are very old. Many of the things thought of as "new" had been talked about or at least mentioned by the likes of Turing, von Neumann, Zuse, et al.
It is very valuable to go back and read some of the old papers. I have a copy of Newman's "History of Mathematics" which I inherited from my father. This has lots of papers from major figures in computing. Ever wanted to read George Boole on logic? Or Turing's paper where he proposes the "Imitation Game"? This is a great set of books. There's also some very good papers on general mathematics in there too. It's a bit old now but is very interesting in any case.
Another good source of information is the ACM SIGPLAN "History of Programming Langauages" conferences. Alan Kay's "History of Smalltalk" presentation at the 2nd is fascinating. And for Unix devotes it also has Dennis Ritchie on the history of C. This conference is one of the best for historical recolection. The people who did things are telling you about it.
I also often go through my old copies of Dr.Dobbs from the 1970s and 1980s. Very interesting to see the types of thing people where proposing for microprocessor based computers Dr.Dobbs also got quite a few good papers from well know CS types. For instance there's a paper from Knuth on TeX in which he states "...I'm going to write a book about the program..." (or somesuch) and some nice articles by the Bell Labs folks on C, Unix, algorithm design (Jon Bently).
Telstra say you can't have a network attached with the non-volume charged plans. You could break the agreement with a firewall.
By "line segments" do you mean simple straight lines? Any more complex curve support? Fills? (should wait for the scan I guess).
And one last thing, the old Tektronix vector terminals had a stream protocol too. Just over a serial line (probably HPIB as well, can't recall and the ones I used only had a serial i/f). But they're a bit more recent than this.
Most of the work is done using the primary OS on the machine, Unix, but it also runs Windows to do certain things at certain times. Doesn't affect the shipping counts but certainly should affect how vendors look at target platforms. Windows here is a legacy system (horrid marketing term, sorry).
The NeXTSTEP workspace mgr. did this. Applications are directories end in ".app" Inside is the actual executable with the same base name as the directory (minus .app).
The workspace mgr knew that double clicing
that .app icon ran X.app/X. Simple. Convention
can often take the place of rules (e.g, special
type of directory).
That's what Sun want to do with StarOffice and their openoffice.org
There was a shell (implemented as a shell script) that presented an Adventure style interface. You picked up files and put them down or fed them to the compiler monster. Etc... Fun for a couple of minutes and then a pain in the arse.
Yesterday I came across Microsoft's taskbar patent (US 6,023, 272) which seems a bit far fetched given prior art in the area (parts of it may be okay though).
Gregory Aharonian's Bust Patents site is a good place to find things. He's on a (good) mission to fight the stupidity of the US PTO in regards to s/w patents. Help him!
And how is the validation supposed to tell the difference between hacked clients and very good players? It's Turing's "Imitation Game" problem. There will be some things that are obviously wrong and can easily be detected but a skillful cheater will be able to game some advantage and remain undetected.
The change happened a long time ago (when was the RS6000 introduced?). I will never forget going to a computer show and seeing the IBM folks in jeans and sneakers and all the Apple people in suits. I wondered what universe I'd woken up in that day.