Re: breadboarding

Im sitting here with a group of guys (and one in CA, and one in england thanks skype) working on an LED video screen. we got a laugh out of it too :)

Cheers Terry

How's Skype for you in that respect? Can you share drawings and docs? How about eaves-drop safety?

Eavesdrop is easy in Skype. The company sells the backdoor:

Ok, I wouldn't worry too much about law enforcement dropping in since I don't do any illegal stuff. But the rumors about selling are concerning. Might be just rumors though. I am more concerned about schematics and stuff that get shared during discussions. Not sure whether and how that works though because there is only scant information on the Skype site, and it only lists webcam style video.

Not that I really have anybody I need to call, but this Skype looks pretty interesting. So I went to their site, and they don't have a Slackware package and I didn't see any links to source where I can compile it here.

Anybody heard of either of those anywhere?

Thanks, Rich

What's slackware? Some kind of trousers?

Actually, I had first heard of Linux in the 1995 era, so I decided to try it. I was wondering which distro to d/l, and there were so many options, with attributes and stuff that I had no clue about, so I picked Slackware because I liked the name. Linux for slackers - what a perfect fit! ;-P

Mind you, it's not Aunt Tillie-Friendly at all - it's more of a techie's Linux. :-)

Cheers! Rich

Joerg wrote:

Actually, it's the oldest extant distro.

I've wondered what the world would be like if a big rock had fallen out of the sky and impacted the Redmond campus during business hours ~April 1, 1995 (before W95 and just before Red Hat's release).

If that had happened, I suspect that Macs and Amigas would have been seen as much more viable contenders than Slackware. :-) (Well, maybe not Amigas... Commodore declared bankruptcy in 1994... :-( )

Probably IBM would then still be in that biz because there wouldn't have been Senor Gates eating their lunch.

That's one reason I can't use Linux. No time to become an OS expert. If I'd fiddle with all them distros and settings and gizmos it would be like Barney Fife and his gun.

Put your bullet back in your pocket, Barney... :)

OS/2 2.0 came out in April, 1992. A spectacular technical success--multithreaded 32-bit OS, fully object-oriented GUI, a beautiful object model (SOM)...I could go on...but a stupid marketing failure. I still use OS/2 at least a few times a week, and I still love it.

Cheers,

Phil Hobbs

Well, absolutely. I was sure hoping OS/2 would make it but they blundered so badly in the marketing area that it's hard to believe. Essentially they could have eaten Microsoft's lunch but instead simply walked away from the table.

They simply didn't have the money.

Back then the money ratio was still in IBM's favor. IBM turned away because it would have eaten into their Power architecture 'nix workstation line. One more instance of killing the golden egg laying goose to save the lame duck product.

No, it wasn't. IBM was bust, by some *very* knowledgeable people, withing two or three weeks of missing payroll. There simply were more important places to put a few hundred million$.