You're absolutely right. It seems like every OS (including Linux) goes through this -- in the early days it boots much faster than the competition, but once people start routinely layering all kinds of junk on it then it starts taking minutes to boot even on super-fast hardware.
What really bugs me is how much of the startup config is done serially. A lot of startup tasks take time, and step N+1 has to wait until step N is finished whether or not it depends on that step. It seems to me that it would be worth the trouble to mechanize startup so that each step is isolated from all the others and knows which previous step it's dependent on and waits for only that step, while everything else cruises ahead in parallel. It'd be a big change from the way things are done now but it'd be worth it. Having my system stop dead for 60 seconds on every boot just because one of the NICs is unplugged (so DHCP isn't answering) is really annoying. Same deal with Apache choking on virtual domains... one at a time... if the name server isn't answering. All those "wait X seconds for Y to happen" things can really add up.
Also, Linux isn't the entire universe, and some of us really do use those legacy BIOS features. Backwards compatibility is the *only* reason the PC architecture has survived, so deciding to toss that to the wind now is just stupid. The cost is minimal (it's not like the code is going to change once it's written) and if whipping up a few tables and setting a couple of INT vectors is honestly adding dozens of seconds to the boot time, well that's just programmer incompetence, it's not the architecture's fault. The rest of the older BIOS code doesn't do anything if you don't call it, so this just sounds like an excuse to be lazy.
What my lawyer told me is that copyright registration shifts the burden of proof to the alleged infringer, but otherwise you're covered either way. But he still wants me to diligently register my copyrights.
I use 3.5" magneto-optical disks. For some reason they never caught on. I got into them back when 100 MB Zip drives were all getting the click-of-death problem, since the MO disks are multi-vendor (well I think Fuji has some private formats but I use the smaller sizes) you can shop around and from what people say, the recording method is inherently more reliable than Zips. I don't know how they compare to CDs/DVDs but since the recording is magnetic (the optical part is just for head positioning, I think), I would think it would last much longer than some plastic that was discolored by an LED. The old minicomputer magnetic media sure seem to last forever. But I don't think I have any MO disks over about 8 or 9 years old (everything has been readable so far) so I don't know about long-term.
Safe deposit boxes are a really good deal. Mine costs something like $20 per year, and every time I'm going to the bank anyway I just bring an optical disk with all my vital stuff and swap it with the one that's there. Now the trick is not losing the key to the deposit box in the fire/flood/etc. that presumably destroyed all my other backups at home.
The same thought popped into my head -- at least I *think* it's the same thought, I don't know the terminology.
Back in college in the mid 1980s I shared an off-campus apartment with a bunch of other geeks like me, and we looked into getting a connection to the school's computer system (which they were surprisingly friendly about). I won't say it was "the Internet" since it was in a lot of pieces back then (and the school seemed to be on everything *except* the ARPAnet until very late -- even Mailnet, which was barely even anything).
Anyway the local telephone company (NYtel) said they could give us a 2-wire leased line to the school for about $36/mo, or a 4-wire one for $72/mo. The catches were: (1) about $600 for installation, (2) it's not one run of copper all the way there so we couldn't just run 20mA current loop or something, we'd need real leased line modems (I eventually picked up a pair of Gandalf 9600 BPS line driver/receivers cheap but I don't even know if that was the right thing, and that was about when dialups started getting that fast so it was pointless), and (3) the school wasn't an ISP, so it wasn't at all clear what would go at the other end (in those days, translating between SLIP and Ethernet didn't just mean stuffing Linux into some old clunker PC). So we never bit, but I regret it, it sure would have been educational.
Anyway those are 1980s upstate NY prices. I'm sure it's more now (and, we weren't talking about a very long distance) but I'll bet you earn more than you did in the 1980s too. And presumably the data rates are way higher now, and most ISPs would know what to do with their end. OK so it wouldn't be as cheap as DSL but how important is the Internet to you?
Also it might be worth looking into RF modems. Before cable broadband came to my neighborhood and made it all easy, I had the local mom + pop ISP (the best kind!) mostly talked into letting me mount a doodad in their attic (since they were only a block away -- if they'd been on the same block I would have just begged neighbors to let me string wires through the trees), and I was just hemming and hawing over which pair of doodads to buy. The data rates aren't fantastic but you can sure beat 26kbps. Anyway even if you don't sell the ISP themselves on the idea, maybe you could at least get their permission to buy space on someone's connection who's closer to you, and talk *them* into sticking a horn antenna on their porch railing or whatever. Privacy is out the window of course so that would have to be OK with you.
Great, they spent a ton of money so that -- what, GPS will *work*? It already did!
Upgrading from 1970s technology to Unix? Unix *is* from the 1970s! The whole reason most slashdotters think it's the whole world is because they grew up with it -- i.e. it's "always" been here. OK it's been updated a lot since the old days but so have IBM mainframes. DASDs are SCSI disks these days.
Sorry to rant, I'm just so sick of companies/governments pouring resources into replacing working systems just because the current crop of wet-behind-the-ears CS grads have been trained to snicker at the stuff that has been making everything work like clockwork all these years.
Unless I misunderstand, this was the entire purpose of the IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin. I don't know why they canned it, because it's a great idea -- an insanely boring magazine that no one is supposed to read, but it exists solely for establishing prior art. So if they have an idea that's cool but they're not going to patent it, they write it up in a TDB issue and the prior art ends up stored in whatever libraries like to hoard this kind of thing, which makes it easy to thrash (in court) anyone who later tries to patent the idea. (You don't have to take IBM's word that they invented it because they made it public record at the time.)
Is the FSF doing anything like this? It's such an obviously good idea, I hope someone still is. Well I suppose if you don't mind paying advertising rates, you can use any halfway respectable publication for this -- i.e. take out a classified ad (in the legal notices section I guess) in your local paper that describes your idea, and it'll end up on microfilm at the local library etc. Hopefully that's respectable enough to be admissable in case you wind up being sued by some weasel who patents your idea five years from now and claims you didn't invent it.
I've never understood why people want to communicate with a computer by rubbing a small box around on the table. Why should I use this stupid thing to make the picture of a tiny finger press the picture of a tiny button, when I have ten real fingers and a keyboard with over 100 real buttons on it. Anyway when I'm forced to use a GUI I usually do use a trackball (Logitech Trackman Vista) but only because this idiotic method of input isn't worth the desk space that a mouse pad wastes.
OK I did see one use of mice that I liked, I knew a guy who felt that double-clicking was too picky so after selecting something, he'd pick the mouse up off the table and use it to press the keypad ENTER key. That's more like it!
I'll bet we'll never hear the follow-up, other than that they'll find a scapegoat and put them away. But not every cut wire in the world is sabotage... for all we know someone just pruned out an unused section of a wiring harness, or something. So it would be nice to hear what the effects were supposed to be before we get too excited about those evil bastards trying to save a few grams of weight on an expensive space flight.
Seriously, does anyone know of any dot matrix fax machines being made anywhere? I loved dot matrix, it was ridiculously reliable, and whether the ribbon is out of ink is highly subjective so you can limp along for ages if you don't care that much (I'm really sick of my OfficeJet 500 cutting me off because it let all my ink evaporate... again... since I hardly get any faxes). A 24-pin dot matrix printer might not be quite up to inkjet resolution, but it's still OK, and doesn't have the smudging/streaking and total intolerance to a raindrop or two.
Didn't Joe McCarthy use the exact same tactic in the 1950s? Claim you have a list but then don't let anyone see it? Worked out great for him, he's one of the most beloved figures in US history! Where'd I put my my "Tailgunner Joe" T-shirt...
Could have sworn I saw this ~20 years ago on a Cyber 180 that was running both NOS and NOS/VE on the same physical machine (these OSes don't even use the same word size!). OK the console wasn't split-screen, you had to flip between one and the other, but that hardly seems like a critical change (most of us would *rather* have the whole screen to play with, with whichever OS has focus right now).
These kinds of arguments always take for granted the idea that programming in assembly is somehow unpleasant. Sure, if you aren't an assembly programmer.
If you know how to do it well, assembly language programming is just plain fun and that's all there is to it. I do almost all of my programming in assembly (my company's main product is a 200K-line assembly program), officially for speed/size but honestly I'd still use it even if it were slower and fatter. I don't need compilers "protecting" me from architecture details that I never minded in the first place, and I really hate it when HLLs obscure the inner workings to the point that someone like me who's been programming for 28 years honestly can't figure out what's actually happening. With assembly I always know what the computer is doing, because it's exactly what I told the computer to do (never mind whether I was wrong). A lot of programmers really are micromanaging control freaks and assembly is nirvana for people like us.
Seriously, the way to get good results from a computer is to learn how to program the computer. These days people would prefer to learn to program some abstraction, and then stuff enough bloatware under the hood to make it appear that that's what the computer is. Great fun if you don't care about the results (Unix) and/or if you're just trying to congratulate yourself for your cleverness (Comp Sci majors), but to get real work done efficiently you have to be able to think like the machine. The really great programmers are the ones who already thought like the machine full-time anyway.
Portability -- good point, in 1980. Retarded now. Boo hoo, my IA32 code runs on only 90% of the world's computers, I sure painted myself into a corner on that one.
Anyway, what ever happened to plain old curiousity? I learned FORTH *because* it's weird and useless. I never expected to be doing everything in FORTH, I haven't used it at all in years. I've forgotten APL but it was fun having my mind bent at the time I learned it. I can't imagine how it would help my life but that's not the point. It's good for your noggin to look at programming from as many different points of view as possible.
I long since stopped going to CompUSA. If the surly/clueless employees, bad selection, and lousy prices weren't enough, I just can't believe they think they have the right to search everyone's bags on the way out! I mean I know there's the "shopkeeper's privilege" concept but it still depends on the same basic idea of probable cause (or something equivalent) that applies to any case of search and seizure. They just saw me buy my stuff at the register, so what basis do they have for pretending they think I stole it when they stop me ten feet later? Anyway I never agreed to be illegally searched, and there's no sign claiming that by going in the store you implicitly agree to be searched. Anyway they only search the bag, don't you think if I were stealing something it would be somewhere else? The explanation I've heard is that the real problem is catching their own employees who are in cahoots with a customer/friend, and charge them for a CD-ROM drive but send them out the door with a laptop (and the friend pays them off). Well if they're hiring the dregs of society that's their problem, it doesn't mean I have to give up my rights. Same reason I stopped going to the Guitar Center. There are plenty of stores in the world that don't treat their customers like criminals, so I'll shop at those, thanks. CompUSA deserves what happens to them.
Wait, why bust on PDP-10 EMACS? I used to use it with my VT52 and Vadic 1200-baud modem as a turist on AI and OZ and I have to say, the screen painting was a beautiful thing, it was very good at optimizing output and dropping everything to process type-ahead before finishing the screen. That GNU behemoth doesn't have a lot to do with what was on the PDP-10s. Yes I'm sure the TVs (I never saw one) made it possible to get lazy, but laziness was not in keeping with PDP-10 culture. People who bend over backwards to save microseconds in their code are certainly going to go to a little trouble to save many seconds in screen painting.
Even DEC did try. EDT got pretty good with screen painting (it was certainly clever about knowing which parameters can be defaulted in VTxxx control sequences), and it had an option to use only the top N lines of the screen for really slow connections (it was painful at 300 baud but still good enough). Also, CHANGE mode in V1 of EDT (still available in later EDTs, EDT is really four editors in one) has a similar reek to vi so I would have thought the Weenix Unies would like it. KED (the mini-EDT on that new-fangled RT-11 thing) was nowhere near as flexible as EDT (and implements only CHANGE mode, and only the V2+ flavor) but it still made a good effort on slow terminals.
As for vi, I don't get it. Yes I use it on a daily basis too but I despise it, it's inconsistent and line-oriented and case-sensitive and all-around annoying. The only good thing I can see about it is that every single Weenix system has it, so wherever you go, you can always find an editor your fingers know how to use.
Yeah, I'm one of the carmudgeons who passed the CW tests in the old days and think it's a valuable experience for anybody. CW is the true beauty of ham radio anyway -- I mean if you just want to yack with people on voice, couldn't you, like, go out in public and actually get a LIFE with real in-person human beings???
Anyway much more importantly, the CW tests are as good a way as any to test someone's level of seriousness and discipline. If we just let everyone waltz on in, well that's called CB and it's cacaphony. Many people won't act with even a basic level of maturity unless they're made to jump through a hoop or two (and it could be anything -- it'd be OK if they made us learn ASL instead).
Finally, it's not as if the CW tests were hard in the first place. I passed the 5 WPM when I was 12 and the 20 WPM when I was 14, and believe me, I'm not a clever guy. All it takes is a little practice. By the time I got the basic alphabet down by getting my mom to quiz me, she knew it too without even meaning to (it was just easier to remember it than to look everything up on the chart). But everyone since then (1978) has pissed and moaned and whined as if it were the hardest thing in the world, and as usual the FCC caved. Well I'll be staying in the CW bands (the ones that are left) where it's safe.
Actually you needed advice going *into* school. If you treat college like welding school and expect to be trained in the skills you'll really use, you're going to end up disappointed.
That doesn't help you now. Well with geezers like me the answer was, get a micro, and learn *everything* about it. I mean everything. Schematics, ROM source listings, whatever you can get your hands on. Learn how to program every single peripheral in the machine. Build boards to interface to it. Trace through the OS. Think of utilities it needs and write the fastest/smallest/best version you can. Sounds tedious and boring but actually it's tons of fun because you *love* everything about computers. Right? The bad news is, this might be where you find out you aren't as big a nerd as they told you you were in high school. Either you are or you aren't, you can fake it but then it'll always be an uphill battle.
The other bad news is, present-day computers come with so many layers of junk piled onto them that it's almost impossible for one person to learn everything. The OSes are vast and not well-documented, they don't give out schematics any more, and the bus can't be interfaced to with 95-cent 74LS245s any more. And the mishmash of high-level languages and libraries mean you're not programming a computer at all, but some crazy abstraction of what various armchair CompScis *think* computers should look like. Which can be fine but not if you end up with the kind of slippery brain that can't get a grip on anything real (like emulating a game console), and there's a lot of that going around.
OK so ideally I'd like to suggest that you go back in time and get an old computer that a mortal can understand, like a PC XT or an Apple ][ or TRaSh-80 or whatever, but I know you won't. What might be about as useful though, would be to get a developer's kit for a simple microcontroller IC. They're a blast, and not too expensive. The vendor is trying to you get you excited about their architecture so it usually comes with everything, even if some of the software is trial versions, and there's sample code and a debugger and some kind of download/debug cable and it's all intended to be fun. Now you've got a tiny computer (probably more powerful than those early PCs, except for the lack of a keyboard and screen) with schematics, and manuals for the CPU and all the I/O. You think this is irrelevant to C/C++ life but it's not.
Dump the C compiler though and program the little doohicky in assembly. You've probably been brainwashed by your schooling to hate assembly but that's a load of BS. It's not for everyone or everything, but neither is any other one language. You may never use it again, but getting good at it on one architecture is the best start for firming up a nice nerdly brain. Getting to the point where every single byte of code on the machine was written by you is a huge step.
The applications might be stupid -- blinking an LED, sending your name out an RS232 port, maybe driving a keypad or an LCD display. But once you've gotten really good at taking total command of a small computer, all the hocus-pocus is gone forever and even if you never learn any other architecture to the same level of detail, you'll be able to make educated guesses about what's hidden underneath all those layers of high-level facade. It'd be directly helpful to understanding a game console, and it would give you a great general ability to zero in on the specifics of any programming project.
OK I agree, including 4DOS makes up for whatever's wrong with their own COMMAND.COM. I hadn't tried downloading their full install because I don't want to install it, I just want a floppy with KERNEL.SYS and COMMAND.COM that I can boot from to make sure my stuff works, well of course they can package it however they want so now I'll put in a scratch HD one of these days and do an install and pick out the good parts. It really is nice to see someone working on this, it's frustrating how all the new kiddies think should use DOS any more now that we have Linux, as if the two have anything to do with each other.
Trust me, you don't care about my application! But anyway it's an emulator for DEC PDP-11 minicomputers. DOS is a wonderful place for a project like that because I can help myself to all the hardware I need, so I reprogram the clock chip for 50/60 Hz and take over the keyboard to make it DEC-style so NumLock is a data key and ENTER doesn't autorepeat and the LEDs are under software control, and download DEC characters into the SVGA, and run a blinkenlights board off the LPT port, and program the FDC for 26-sector single density mode, and on and on, all that kind of stuff you can do easily in DOS that takes buttloads of ioctl()s on other systems (so, lots of context switches) if they let you do it at all. And there's no multitasking so the response time is great (except during file I/O of course). Plus I roll in my own drivers for a bunch of weird optional hardware (RocketPorts and I/O bus adapters and parallel interfaces), and those drivers keep on working year after year, not like anything I've written for Linux, where I have to write separate kernel drivers which break even between minor versions of a supposedly "stable" kernel series, so I'm always fixing them up to match the latest gratuitous kernel changes. Anyway last winter's big project was adding support for SMP motherboards, for emulating multi-CPU PDP-11s -- well it doesn't work on my new AMD64 X2 board but I'll sort that out -- I love this though, I can't think of any other OS where you could slip your own SMP code in underneath a totally non-SMP-aware OS. DOS's brainlessness is its greatest strength.
Slashdot Mirror
... until I saw the shipping cost. $95?!
Too bad, this thing would make an absolutely kickass DOS machine. (I'm serious! As long as the BIOS does USB/PS2 keyboard emulation.)
You're absolutely right. It seems like every OS (including Linux) goes through this -- in the early days it boots much faster than the competition, but once people start routinely layering all kinds of junk on it then it starts taking minutes to boot even on super-fast hardware.
... one at a time ... if the name server isn't answering. All those "wait X seconds for Y to happen" things can really add up.
What really bugs me is how much of the startup config is done serially. A lot of startup tasks take time, and step N+1 has to wait until step N is finished whether or not it depends on that step. It seems to me that it would be worth the trouble to mechanize startup so that each step is isolated from all the others and knows which previous step it's dependent on and waits for only that step, while everything else cruises ahead in parallel. It'd be a big change from the way things are done now but it'd be worth it. Having my system stop dead for 60 seconds on every boot just because one of the NICs is unplugged (so DHCP isn't answering) is really annoying. Same deal with Apache choking on virtual domains
Also, Linux isn't the entire universe, and some of us really do use those legacy BIOS features. Backwards compatibility is the *only* reason the PC architecture has survived, so deciding to toss that to the wind now is just stupid. The cost is minimal (it's not like the code is going to change once it's written) and if whipping up a few tables and setting a couple of INT vectors is honestly adding dozens of seconds to the boot time, well that's just programmer incompetence, it's not the architecture's fault. The rest of the older BIOS code doesn't do anything if you don't call it, so this just sounds like an excuse to be lazy.
What my lawyer told me is that copyright registration shifts the burden of proof to the alleged infringer, but otherwise you're covered either way. But he still wants me to diligently register my copyrights.
I use 3.5" magneto-optical disks. For some reason they never caught on. I got into them back when 100 MB Zip drives were all getting the click-of-death problem, since the MO disks are multi-vendor (well I think Fuji has some private formats but I use the smaller sizes) you can shop around and from what people say, the recording method is inherently more reliable than Zips. I don't know how they compare to CDs/DVDs but since the recording is magnetic (the optical part is just for head positioning, I think), I would think it would last much longer than some plastic that was discolored by an LED. The old minicomputer magnetic media sure seem to last forever. But I don't think I have any MO disks over about 8 or 9 years old (everything has been readable so far) so I don't know about long-term.
Safe deposit boxes are a really good deal. Mine costs something like $20 per year, and every time I'm going to the bank anyway I just bring an optical disk with all my vital stuff and swap it with the one that's there. Now the trick is not losing the key to the deposit box in the fire/flood/etc. that presumably destroyed all my other backups at home.
Oh sure, find the problem NOW!
- JW, SAT=1380, RPI '88 thank you ever so much (99% of the people I knew at frickin' RPI were there because like me they got bagged by MIT)
The same thought popped into my head -- at least I *think* it's the same thought, I don't know the terminology.
Back in college in the mid 1980s I shared an off-campus apartment with a bunch of other geeks like me, and we looked into getting a connection to the school's computer system (which they were surprisingly friendly about). I won't say it was "the Internet" since it was in a lot of pieces back then (and the school seemed to be on everything *except* the ARPAnet until very late -- even Mailnet, which was barely even anything).
Anyway the local telephone company (NYtel) said they could give us a 2-wire leased line to the school for about $36/mo, or a 4-wire one for $72/mo. The catches were: (1) about $600 for installation, (2) it's not one run of copper all the way there so we couldn't just run 20mA current loop or something, we'd need real leased line modems (I eventually picked up a pair of Gandalf 9600 BPS line driver/receivers cheap but I don't even know if that was the right thing, and that was about when dialups started getting that fast so it was pointless), and (3) the school wasn't an ISP, so it wasn't at all clear what would go at the other end (in those days, translating between SLIP and Ethernet didn't just mean stuffing Linux into some old clunker PC). So we never bit, but I regret it, it sure would have been educational.
Anyway those are 1980s upstate NY prices. I'm sure it's more now (and, we weren't talking about a very long distance) but I'll bet you earn more than you did in the 1980s too. And presumably the data rates are way higher now, and most ISPs would know what to do with their end. OK so it wouldn't be as cheap as DSL but how important is the Internet to you?
Also it might be worth looking into RF modems. Before cable broadband came to my neighborhood and made it all easy, I had the local mom + pop ISP (the best kind!) mostly talked into letting me mount a doodad in their attic (since they were only a block away -- if they'd been on the same block I would have just begged neighbors to let me string wires through the trees), and I was just hemming and hawing over which pair of doodads to buy. The data rates aren't fantastic but you can sure beat 26kbps. Anyway even if you don't sell the ISP themselves on the idea, maybe you could at least get their permission to buy space on someone's connection who's closer to you, and talk *them* into sticking a horn antenna on their porch railing or whatever. Privacy is out the window of course so that would have to be OK with you.
You're hired!!!
Great, they spent a ton of money so that -- what, GPS will *work*? It already did!
Upgrading from 1970s technology to Unix? Unix *is* from the 1970s! The whole reason most slashdotters think it's the whole world is because they grew up with it -- i.e. it's "always" been here. OK it's been updated a lot since the old days but so have IBM mainframes. DASDs are SCSI disks these days.
Sorry to rant, I'm just so sick of companies/governments pouring resources into replacing working systems just because the current crop of wet-behind-the-ears CS grads have been trained to snicker at the stuff that has been making everything work like clockwork all these years.
Unless I misunderstand, this was the entire purpose of the IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin. I don't know why they canned it, because it's a great idea -- an insanely boring magazine that no one is supposed to read, but it exists solely for establishing prior art. So if they have an idea that's cool but they're not going to patent it, they write it up in a TDB issue and the prior art ends up stored in whatever libraries like to hoard this kind of thing, which makes it easy to thrash (in court) anyone who later tries to patent the idea. (You don't have to take IBM's word that they invented it because they made it public record at the time.)
Is the FSF doing anything like this? It's such an obviously good idea, I hope someone still is. Well I suppose if you don't mind paying advertising rates, you can use any halfway respectable publication for this -- i.e. take out a classified ad (in the legal notices section I guess) in your local paper that describes your idea, and it'll end up on microfilm at the local library etc. Hopefully that's respectable enough to be admissable in case you wind up being sued by some weasel who patents your idea five years from now and claims you didn't invent it.
I've never understood why people want to communicate with a computer by rubbing a small box around on the table. Why should I use this stupid thing to make the picture of a tiny finger press the picture of a tiny button, when I have ten real fingers and a keyboard with over 100 real buttons on it. Anyway when I'm forced to use a GUI I usually do use a trackball (Logitech Trackman Vista) but only because this idiotic method of input isn't worth the desk space that a mouse pad wastes.
OK I did see one use of mice that I liked, I knew a guy who felt that double-clicking was too picky so after selecting something, he'd pick the mouse up off the table and use it to press the keypad ENTER key. That's more like it!
I'll bet we'll never hear the follow-up, other than that they'll find a scapegoat and put them away. But not every cut wire in the world is sabotage ... for all we know someone just pruned out an unused section of a wiring harness, or something. So it would be nice to hear what the effects were supposed to be before we get too excited about those evil bastards trying to save a few grams of weight on an expensive space flight.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Seriously, does anyone know of any dot matrix fax machines being made anywhere? I loved dot matrix, it was ridiculously reliable, and whether the ribbon is out of ink is highly subjective so you can limp along for ages if you don't care that much (I'm really sick of my OfficeJet 500 cutting me off because it let all my ink evaporate ... again ... since I hardly get any faxes). A 24-pin dot matrix printer might not be quite up to inkjet resolution, but it's still OK, and doesn't have the smudging/streaking and total intolerance to a raindrop or two.
>Eris is more massive than Pluto. Sounds like they should both get to (re)join the club. Why not?
Because they were both discovered by Americans. Don't be naive!
Didn't Joe McCarthy use the exact same tactic in the 1950s? Claim you have a list but then don't let anyone see it? Worked out great for him, he's one of the most beloved figures in US history! Where'd I put my my "Tailgunner Joe" T-shirt...
Could have sworn I saw this ~20 years ago on a Cyber 180 that was running both NOS and NOS/VE on the same physical machine (these OSes don't even use the same word size!). OK the console wasn't split-screen, you had to flip between one and the other, but that hardly seems like a critical change (most of us would *rather* have the whole screen to play with, with whichever OS has focus right now).
... is, why would anybody lie about going to RPI?! "The 'tute screw -- no matter which way you turn it, it goes in."
(JW / RPI '88 through '92 but for god's sake don't tell anyone)
If you know how to do it well, assembly language programming is just plain fun and that's all there is to it. I do almost all of my programming in assembly (my company's main product is a 200K-line assembly program), officially for speed/size but honestly I'd still use it even if it were slower and fatter. I don't need compilers "protecting" me from architecture details that I never minded in the first place, and I really hate it when HLLs obscure the inner workings to the point that someone like me who's been programming for 28 years honestly can't figure out what's actually happening. With assembly I always know what the computer is doing, because it's exactly what I told the computer to do (never mind whether I was wrong). A lot of programmers really are micromanaging control freaks and assembly is nirvana for people like us.
Seriously, the way to get good results from a computer is to learn how to program the computer. These days people would prefer to learn to program some abstraction, and then stuff enough bloatware under the hood to make it appear that that's what the computer is. Great fun if you don't care about the results (Unix) and/or if you're just trying to congratulate yourself for your cleverness (Comp Sci majors), but to get real work done efficiently you have to be able to think like the machine. The really great programmers are the ones who already thought like the machine full-time anyway.
Portability -- good point, in 1980. Retarded now. Boo hoo, my IA32 code runs on only 90% of the world's computers, I sure painted myself into a corner on that one.
Anyway, what ever happened to plain old curiousity? I learned FORTH *because* it's weird and useless. I never expected to be doing everything in FORTH, I haven't used it at all in years. I've forgotten APL but it was fun having my mind bent at the time I learned it. I can't imagine how it would help my life but that's not the point. It's good for your noggin to look at programming from as many different points of view as possible.
I long since stopped going to CompUSA. If the surly/clueless employees, bad selection, and lousy prices weren't enough, I just can't believe they think they have the right to search everyone's bags on the way out! I mean I know there's the "shopkeeper's privilege" concept but it still depends on the same basic idea of probable cause (or something equivalent) that applies to any case of search and seizure. They just saw me buy my stuff at the register, so what basis do they have for pretending they think I stole it when they stop me ten feet later? Anyway I never agreed to be illegally searched, and there's no sign claiming that by going in the store you implicitly agree to be searched. Anyway they only search the bag, don't you think if I were stealing something it would be somewhere else? The explanation I've heard is that the real problem is catching their own employees who are in cahoots with a customer/friend, and charge them for a CD-ROM drive but send them out the door with a laptop (and the friend pays them off). Well if they're hiring the dregs of society that's their problem, it doesn't mean I have to give up my rights. Same reason I stopped going to the Guitar Center. There are plenty of stores in the world that don't treat their customers like criminals, so I'll shop at those, thanks. CompUSA deserves what happens to them.
Those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. Proofread your posts before insulting peoples' intelligence.
Of course you mean "people's". "People" is already plural. Yes, I am administering a self-wedgie as I'm writing this.
Even DEC did try. EDT got pretty good with screen painting (it was certainly clever about knowing which parameters can be defaulted in VTxxx control sequences), and it had an option to use only the top N lines of the screen for really slow connections (it was painful at 300 baud but still good enough). Also, CHANGE mode in V1 of EDT (still available in later EDTs, EDT is really four editors in one) has a similar reek to vi so I would have thought the Weenix Unies would like it. KED (the mini-EDT on that new-fangled RT-11 thing) was nowhere near as flexible as EDT (and implements only CHANGE mode, and only the V2+ flavor) but it still made a good effort on slow terminals.
As for vi, I don't get it. Yes I use it on a daily basis too but I despise it, it's inconsistent and line-oriented and case-sensitive and all-around annoying. The only good thing I can see about it is that every single Weenix system has it, so wherever you go, you can always find an editor your fingers know how to use.
Anyway much more importantly, the CW tests are as good a way as any to test someone's level of seriousness and discipline. If we just let everyone waltz on in, well that's called CB and it's cacaphony. Many people won't act with even a basic level of maturity unless they're made to jump through a hoop or two (and it could be anything -- it'd be OK if they made us learn ASL instead).
Finally, it's not as if the CW tests were hard in the first place. I passed the 5 WPM when I was 12 and the 20 WPM when I was 14, and believe me, I'm not a clever guy. All it takes is a little practice. By the time I got the basic alphabet down by getting my mom to quiz me, she knew it too without even meaning to (it was just easier to remember it than to look everything up on the chart). But everyone since then (1978) has pissed and moaned and whined as if it were the hardest thing in the world, and as usual the FCC caved. Well I'll be staying in the CW bands (the ones that are left) where it's safe.
That doesn't help you now. Well with geezers like me the answer was, get a micro, and learn *everything* about it. I mean everything. Schematics, ROM source listings, whatever you can get your hands on. Learn how to program every single peripheral in the machine. Build boards to interface to it. Trace through the OS. Think of utilities it needs and write the fastest/smallest/best version you can. Sounds tedious and boring but actually it's tons of fun because you *love* everything about computers. Right? The bad news is, this might be where you find out you aren't as big a nerd as they told you you were in high school. Either you are or you aren't, you can fake it but then it'll always be an uphill battle.
The other bad news is, present-day computers come with so many layers of junk piled onto them that it's almost impossible for one person to learn everything. The OSes are vast and not well-documented, they don't give out schematics any more, and the bus can't be interfaced to with 95-cent 74LS245s any more. And the mishmash of high-level languages and libraries mean you're not programming a computer at all, but some crazy abstraction of what various armchair CompScis *think* computers should look like. Which can be fine but not if you end up with the kind of slippery brain that can't get a grip on anything real (like emulating a game console), and there's a lot of that going around.
OK so ideally I'd like to suggest that you go back in time and get an old computer that a mortal can understand, like a PC XT or an Apple ][ or TRaSh-80 or whatever, but I know you won't. What might be about as useful though, would be to get a developer's kit for a simple microcontroller IC. They're a blast, and not too expensive. The vendor is trying to you get you excited about their architecture so it usually comes with everything, even if some of the software is trial versions, and there's sample code and a debugger and some kind of download/debug cable and it's all intended to be fun. Now you've got a tiny computer (probably more powerful than those early PCs, except for the lack of a keyboard and screen) with schematics, and manuals for the CPU and all the I/O. You think this is irrelevant to C/C++ life but it's not.
Dump the C compiler though and program the little doohicky in assembly. You've probably been brainwashed by your schooling to hate assembly but that's a load of BS. It's not for everyone or everything, but neither is any other one language. You may never use it again, but getting good at it on one architecture is the best start for firming up a nice nerdly brain. Getting to the point where every single byte of code on the machine was written by you is a huge step.
The applications might be stupid -- blinking an LED, sending your name out an RS232 port, maybe driving a keypad or an LCD display. But once you've gotten really good at taking total command of a small computer, all the hocus-pocus is gone forever and even if you never learn any other architecture to the same level of detail, you'll be able to make educated guesses about what's hidden underneath all those layers of high-level facade. It'd be directly helpful to understanding a game console, and it would give you a great general ability to zero in on the specifics of any programming project.
Trust me, you don't care about my application! But anyway it's an emulator for DEC PDP-11 minicomputers. DOS is a wonderful place for a project like that because I can help myself to all the hardware I need, so I reprogram the clock chip for 50/60 Hz and take over the keyboard to make it DEC-style so NumLock is a data key and ENTER doesn't autorepeat and the LEDs are under software control, and download DEC characters into the SVGA, and run a blinkenlights board off the LPT port, and program the FDC for 26-sector single density mode, and on and on, all that kind of stuff you can do easily in DOS that takes buttloads of ioctl()s on other systems (so, lots of context switches) if they let you do it at all. And there's no multitasking so the response time is great (except during file I/O of course). Plus I roll in my own drivers for a bunch of weird optional hardware (RocketPorts and I/O bus adapters and parallel interfaces), and those drivers keep on working year after year, not like anything I've written for Linux, where I have to write separate kernel drivers which break even between minor versions of a supposedly "stable" kernel series, so I'm always fixing them up to match the latest gratuitous kernel changes. Anyway last winter's big project was adding support for SMP motherboards, for emulating multi-CPU PDP-11s -- well it doesn't work on my new AMD64 X2 board but I'll sort that out -- I love this though, I can't think of any other OS where you could slip your own SMP code in underneath a totally non-SMP-aware OS. DOS's brainlessness is its greatest strength.