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Performing the calculations,
(22,238 miles X 1609.344 meters per mile)/(299,792,458 meters per second) X 4 trips = .47751 seconds.

See this Byte article for further discussion of TCP and latency. Also see this student article for a discussion of alternatives.

Performing the calculations,
(22,238 miles X 1609.344 meters per mile)/(299,792,458 meters per second) X 4 trips = .47751 seconds.

See this Byte article for further discussion of TCP and latency. Also see this student article for a discussion of alternatives.

Performing the calculations,
(22,238 miles X 1609.344 meters per mile)/(299,792,458 meters per second) X 4 trips = .47751 seconds.

See this Byte article for further discussion of TCP and latency. Also see this student article for a discussion of alternatives.

--

Anyone can apply to receive SIR patent status for a novel invention, and there is only a small one-time fee for this type of patent compared to the larger and periodic fees required to receive and maintain a regular patent. However, statutory patents are only used when the patentee wants to guarantee that no third party will ever be able to claim patent protection for an invention. This makes SIR a very interesting, if currently overlooked, option for protecting open source inventions.

Okay, patents as they are should definitely be fixed. But has anyone actually used the SIR patent method above to proactively stop this land-grab mentality? Maybe FSF or EFF should spend some of the members' money to make things more public domain. I would contribute if my money were used to stop the current insanity.

Which is basically a stripped down 4400. Here is a link to a detailed description.

However I would hardly call this a general purpose CPU. It is a stripped down relative of SGI's 4400. If you recall SGI was known for being a graphics powerhouse, and most of the changes they made to the chip were to make it inexpensive, and even more specialized for graphics. True, they didn't put the same level of energy that went into later generations of gaming consoles. But it had a lot of design decisions that would not make sense for a general purpose CPU!

Compare that to the early Pentiums selling at around the same time-frame which were a true general purpose CPU for a home machine, and the differences leap out at you. The Nintendo 64 ran circles around several generations of home PCs in its intended use. Had it been used for running software closer to Windows 95, it would have been limping pitifully instead...

Cheers,
Ben

I just did.

r/

Dave

This class of patent is most commonly used to register inventions made by the U.S. Government and it is known as Statutory Invention Registration, or SIR. Anyone can apply to receive SIR patent status for a novel invention, and there is only a small one-time fee for this type of patent compared to the larger and periodic fees required to receive and maintain a regular patent. However, statutory patents are only used when the patentee wants to guarantee that no third party will ever be able to claim patent protection for an invention. This makes SIR a very interesting, if currently overlooked, option for protecting open source inventions.

Various people have proposed an opensource prior art database. This would probably work better, because the patent office already looks at it. Others have proposed getting actual patents and assigning them to the Free Software Foundation. But the SIR would be much cheaper. Does anybody know what the fee is? I'm seriously thinking about using this for a project I'm working on.

Hmmm... AOL has 'plays' in wireless, cable, DSL, and free PCs. They certainly have the money to do this. Most importantly, AOL has Mozilla.

Mozilla could be the Trojan Horse AOL needs to rid itself of Windows. Go read this article on Byte on programmable browsers. AOL could potentially rebuild its entire interface in Mozilla/XUL.

Then, not only they will be platform agnostic (with Mozilla doing the compatibility heavy-lifting) and connection agnostic (PPP? who needs PPP over a browser?), but could also potentially move away from being a consumer ISP, as they could pipe their proprietary content to a rebranded Mozilla at work (AOL@Work?). Then they could finally get the hits they need during daytime and business hours to truly be the #1 Internet site (bye, bye Netcenter?).

More importantly, AOL is smart enough to do this. And their stock has fallen 25% since the T-W take-over. Anyone else see an opportunity here? ;-)...


engineers never lie; we just approximate the truth.

For the mean time, it sounds very interesting.

Like one code is broken, then they think of a new one. Like DVD, we can now see movies on our computer, a scandinavian kid breaks it (or publishes the crack) and they come up with a new challenge.Life certainly is a game!

We were having difficulty with the standards committee controlling the North American Presentation Level Protocol Syntax -- the graphics protocol upon which the Viewtron videotex terminals built by Western Electric were based. Specifically, there wasn't enough programmability. The Western Electric terminal was so limited in capacity that we had to fit the graphics interpreter into a very few number of bytes, and could afford only a few thousand bytes of dynamically downloadable store. I had been enamored with Forth ever since the Byte magazine article about it about a year or so earlier (my first digital purchase was an HP35 so reverse polish didn't bother me perhaps as much as it should have). Even so, I was hunting around for options. Jim Thompson, another senior staff member with the Viewtron project, was also interested in Forth -- enough so that he had subscribed to the Forth newsletter, which he shared with me. Jim was supposed to develop a menu system to run on the central system. I had specifically asked that his menu system never achieve Turing Machine equivalence, because I knew what sort of horrors lay in wait for us if it did. Nevertheless, Jim eventually implemented GOLFBAL "Game Oriented Language for Business And Leisure" -- and it was a Forth derivative. I had rejected Forth as anything but the low level protocol and engine for the telesoftware graphics system and was fairly horrified to discover what he had done. In any case, it was this immersion in Forth we brought with us to our meeting with the Xerox PARC folks.

Now, I swear on a stack of bibles that after I met with the PARC folks and discussed the problems of graphics communications, I had no idea the industry could end up being stuck with Postscript as a type-setting standard. I can say this for a certainty because:

I wanted to see a Novix-style reduction-to-hardware of the Forth virtual machine so that Forth would become the macro assembly language. Then we could use the Forth silicon machine to start running dynamically downloaded Smalltalk -- or some similar high level language -- compiled for the Forth stack machine which would provide much more powerful graphics specifications than Forth itself.

I never imagined the Smalltalk guys would actually depart from Smalltalk itself as a graphical specification language.

By the time the PARC guys spun off Adobe with Postscript and its Forth-like engine, I had become more interested in constraint/relational programming semantics than object oriented semantics because it more naturally fits graphics description, distribution, nondeterminism and parallelism not to mention databases.

It was summer of 1982 when I met with Tesler for the last time -- and he had just left PARC to go work on Lisa. We were sitting in the empty Astrodome, I think it was, next to the convention center where the Commodore 64 was being introduced to the world market as part of the precursor to Comdex. 64K of memory! At any rate, Tesler and I discussed the reason he had abandoned Smalltalk for the Lisa. I had thought that type inference coupled with artful use of assembly language libraries would be sufficient on the Motorola 68000 family, but Tesler was insistent that Object Pascal was necessary for adequate speed. Frankly, I was apalled that Tesler had so easily abandoned Smalltalk with type inference since he had made specific mention of it as an optimization technique in his Byte article. But in a recent email exchange about this history, he told me type inference was never of much interest to him -- that others at Apple were hooked on Object Pascal.

The horrifying thing about all this is that when Steve Jobs took off from Apple to found NeXT, instead of correcting the nonsense with Postscript and going straight for Smalltalk with type inference, he repeated the mistake, only this time with Objective-C. Then, as I understand it, Objective-C was the precursor to Java with its reliance on declaration rather than inference for type checking. This despite the fact that Sun already had the Self programming language in house with type inference and dynamic optimization technologies that realized the potential of Smalltalk at along last. Unfortunately the only technology to make it bigtime from Sun's Self project was the Hotspot JVM.

Although these aren't exactly the same mistakes over and over, we're still struggling to get a decent, widely-used dynamically typed language "for everyone" that includes a pure OO library for graphics. Python isn't easily deployable and although I'm a Perl bigot, even I realize we're unlikely to get Perlscript installed in every browser anytime soon. Anyway I'm partial to prototype languages like Self when it comes to Smalltalk offspring. I do have hopes for TIBET as a way of turning Javascript into a powerful programming system across many platforms -- as outrageous as that sounds. I know Bill Edney and Scott Shattuck were some of the first NeXT hackers, but we can all pray for a swift recovery. This isn't an official announcement or anything -- but Bill and Scott did do a presentation at Hackers so I figure I can mention it in the mode of a "hot rumor".

As I said, I'm more into constraint/relational stuff these days myself, but it sure would be nice if someone brought the power originally in Smalltalk the ubiquity it deserved almost 20 years ago.

The terms that clearly shout "Crusoe" are 'heat-dissapation' and 'low-power consumption'

Hello, those terms shout "mobile processing," not "Crusoe." Those are the two things that notebook makers have been struggling with for years. Just on a lark, I searched News.com for that subject, and turned up this article about that very topic. Wow, Intel must have some top-notch industrial spies on their payroll to have stolen Transmeta's plans way back in 1997!!

Transmeta could really have a field day if they ever decided to sue Intel for stealing their completely original idea that "heat-dissipation" and "low-power consumption" are good for notebook CPUs! Just look at this 1994 Byte article, where those thieving bastards at Intel mention the improvments in their (obviously stolen!) 486DX4 CPU design:

"The DX4 chips also introduce other improvements, including 3.3-V operation; pin compatibility with existing 486 sockets and 5-V parts; lower power consumption and heat dissipation; 0.6-micron process technology; and a 16-KB instruction/data cache, twice as big as a normal Intel 486 cache."

Damn, it's truly hilarious watching you naïve Linus Torvalds fanboys making asses of yourselves as you slavishly scramble to heap greater and greater praise upon anything with which he's associated.

Cheers,
ZicoKnows@hotmail.com

As it happens, there is an article at Byte on exactly this issue at the moment. I don't agree with everything in the article, but it is worth a read.

As it happens, there is an article at Byte on exactly this issue at the moment. I don't agree with everything in the article, but it is worth a read.

Damn straight, baby.

If it weren't for Windows, I'd still be using overpriced Macs.

Joe says it best.

cheers,

In no particular order and just a few minutes of thought:

DaVinci, for reasons already stated.

Michaelangelo - master architect and builder as well as painter and sculptor. There's real engineering in that art.

Gallileo; what could be more geek than dropping cannonballs off a tower "as an experiment" or building a telescope from scratch. And he got in trouble with the thought police a few centuries before PC came into vouge.

Gutenberg - where would OReilley be without *his* invention?

James Watt - made steam power practical leading to the Industrial Revoultion, etc...

Bejamin Franklin, for being a geek with style, fame, *and* political clout.

Samuel Morse - telegraphy became the "internet" of the last century (read the book "The Victorian Internet" and see if you agree)

Thomas Edison - quintessinal hardware hacker, entrepreneur, even suffered from NIH [not invented here] at times and wasn't above stealing a trade secret or two [so was he a cracker as well as a hacker?].

Otto Diesel - practical internal (infernal?) combustion engine, and all the cars, ships, planes, oil business, smog, etc. that came from it.

Enrico Fermi - "So you want this grant to build an atomic pile *WHERE*?!"

I knew apple had gone over to the dark side a long time ago, but this is still ridiculous...

For those of you worried about software bloat, side effects, etc., etc.: shut up! This is only an issue if you can't code well in the first place. As long as you have a simple, well-written, 'credits scrolly' type module, all it does is take up disk space until it is executed. Therefore, no real extra bloat (oh no, it calls a library function...) and no side effects. And geez, if you can't figure out how to compress a *text* file, go to jail, do not download mini-lzo, do not write a credits scrolly...

If Jobs had told Woz this back in the day, do you think there would even *be* an Apple? Of course, Hertzfeld had to fight to get the frickin' puzzle game in, so what do we expect...

(incidentally, the article I linked to has a *real* list of hacking feats. I'm gonna have to save that page...)
---
pb Reply or e-mail rather than vaguely moderate.

The WPS feels like no other UI. It is amazingly productive. Objects are assigned properties based on rules that can be applied in different ways. 'Drag and drop' is used, for example, in assigning colors, fonts and so forth to text.

Here is a link that discusses the WPS API.

This is a link that points to WPS programming links.

Byte went all-electronic. Read about their Comdex awards and Linux is Best of Show award at their "e-site". If you polk around you can even find Jerry Pournelle somewhere among Byte's html (cringe!).

Suffice it to say that the true purpose of the GPL is to turn open source into a weapon which destroys businesses and livelihoods.

Could this be true? No, it's just a fanatic blowing smoke. Brett couldn't be more mistaken (or dare we say dishonest?).

GPL Linux means business. Let's examine the facts. Cygnus, the GPL business, just sold for 2/3 of a billion dolars. And it turned 2 dozen Cygnus employees into overnight GPL millionaires. Red Hat, a GPL business, bought Cygnus. Red Hat's market cap is 6 billion dollars. Red Hat was in the top 10 IPOs of the decade. But don't forget that GPL Linux based Cobalt's IPO was also one of the top 10 of the 1990s, pretty good by any measure. Cobalt's market cap is about 3.5 billion dollars. GPL Linux based TiVo, the fastest growing media service in North America, has a market cap of 1.4 billion dollars.

Corel, Suse, Rebel Netwinder, Linux Journal, Caldera, eSoft, TurboLinux, VA Linux (the next hot IPO), are all GPL Linux centric companies worth multi-billions of dollars.

As investors have discovered, Linux is a red hot money machine. The Linux Business Expo was one of the shining stars of all trade shows this year. So impressive was the Linux Business Expo that Byte Magazine awared Linux Business Expo Best of Comdex. From coast-to-coast, the Linux Business Expo received rave reviews from even the most staid publications. The Washington Post said that the Linux Business Expo rivaled Comdex itself in importance, hinting that someday the Linux Business Expo may actually supersede Comdex in size.

Wall Street says yes to Linux. Wall Street says yes to GPL business. Pick up a copy of the Wall Street Journal, and follow the GPL money. Follow the new GPL millionaires into the new GPL Millennium. Don't miss the boat.

Here are some links from people as qualified as some of the so called experts polled by Slashdot

• http://www.upside.com/te xis/mvm/opinion/story?id=382760110
• http://www.byte.com/column/BYT19991108S 0001
• http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/trial/

At least one of these has already been hashed out on Slashdot and in typical fashion deemed FUD because it sided with Microsoft. I really don't expect the typical /. poster to accept anything from the Microsoft site, but that article shows another side to the story than what is generally posted here. I noticed you ignored my example of the judge contridicting himself in the FoF, if Jackson is so all knowing and infaliable how can this be?

Byte had a feature entitled: "How to Fail at Software Development, Don't Communicate" it at a slightly higher level, but is just as useful.
--

DOS applications were starting to pick up on it despite the horrid CGA they had to work with initially -- and it wasn't because Jobs did the Mac. The Windowing GUI was inevitable and obvious to people with money as well as most personal computer programmers, especially once Tesler had already popularized it with his 1981 Byte magazine article.

Dynamic, late-binding programming environments that highly leverage the sparse nerd matrix out there -- like Smalltalk, Python, etc. -- are, however _still_ struggling to make it past the concrete barriers Jobs poured into the OO culture with the Mac.

When Jobs passed up Smalltalk for Object Pascal, and then again, with Next, passed up Smalltalk for Objective C, he set a pattern that continues to this day when Sun passed up that sun-of-Smalltalk, Self and went with that son-of-Objective-C, Java.

Gutting the superstructure of technology while maintaining appearances isn't leadership.

It is nice to see that Micro$oft is able to povide ample evidence as to how much better Windows NT is. They have the first myth covered with three reputable sources. I have problems with the magazine's bias, but before you guys decide to shoot me down, I would like to know where the results are for another magazine such as Infoworld, or Byte Online where they focus on the business aspect of computing. Other then that Microsoft used reliable sources to explain their results, but my question is where are these sources? The few links that are provided are from customers of Microsoft and Microsoft's own web sites. Besides, it is always nice to see that in Microsoft's rants and raves, they neglected to mention the numerous bugs in Win NT in fact, there is a feature article in last week's Infoworld about the security flaws in NT. Another item of interest is an old Slashdot article about the Army swithching over to Macs because of NT's security. Oops. I guess in the end, this was just yet another PR stunt to justify NT's existance.

Byte has an article this week, OS/2: The Little Engine That Could, that touches on OS ease of installation in OS/2 Is Hard To Install...Not!

My favorite part of this article talkes about the ease of installing OS/2 compared to installing Windows in that OS/2 does not require you to install DOS first to use the CD: Note that in no case do you have to install DOS and a CD driver first, like Microsoft requires for Windows 95, 98, and NT.

I've found this to be true when I've installed 95 on a new machine I built(I used the 95 partition to run Windows software under OS/2 using Win32-OS/2, now known as Odin). I've not installed 98 or NT so I don't know if the DOS requirement is valid for them.

Byte has an article this week, OS/2: The Little Engine That Could, that touches on OS ease of installation in OS/2 Is Hard To Install...Not!

My favorite part of this article talkes about the ease of installing OS/2 compared to installing Windows in that OS/2 does not require you to install DOS first to use the CD: Note that in no case do you have to install DOS and a CD driver first, like Microsoft requires for Windows 95, 98, and NT.

I've found this to be true when I've installed 95 on a new machine I built(I used the 95 partition to run Windows software under OS/2 using Win32-OS/2, now known as Odin). I've not installed 98 or NT so I don't know if the DOS requirement is valid for them.

Byte has an article this week, OS/2: The Little Engine That Could, that touches on OS ease of installation in OS/2 Is Hard To Install...Not!

My favorite part of this article talkes about the ease of installing OS/2 compared to installing Windows in that OS/2 does not require you to install DOS first to use the CD: Note that in no case do you have to install DOS and a CD driver first, like Microsoft requires for Windows 95, 98, and NT.

I've found this to be true when I've installed 95 on a new machine I built(I used the 95 partition to run Windows software under OS/2 using Win32-OS/2, now known as Odin). I've not installed 98 or NT so I don't know if the DOS requirement is valid for them.

http://www.scriptics.com /people/john.ousterhout/wrist.html

What John Ousterhout (creator of Tcl/Tk) does about his RSI. Summary: Windows PC running Dragon Systems NaturallySpeaking, plus a2x to make the Windows PC act as a keyboard for a Unix box running X.

Here is an article from Byte reviewing good mikes with NaturallySpeaking. (Formatting's terrible, but at least it's all on one Web page.)

Accuracy is reported to be 99%+.

Unfortunately the asker of the question does not have a Tillamook system. Maybe he can at least Beta Overclock a Toshiba notebook as one of the upgrades from Portable Enhancements. Or see if NCS has it in their list.

I found the Byte Magazine article mentioned in my previus post. I think this article will answer your questions regarding today optical storage.

I found the Byte Magazine article mentioned in my previus post. I think this article will answer your questions regarding today optical storage.

I would concure that the DC drive prolly isn't using any special light/laser source. One of the things that makes todays CDrom/DVDdrives so afordable is the cheap/safe laser. Getting more data on a optical platter involves layers, and focusing. The disk would have 2 layers (the top layer would be semi opaque/seethrough. and the bottom layer would not) When the reader head focuses the laser on the top of the disk, that layer of data would be read. When the laser focuses further down into the disk, *that* lower layer of data would be read. This gives you double the data density without a lot of cost. Then there is a double sided/dual focal point drives that can read twice as much again. The bottom line? You will be seeing cheap plastic optical platters storing 4.7Gbytes(todays DVD) / 10Gbytes / 20Gbytes without having to alter the laser source or sector structure. (I think Byte magazine had an article on this when DVD first came out) comments welcome.

I would concure that they are prolly not using a differnt light (laser) source. Getting more bits onto a CD style platter involves layers, and varying the focal point of the reader head. The very top layer of the disk would have data on it, but is semi opaque. The layer under that has data on it, and it accessed by focusing the reader head laser to a deeper depth, thus attaining double the density of a traditional disk. Then there are 2 sided disks requiring a dual focus/dual reader head drive to read them. Bottom line: the CD style storage disk (CDrom/DVD/DreamCast) could hold a LOT MORE data than the dreamcast or the current DVD format is exploiting today. (Byte had an interesting article on this topic when DVDs first came out.

In concept, the Nx586 decoder works like the code generator of a compiler, except at a lower level. Just as a C++ compiler converts C code into 80x86 machine code, the Nx586 decoder converts 80x86 machine code into RISC86 code.

Intel downplays NexGen's RISC86 and says the Pentium does something similar when it decodes complex 80x86 instructions into microcode primitives; in a sense, this is true. Complex instructions are broken down into 88-bit, fixed-length microinstructions that could be regarded as "RISC instructions," and many simple instructions don't require microcode at all because they're hard-wired in silicon. Intel also makes a valid point that code generators in modern compilers tend to avoid complex 80x86 instructions, because they can generate faster-running code by sticking to simpler instructions.

RISC86 instructions share some characteristics with Pentium microinstructions: They're quite long (the Nx586's eight-chip predecessor used 104-bit RISC86 instructions) and carry vital information of processor states that normally wouldn't be known to a true external RISC instruction. But there's still an important difference: Unlike microcode, NexGen's RISC86 can theoretically support its own assemblers, compilers, and application software. The Nx586 bus can bypass the 80x86 decoder and feed RISC86 instructions directly into the execution stages of the pipeline at full bus speeds. In fact, NexGen already has a RISC86 assembler, although it's for internal use only, since there's obviously no software market for RISC86 binaries.

Hardware

• Teletype ASR-33, teletypewriter very popular as a computer terminal.
• Popular Electronics, January 1975, cover story: MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer.
• Apple II with its color graphics and multiple easy-to-access expansion slots.
• IBM PC and its corporate desktop success providing cheap hardware for all.
• IBM's MicroChannel bus and its failure showed the popularity of open hardware.
• Hayes modem command set allowed modem control without custom device driver.
• VGA graphics. Finally the IBM PC could show reasonable images. Web browsing later became a significant side effect.

Software

• VisiCalc. Killer App. Welcome to "electronic spreadsheets." A reason to buy a computer.

Early Computer Magazines

• People's Computer Company, an organization promoting personal and community computing. A computer newspaper before there were computer publications. Community Memory was an early idea for sharing computer databases at computing storefronts.
• dr. dobb's journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia, an early proponent of publishing source code. Evolved into Dr. Dobb's Journal.
• Byte magazine, its huge 50,000 copy beginning and eventually the first computer magazine to appear on general magazine racks.
• Kilobaud magazine, very popular hacker magazine, often with sources (remember programs on vinyl sheets for playback from phonograph player into cassette interfaces?).

Conceptual

• Homebrew Computer Club. Build your own computer if you can't afford a small CDC or PDP to heat your house. I was designing a TTL personal computer until the 8080 appeared; sure was nice to have quad NAND DIPs.
• Xerox PARC center with its influential network and user interface experiments.
• MECC: Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium" spread timeshare computing to all Minnesota school districts, then Apple computers. I worked there in the 1970's. State of MN has since sold it.

Hardware

• Teletype ASR-33, teletypewriter very popular as a computer terminal.
• Popular Electronics, January 1975, cover story: MITS Altair 8800 microcomputer.
• Apple II with its color graphics and multiple easy-to-access expansion slots.
• IBM PC and its corporate desktop success providing cheap hardware for all.
• IBM's MicroChannel bus and its failure showed the popularity of open hardware.
• Hayes modem command set allowed modem control without custom device driver.
• VGA graphics. Finally the IBM PC could show reasonable images. Web browsing later became a significant side effect.

Software

• VisiCalc. Killer App. Welcome to "electronic spreadsheets." A reason to buy a computer.

Early Computer Magazines

• People's Computer Company, an organization promoting personal and community computing. A computer newspaper before there were computer publications. Community Memory was an early idea for sharing computer databases at computing storefronts.
• dr. dobb's journal of Computer Calisthenics & Orthodontia, an early proponent of publishing source code. Evolved into Dr. Dobb's Journal.
• Byte magazine, its huge 50,000 copy beginning and eventually the first computer magazine to appear on general magazine racks.
• Kilobaud magazine, very popular hacker magazine, often with sources (remember programs on vinyl sheets for playback from phonograph player into cassette interfaces?).

Conceptual

• Homebrew Computer Club. Build your own computer if you can't afford a small CDC or PDP to heat your house. I was designing a TTL personal computer until the 8080 appeared; sure was nice to have quad NAND DIPs.
• Xerox PARC center with its influential network and user interface experiments.
• MECC: Minnesota Educational Computing Consortium" spread timeshare computing to all Minnesota school districts, then Apple computers. I worked there in the 1970's. State of MN has since sold it.

It must be nice to have a major website quote you without any challenge whatsoever. Where's the skepticism? If Intel has missed all of its other targets, why does anyone think Merced by middle 200 will be any different? I'm not knocking what they are trying to do, but they are still along way from a product anyone can use, and there's no guarantee that this will be a success.

This article from Byte goes into some of the problems Intel has from this stage forward. A little low-tech for /. but you're young, you can afford to slum a little.

Intel has spent a lot of time doing this thing right. I bet you will be enjoying your favorite OS on the oddles of power Merced will be delievering. Given that it will be only affordable for enterprise needs but the old Intel trickle down economics will have us mortals EPICing in no time (Can you say CeleronA >= P2.) For your reading enjoyment. I liked this CMP Article as a nice intro / gossip on Merced.

Breaking up M$ will probably improve the stability of M$ products. The first time you install Access 97 on Win 98, it won't run. Why? As an article in Byte (MS Is Not Done) shows how M$ changes its API to thwart competition because it controls the API. M$ probably changed something about the API or the registery from 95 to 98, and forgot to send the memo to the Access developers. Breaking up M$ will give them less incentive to change the API if the branch that controls the API only develops the OS. M$ needs to follow their own advise. If you haven't read Code Complete, you should just to see how some of their developers know how to do stuff right, but probably don't because of marketing pressure. (3 of 10^8 reasons that open source projects are better than commercial projects.)

Some VM100 FreeBSD code here.

A press mention of the VM100 in Byte

Checkout ByteMark documentation at http://www.byte.com/bmark/bdoc.htm, which is the benchmark Apple used for their G3 vs. P-II comparison. BTW this link used to be on Apple's G3 benchmark pages, but not any more. A careful and informed reading of the ByteMARK doc reveals that even the integer results are twisted.

Choosing CodeWarrior for the Mac vs. Watcom 10.0 for the PC is totally laughable.

Another note: it appears that there are no results on www.spec.org for Apple systems. SPECint95 is a relatively fair crossplatform test. I wonder why Apple has not posted results there.

BTW 1st post

A few years ago in Byte magazine, I remember reading an article about a 3D display technology called HDVD. It was supposed to allow the projection of three-dimensional images in open space (within reason). It seemed to be leaps and bounds ahead of this announcement. But, I haven't heard of it at all since the article.

I did find the original article at Byte's Web site.