Microsoft owned SCO at one time. In fact, the Santa Cruz Office of Microsoft became SCO. I have a machine here in my collection with pre-SCO Microsoft Xenix installed and running on it. Microsoft in their pre-MS-DOS days developed the first port of UNIX to run on the Intel 8086 processor, called Xenix. When Billy decided he didn't want to do UNIX anymore, it was all split off to become SCO.
SCO was an entity formed by Microsoft. It was once owned by Microsoft.
I can't speak for the people of Venezuela. So I didn't try. Sadly, with the polarized 'left' and 'right' bias of most 'informed' news sources in the United States, it's near impossible for me to know what the Venezuelan people think. All I can know is what Jimmah Carter and Matt Drudge thing, and that ain't very reliable.
They're better mashed that pressed-into-french-fry (er... 'american fry') shape as is the norm at Burger King. I ate there last weekend for the first time in a long while. They STILL have reformulated fries (not sliced and fried, pulped and formed into 'fry' shape). Ick. Very, VERY unAmerican. True 'French' fries, one might say.
heh
(too many layers of sarcasm to sort out in above. so best just hit 'submit' and possibly kiss karma g'bye.)
There's a ton of good software to run on that Alpha. You can run the latest version of NetBSD, for instance, with nearly the entire collection of packages. And I mean the most current up-to-date packages available.
Obviously, you won't be able to run Microsoft Word 200x or Visio on it, though.
My concern goes further than that. When I was a kid, I learned a lot and had a lot of fun taking stuff apart to learn how it works, etc. All that stuff that the article claims "Besides the obvious benefit of getting this junk out of our homes," sounds like my mom throwing all the cool stuff away each summer when I went to summer camp.
This is a nerd/geek site. And that does NOT only mean 'IT' nerds (grrr). There's a place in every community where some nerdy guy has hoarded up a lot of cool older electronic gear and is adapting it to other uses.
I'm sorry, but the 'recycling' regime comes off as a bit fascistic, sometimes. Like 'we forbid you to keep that old stuff around' and the likes. Many recycling centers specifically forbid people from pulling out the cooler bits to do stuff with.
Any classic computing buff knows that some of the recyclers are 'cool' but that lots of them are total jerks towards anybody who shows an interest in saving/restoring the old stuff.
If the homeless dude was smart, he'd slip out of line with all the money intended for purchase of the PS3. It seems like it would be more than the 20,000 yen being mentioned. Does the scalper dude have guards making sure the homeless folks don't slip away?? Are they paying for the units with a gift-card/voucher they can't carry off and use to pay for tinned food and wine?
The world is not so much a 'black and white' world as one that has patches of gray, black, and white all over. The people of Venezuela leapt away from one dark black patch (dictatorship supported by the CIA) to a megalomaniac populist dictator (Chavez) not supported by the CIA. In other words, to another dark black patch. I think the people in that country probably want something better than either alternative. Hopefully it will transition to that eventually. The country being ruled by Chavez definitely is NOT a move toward the light. Pretending that not-CIA is automatically an improvement is a terrible way of understanding the situation.
The land stolen from it's original inhabitants in the Americas was stolen gradually between 500- 150 years ago. It was 'stolen' by modern Western people from people with ancient ways. It is a bad thing from the past, but not similar in many regards to a political 'movement' that sprung out of Western Culture (Communism) rolling in and stealing the property of people who practice a different variant of Western Culture.
It's odd that you seem to be raising an arguement to justify land stealing, using the 'bad feelings' people hold regarding the expropriation of the Native American people's land as justification. Which way do you feel about it? Was it okay to steal the NA land, and thus the Cuban dictatorship is justified in doing it also? Or are both wrong? The Cuban situation is still within means of being corrected. The NA people haven't seen justice completely (but things are improving,) but much more than Cuban refugees from Castro have.
Be fair. His sputtering ignorant fury would have been better expressed in his native language (whatever it is). It isn't fair to poke fun at a fanatic ranting in a second language.
Capitalist run farms in Africa and Asia leave people starving.
Actually, in Zimbabwe, you'll now find people starving around the land that formerly was feeding the populace quite successfully. The Capitalist farmers were thrown off the land by the 'socialist' government who handed the land over to incompetent thugs who are incapable of operating an efficient farm.
An economic blockade is only in effect because the Cuban Government has not made reparations to the people whose property they stole after 'making their revolution.'
Skip the comic book 'Class Warfare' picture you conjure up in your second paragraph.
There was an attempted coup d'etat against Chavez - which was prevented by the people of Venezuela!
Indeed. In a spontaneous reaction to the very notion that the Glorious Leader could be overthrown and the People's Will(tm) thwarted, The People(tm) rose up to defend the revolution.
Do you cut-n-paste from socialist rags you buy on the mall on campus?
The people who wait for hours in long lines at 'product release' of some new thing are supposed to be dedicated, devoted fanatics to that particular retail product.
I can't help but shudder at the thought of the pure spirit of materialistic fanaticsm being diluted by these stand-in buyers who probably aren't even completely dressed up as their favorite character from a game.
This sort of thing will dilute the thrill of being one of the first enthusiasts to purchase popular products. I can't help but think that maybe we should petition Bob Barker of 'The Price Is Right' to start up a public campaign to stand up for the rights of fanatical consumers everywhere.
If NASA hasn't tested such scenarios by 'setting the clock' and seeing how systems react, they are not texting their systems adequately.
This so often comes up with year-change issues. People get all sweaty like the 'realtime-clock' module can't be changed to simulate the conditions and see what will happen.
A slashdotter who builds his own computer is, uh... somebody with a phillips screwdriver who knows how to plug together taiwanese circuit boards and fit them in a case properly.
And there is no such thing as a jedi warrior, or a light sabre. Bad thing to compare *anything* from real life to.
Your core point in the tagline holds, kinda. All kinds of people who've never built a single electronic device from raw parts have this attitude that they're 'hardware whizzes' because they wield a wicked phillips screwdriver. They probably couldn't simplify a boolean equation into the least number of TTL gates if their life depended on it. They've probably never burned a bit of code they wrote into an EPROM. etc. etc.
If somebody breaks into my house and reads the ebay password I have on a sticker stuck to the frame of my monitor, the last thing I am going to worry about is him having my ebay password.
First off, he's killed the dog (to get into the room with the computer) so I have that to worry about (my wife really likes that dog.) Second, he's stolen the little notebook with all the other passwords written in it. Third, he's probably knocked over the piles of electronic gear, books, test equipment in getting to the monitor/keyboard where I sit, so it's all a total mess. And he has root access on my system? Yeah. I guess so.
It's a slashdot thing. 2/3 of the employees at Google could quit in a huff, over issues involving data privacy, and Slashdot would summarize it as "2/3 of Google employees retire because of great retirement benefits Google offers."
Agreed. I like the way I can 'sync' my Creative flash player better. I attach like any USB drive and it plays the music in the folders as I arrange them.
At present I use Midnight Commander to 'sync' the player.
I now use Foxit Reader almost exclusively for displaying and printing PDFs at work. But my machine still sometimes locks up and throws up dialogues about AdobeAcrobat plugin junk. I haven't taken the initiative to completely excise Adobe Acrobat from the machine (the IT people might frown on that) but Foxit Reader is a single.exe file that I can stick essentially anywhere on my drive and point PDF files at, and it just works(tm).
Either way I couldn't give a monkeys butt about the brand, I care about the product.
True to a degree. But the 'brand' of OSS projects is the center around which developers gather. If the 'brand' is subverted or branches out in a way that dissipates that center, then developers will disperse and/or cease to participate.
'The Mozilla Project' is a distinctily different 'brand' than 'Adobe (tm) Mozilla.'
Personally, I try to stay at arms length from anything currently made by Adobe. They've been taken over by types who add in thick layers of garbage. Recent incartions of Acrobat Reader, and the whole Adobe approach to PDF, reflect this. And I am a paid licensee of several older versions of Acrobat.
Slashdot Mirror
BTW, I used all of these environments at one time, including MS Xenix.
I have a 'live' copy of MS Xenix installed and running (when powered up) on an Altos 586 system.
It's kinda on borrowed time though as I no longer have any OS installation media.
Microsoft owned SCO at one time. In fact, the Santa Cruz Office of Microsoft became SCO. I have a machine here in my collection with pre-SCO Microsoft Xenix installed and running on it. Microsoft in their pre-MS-DOS days developed the first port of UNIX to run on the Intel 8086 processor, called Xenix. When Billy decided he didn't want to do UNIX anymore, it was all split off to become SCO.
SCO was an entity formed by Microsoft. It was once owned by Microsoft.
I can't speak for the people of Venezuela. So I didn't try. Sadly, with the polarized 'left' and 'right' bias of most 'informed' news sources in the United States, it's near impossible for me to know what the Venezuelan people think. All I can know is what Jimmah Carter and Matt Drudge thing, and that ain't very reliable.
They're better mashed that pressed-into-french-fry (er... 'american fry') shape as is the norm at Burger King. I ate there last weekend for the first time in a long while. They STILL have reformulated fries (not sliced and fried, pulped and formed into 'fry' shape). Ick. Very, VERY unAmerican. True 'French' fries, one might say.
heh
(too many layers of sarcasm to sort out in above. so best just hit 'submit' and possibly kiss karma g'bye.)
There's a ton of good software to run on that Alpha. You can run the latest version of NetBSD, for instance, with nearly the entire collection of packages. And I mean the most current up-to-date packages available.
Obviously, you won't be able to run Microsoft Word 200x or Visio on it, though.
(isn't life great?)
My concern goes further than that. When I was a kid, I learned a lot and had a lot of fun taking stuff apart to learn how it works, etc. All that stuff that the article claims "Besides the obvious benefit of getting this junk out of our homes," sounds like my mom throwing all the cool stuff away each summer when I went to summer camp.
This is a nerd/geek site. And that does NOT only mean 'IT' nerds (grrr). There's a place in every community where some nerdy guy has hoarded up a lot of cool older electronic gear and is adapting it to other uses.
I'm sorry, but the 'recycling' regime comes off as a bit fascistic, sometimes. Like 'we forbid you to keep that old stuff around' and the likes. Many recycling centers specifically forbid people from pulling out the cooler bits to do stuff with.
Any classic computing buff knows that some of the recyclers are 'cool' but that lots of them are total jerks towards anybody who shows an interest in saving/restoring the old stuff.
If the homeless dude was smart, he'd slip out of line with all the money intended for purchase of the PS3. It seems like it would be more than the 20,000 yen being mentioned. Does the scalper dude have guards making sure the homeless folks don't slip away?? Are they paying for the units with a gift-card/voucher they can't carry off and use to pay for tinned food and wine?
The world is not so much a 'black and white' world as one that has patches of gray, black, and white all over. The people of Venezuela leapt away from one dark black patch (dictatorship supported by the CIA) to a megalomaniac populist dictator (Chavez) not supported by the CIA. In other words, to another dark black patch. I think the people in that country probably want something better than either alternative. Hopefully it will transition to that eventually. The country being ruled by Chavez definitely is NOT a move toward the light. Pretending that not-CIA is automatically an improvement is a terrible way of understanding the situation.
The land stolen from it's original inhabitants in the Americas was stolen gradually between 500- 150 years ago. It was 'stolen' by modern Western people from people with ancient ways. It is a bad thing from the past, but not similar in many regards to a political 'movement' that sprung out of Western Culture (Communism) rolling in and stealing the property of people who practice a different variant of Western Culture.
It's odd that you seem to be raising an arguement to justify land stealing, using the 'bad feelings' people hold regarding the expropriation of the Native American people's land as justification. Which way do you feel about it? Was it okay to steal the NA land, and thus the Cuban dictatorship is justified in doing it also? Or are both wrong? The Cuban situation is still within means of being corrected. The NA people haven't seen justice completely (but things are improving,) but much more than Cuban refugees from Castro have.
They must think: "If the world ends tomorrow and I don't get to play ps3 I will die!" !!!!!
Now, if we can just get them to react properly to their beliefs, and to line up to fall in neat piles....
Be fair. His sputtering ignorant fury would have been better expressed in his native language (whatever it is). It isn't fair to poke fun at a fanatic ranting in a second language.
Capitalist run farms in Africa and Asia leave people starving.
Actually, in Zimbabwe, you'll now find people starving around the land that formerly was feeding the populace quite successfully. The Capitalist farmers were thrown off the land by the 'socialist' government who handed the land over to incompetent thugs who are incapable of operating an efficient farm.
An economic blockade is only in effect because the Cuban Government has not made reparations to the people whose property they stole after 'making their revolution.'
Skip the comic book 'Class Warfare' picture you conjure up in your second paragraph.
There was an attempted coup d'etat against Chavez - which was prevented by the people of Venezuela!
Indeed. In a spontaneous reaction to the very notion that the Glorious Leader could be overthrown and the People's Will(tm) thwarted, The People(tm) rose up to defend the revolution.
Do you cut-n-paste from socialist rags you buy on the mall on campus?
The people who wait for hours in long lines at 'product release' of some new thing are supposed to be dedicated, devoted fanatics to that particular retail product.
I can't help but shudder at the thought of the pure spirit of materialistic fanaticsm being diluted by these stand-in buyers who probably aren't even completely dressed up as their favorite character from a game.
This sort of thing will dilute the thrill of being one of the first enthusiasts to purchase popular products. I can't help but think that maybe we should petition Bob Barker of 'The Price Is Right' to start up a public campaign to stand up for the rights of fanatical consumers everywhere.
If NASA hasn't tested such scenarios by 'setting the clock' and seeing how systems react, they are not texting their systems adequately.
This so often comes up with year-change issues. People get all sweaty like the 'realtime-clock' module can't be changed to simulate the conditions and see what will happen.
Oh, and about your tagline:
A slashdotter who builds his own computer is, uh... somebody with a phillips screwdriver who knows how to plug together taiwanese circuit boards and fit them in a case properly.
And there is no such thing as a jedi warrior, or a light sabre. Bad thing to compare *anything* from real life to.
Your core point in the tagline holds, kinda. All kinds of people who've never built a single electronic device from raw parts have this attitude that they're 'hardware whizzes' because they wield a wicked phillips screwdriver. They probably couldn't simplify a boolean equation into the least number of TTL gates if their life depended on it. They've probably never burned a bit of code they wrote into an EPROM. etc. etc.
You don't think jedis are real, do you?
If somebody breaks into my house and reads the ebay password I have on a sticker stuck to the frame of my monitor, the last thing I am going to worry about is him having my ebay password.
First off, he's killed the dog (to get into the room with the computer) so I have that to worry about (my wife really likes that dog.) Second, he's stolen the little notebook with all the other passwords written in it. Third, he's probably knocked over the piles of electronic gear, books, test equipment in getting to the monitor/keyboard where I sit, so it's all a total mess. And he has root access on my system? Yeah. I guess so.
It's a slashdot thing. 2/3 of the employees at Google could quit in a huff, over issues involving data privacy, and Slashdot would summarize it as "2/3 of Google employees retire because of great retirement benefits Google offers."
Because Google = Good; Sony = Evil
Agreed. I like the way I can 'sync' my Creative flash player better. I attach like any USB drive and it plays the music in the folders as I arrange them.
At present I use Midnight Commander to 'sync' the player.
'nuff said.
Minix wasn't free. You had to buy a $50 textbook to get a single user license.
It's free now, of course.
I now use Foxit Reader almost exclusively for displaying and printing PDFs at work. But my machine still sometimes locks up and throws up dialogues about AdobeAcrobat plugin junk. I haven't taken the initiative to completely excise Adobe Acrobat from the machine (the IT people might frown on that) but Foxit Reader is a single .exe file that I can stick essentially anywhere on my drive and point PDF files at, and it just works(tm).
Either way I couldn't give a monkeys butt about the brand, I care about the product.
True to a degree. But the 'brand' of OSS projects is the center around which developers gather. If the 'brand' is subverted or branches out in a way that dissipates that center, then developers will disperse and/or cease to participate.
'The Mozilla Project' is a distinctily different 'brand' than 'Adobe (tm) Mozilla.'
Personally, I try to stay at arms length from anything currently made by Adobe. They've been taken over by types who add in thick layers of garbage. Recent incartions of Acrobat Reader, and the whole Adobe approach to PDF, reflect this. And I am a paid licensee of several older versions of Acrobat.
Avalanches involve snow and ice, not pebbles.