Topic: Authorities Concerned Over Rise of Teen Linux Gangs

[Nemesis]

Link to full article

Boston, MA—On Friday evenings, scruffy bands of teenagers gather in alleys behind Micro Centers, Best Buys, and Apple Stores across the country. Going by names like “Team Mayhem” and “The Pipes,” the Bawls-swigging teens trade Linux installation advice, brag about their videogame prowess, and sneer at authorities.

“We’re very concerned about what these kids are doing in their spare time,” says FBI spokesman Mark Brasslathe. “Just a few years ago, these kids would have been safe in their parents’ basements with their PlayStations, but cybermancy has changed all that. Now they’re fast becoming a threat to the public welfare.”

One young Linux gangster, who goes by the name “Retinoid,” agrees that cyberspiritual technologies have radically changed the teen geek community.

[Commander Maxillius]

Dear FBI,

GET AN F-ING LIFE!!!

Signed,
Me

[Nemesis]

 

[Just plain old Punisher]

LOL me thinks the thread has run afowl of the dangerious and unseen shoals of satire.

[Nemesis]

shhh!

[FPF-Tobin Dax]

 

[Dash Jones]

Don't upset the squirrel.

[Commander Maxillius]

[Vipre]

I'll switch to Linux if someone here can get it installed in a Chihuahua and make it play MP3's for me.

[Nemesis]

I'll switch to Linux if someone here can get it installed in a Chihuahua and make it play MP3's for me.

That should be do able.

Use this motherboard as it is small enough to fit.  I'm using (since last Thursday) Vector Linux on my laptop and it plays DVDs "out of the box" and is supposed to handle MP3s but I haven't tried them yet.  Of course it is illegal in the U.S.  It should run on a system based on that motherboard.  So it can be done.

[Panzergranate]

I've seen smaller than that, but those are for industry and millitary use. You'd be surprised just how many missiles, Drones, systems and industrial plant processes are run  by embedded PCs.

Be very very worried if Microsoft comes up with a Windows for Missiles release!!

Like the T-Shirt says, "Thank God Microsoft don't make aircraft!!"

[Just plain old Punisher]

Heck, a couple years back when I worked on a Air Force project that developed software that interfaced with flight data computers on AF Jets, we still had to release a DOS version of the application because that was about 18 percent of our market.

The Air Force tech people were still using DOS 6.11

Jezz.

Not as bad as the Navy tho...a lot of their software that drives the advanced radar systems was written back in the 1970's. They've only recently began updating it to newer standards.

Was really hard finding people who know Cobol. =P

[Panzergranate]

COBOL (Completely Obstelete Banal Operating Language) was out of dae in the early 1980's. 

They must have had to trawl around returement homes to find anyone who remembered COBOL and then find a card punch terminal out of a museum to programme with.

Geez, and people asume that the Russian were decades out of date, military wise, aparently not!!

Only DOS 6.21 and not DOS 6.44 or DOS 7!! 

Next you'll be telling us that they were running old 8 bit 4.77 Mhz. 8088 PCs as well!!

[Javora]

COBOL (Completely Obstelete Banal Operating Language) was out of dae in the early 1980's. 

They must have had to trawl around returement homes to find anyone who remembered COBOL and then find a card punch terminal out of a museum to programme with.

Geez, and people asume that the Russian were decades out of date, military wise, aparently not!!

Only DOS 6.21 and not DOS 6.44 or DOS 7!! 

Next you'll be telling us that they were running old 8 bit 4.77 Mhz. 8088 PCs as well!!

 

I used to be able to code in Cobol, but that was a long time ago.  My sister still can still code in it though.  That was a serious pain in the @$$ to use though.  I remember a class mate used Cobol to write a program that would convert a number in to hexadecimal, that thing was huge.  Anyone remember Cobol for graphics and animation??!?  I got a big laugh out of that when I saw that course book.

[Panzergranate]

Here in the UK, my first computer, when I was still at school in 1977, was a Radofin 1296 running 6.5 Megabyte E2PROM Cartridges. You could either buy games from software companies, such as Activision (yes, they're really that old!!) or biy blank cartridges and programme them yourself. Some companies would sell blank cartridges and advertise for games programmes to be sent into them.

The cartridge system was nicked by a Japanese game machine manufacturer in the 1980's.

However, the only programming language available was Signetics 2650 assembler. Anyone remember the 2650 processor?? It was usually found running Hard Drives (MFM and the old Warp Core sized things) and Disc Drives (8 Inch and 5 Inch).

The 2650 was the competitor to the 8080 and 6800 back in the late 1970's. It is a real headache to programme, if you're used to "normal" register arrangements. So I started out in asembly language programming from day one.

I later added in a homebrew circuit to save and load from tape, as with the ZX81. Actually saving from memory and loading data into memory using cassette tape is not that hard to do with any computer. The first PCs used cassette tape. remember TRON and TROFF??

Despite having computers and programming a lot of my own games (you had to back then), I never made it as a Nerd or Geek.... I ride motorcycles and ran with and later led a motorcycle gang back in the 1980's.

Yes, I have a life.

But in between the fast bikes, fast women and fun, I still found time to play around with computers. I even design and make my own PC cards occasionally.

I also own Macs and they are better!! However, as an electronics design engineer, all the ECAD packages run on PC, as do most games and so I have a lot of them around here for various roles.

I still have an old IBM AT complete with twin MFM brick drives. They just sound so good powering up, just like a jet turbine. It runs Windows 2.03 and still runs, when fired up ocasionally. It's used to play Wolfenstein, Red Baron 1 and Spectrum Emulator games.

I can programme in PASCAL, BASIC, C, C++, any assembler, DOS and CPM.

Talking of CPM, why was it pushed out?? It was far superiour to DOS in the way LINUX and UNIX are superiour to WINDOWS. I can remember, vagiely, the CPM versus DOS back in the early 1980's. Think now, if CPM had won, what operating system would we be running now??

[Commander Maxillius]

Someone should write Windows for CPM, see how it works

[Panzergranate]

I always like the message, when a floppy disc screwed up, of "Retry, Abandon, Ignore, Salvage??" that CPM put up. The salvage option would copy the data from the disc, without the FAT (which was obviously screwed up) and put it onto another floppy disc, figure out and create a new FAT for it. MS DOS and DR DOS never had this facility!!

Also typing in CAT (Catalogue) instead of DIR to lisyt a disc's contents in CPM.

I can also remember when BIOS stood for Built In Operating System, as on the cover of the 1982 IBM publication "The  IBM PC Built In Operating System Manual".

Somewhere, during the late 1980's, someone started wrongly calling it  Basic Input Output System (which it is actually more than) and the worng label has stuck ever since.

I once won £20 at University over the true meaning of BIOS, during one argument. I just went with the guy to the Universty library, asked for the book (it was not a loan book) and just held it up, told the guy to read out aloud what the cover said, and held my hand out for the money.

I seriously need to find a copy of my own though, as I could travel around IT departments all over the planet making a living betting on the true meaning of BIOS!!

If you seriously need to programme a PC in assembler, you need access to this book. It has all the built in subroutines, operating proceedures, descriptions of pre-call register conditions and after call conditions/corruptions.

There are inbuild pieces of software, such as the XDPB, INT27, etc. that can be called upon to do work for you. Also data stream course changes can be performed by simply kicking an address with different value.

On all computers, by industry standards, Date Stream #1 is the Keyboard, #2 is the Printer, #3 is the VDU, #4 is the Serial Port, #5 is the Parallell Port, #6 and upwards relate to storage devices. By redirectiong a stream, you could type and what you type appears straight out of the printer port instead of ending up on screen.