Save Officer Spock

It finally happened, well 30 years ago.

Message-ID: <[email protected]>
Newsgroups: fa.sf-lovers
Path: utzoo!duke!cincy!chris
Date: Mon Jun 8 11:06:47 1981
Subject: Save Officer Spock
From: chris
X-OldUsenet-Modified: added From; converted from A-news; fixed Message-ID; added Xref
Xref: dummy dummy:1
Perhaps you are not yet aware of it, but a new Star Trek movie
is in the making this summer. While that is all well and good,
there is a problem with it. It seems that Leonard Nimoy will no
longer be available for the role of Spock after this movie;
thus they are killing him off. Loyal trekkies here have taken
great offense to this, as well they should. There are much better
ways to remove the necessity of having the character present.
A local radio station has begun a campaign the call SOS (see title).
They are encouraging letter writers, and wil forward the mail they
collect to the producers of the movie. If you would like to write,
or contact them and start your own movement, here is the address:
SOS
WVXU-FM
Xavier University
Cincinnati, OH 45207
Live Long and Prosper!

From what I recall the breaking story of how Spoke died in Star Trek II was one of the first ‘big’ nerd crisis on usenet. I’m sure it has more to do with the date of when usenet started to get popular vs other big ‘shocks’ of the time like Empire Strikes Back. The old usenet archives sure do provide an interesting ‘view’ into our past, of even 30 years ago. I’m out of town for the next few days so … no big stuff coming up but I thought this was worthy enough to post.

Old Usenet! Party like it’s 1981!

Check out this amazing site, olduse.net!  It’s really amazing!  What Joey Hess has done, is get a copy of the old USENET archives from the UofT, and parse out all the dates, set them in the right format for a news server, then stream them in ‘real time’ as it was, back in 1981.

That is right, it’s August 6th 1981.  Star Trek II still hasn’t happened yet, can you wait for the hype and the build up for the biggest geek movie since.. well when everyone found out last year (1980) that Vader was Luke’s father?

News/2

What is also cool is that you can take any news reader (even News/2) and point it to nntp.olduse.net and read away!  And not to mention the incredible setup with a telehack like interface to a news reader.

Now I’ll just have to figure out a way to stuff USENET into Synchronet 2.. (I’m sure Synchronet 3 will/would be way easier, but heh you know, OS/2 …)

Oh and here is a timeline of things to look forward to.  But I guess being a ‘time traveler’ kind of takes the fun out of it.

The end of the world as we know it!

So after waiting what? 14 years and actually shelling out money for a game that I really don’t care about (BORDERLANDS.. UGH.) and all the promises…. I was about to go to bed, and suddenly… I got the email.

And of course, the server is OVERLOADED, and the first time I tried.. Denied.

Over and over. I know it’s silly but how can I go to sleep now?  The greatest expectation in video gaming history is upon us!

Ok ok, yeah I do remember daikatana and what a catastrophic letdown that was, but come on! this is the DUKE!

So a few clicks more….

And it looks like we are in business.

 

Now the only debate is…

Sleep, or not.

 

ARGH!

DOSBox ported to google’s Chrome as NACLBox!

This is cool.  While it won’t be portable like jdosbox, it should run significantly faster.  At the moment there is some bugs in a port of SDL to the NACL framework, but when they get those worked out it’ll be amazing!

And I have to wonder with a real i386 backend and SDL would Qemu on NACL be possible? And the ability to sync disk images somewhere for persitent storage, and you’d get a ‘web os’ of your choice, on demand!

At a minimum it’d be cool to compare neko in a ‘native’ version of dosbox.

Sysadmin rosetta stone.

A friend passed this link on to me, and it’s a good place to turn for some old/foreign OS’s.

It’s covers some basic tasks with the following OS’s:

  • AIX
  • A/UX
  • DG/UX
  • FreeBSD
  • HP-UX
  • IRIX
  • Linux
  • Mac OS X
  • NCR Unix
  • NetBSD
  • OpenBSD
  • Reliant
  • SCO OpenServer
  • Solaris
  • SunOS 4
  • Tru64
  • Ultrix
  • UNICOS

Always a good thing to have handy if you run into a supercomputer…..

Looks like more outages ahead..

“We’re moving most of our servers from SVTIX[1] to Market Post Tower[2] this
weekend. we’ve got layer 2 between the two locations already, so we’ll
be bringing down servers in batches of five and moving them five at a shot.
each user should experience something like two hours of downtime, if all
goes well.”

Well at least luke is transparent on the whole thing so it looks like there will be more bumps ahead. But I do have a full backup so worst case I can bring this online elsewhere if this goes down.

If anything the blogger outage made me finally break down and get that squared away.