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https://www.computerhope.com/jargon/d/data-point.htm

Not really "Classic" unless it's corded. Serial or PS/2 DIN. I might accept a USB 1.0.

My now-ancient ASUS G50VT included ExpressGate. Based on Splashtop, burned into the BIOS ROM, manageable. Rudimentary Firefox browser, email client, Skype, and obviously hard to update. But it ran independently of any OS installed on storage.

Splashtop is now done, but it was also used by ASUS on some motherboards, and then endured obscurity, competition, and finally turned into something else.

It did work. It was pretty minimal, and could have been cool. And it certainly is possible today, even in BIOS, with flexibility and update capabilities, but somehow I don't see any of this on the market.

The obvious solution would be to embed ChromeOS or something similar, fairly lightweight and useful. This could let you keep your primary OS invisible.

Cost?

I don't know how WW3 will be fought, but video war X will be fought with a vintage analog video recorder aimed at a monitor

Good luck, because HDMI has replaced VGA ports on every computer and any VGA converter reduces the display resolution. That's by design to prevent piracy - recording a low resolution VGA display with a video recorder results in grainy video.

Almost none of the fundamental technology we are using right now is based off developments due to the profit motive. This is a myth the rural population tells its children.

Your statement is about as accurate references to the tooth fairy or santa clause

The internet? Defense. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Computing? Defense. https://www.computerhope.com/i...

Electricity? Pure intellectual curiosity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/....

Home electricity distribution? Half profit motive, half ego battle.

https://www.livescience.com/46...

Roughly 1/8ths of the underlying motivations came from profit motive.

nice: Runs a command with a modified scheduling priority.

"Cyberwar and its ramifications have been debated for some time and the issue has been wrought with controversy"

No serious techie uses 'cyber' in a sentence. If you do want to go online and stay safe from hacking, then buy a computer that can't be compromised by opening an email attachment or clicking on a malicious URL (Uniform Resource Locator).

Bullocks yourself. The games I have say what operating system and version they require on the box and in the product insert/installation instructions/manual. That hasn't changed from before IBM came out with their version of the personal computer, when games would list their hardware requirements, since personal computers then weren't hardware (never mind operating system) compatible.

IBM did not invent the personal computer.

In 1975, Ed Roberts coined the term "personal computer" when he introduced the Altair 8800. Although the first personal computer is considered by many to be the KENBAK-1, which was first introduced for $750 in 1971. The computer relied on a series of switches for inputting data and output data by turning on and off a series of lights.

Even Allen and Gates gave Roberts credit:

Even Roberts' Wikipedia page acknowledges him as the engineer who developed "the first commercially successful personal computer." When he died last year, Microsoft's Bill Gates and Paul Allen praised him as "the father of the PC."

"The day our first untested software worked on his Altair was the start of a lot of great things," their statement concluded. "The Altair ultimately failed in the marketplace, but it sold thousands of units and jump-started the entire personal computer industry,"

So Bill Gates and Paul Allen say bullocks to you too :-)

Oh, and before somebody asks, Linux 1.0 was released 14 March 1994.

FreeBSD was there first.

True enough, but I was using (IIRC) SVr3 (HP/UX) in '91, SunOS 4.0.x (BSD)in '92 and (Yggdrasil as I recall) Linux v0.91 in '93. You got the order right, but the dates wrong, friend.

As for the quibbling about who killed who, that link should help.

findstr has POSIX basic regular expression support (almost) and has been available since Windows 2000.

You obviously don't use a word processor often enough. All of those functions have keyboard shortcuts; Reaching up to the menu bar to make a bold, centre-aligned title and then saving it is *far* faster on the keyboard (Ctrl+ Shift + Arrows to highlight, Ctrl + B, Ctrl + E, Ctrl + Shift + S). Or, stop being a luddite and set up Styles.

IMO the menu bar is for seldom used functions. I don't often have to insert a table, or change the background colour, so those go on the menu bar. For everything else there's Mastercard^Wkeyboard shortcuts

1) Automotive. Cars don't look any different now than they did 10 years ago, and technologically they're pretty much the same. The fuel economy is slightly improved with some brands, mostly thanks to gasoline direct injection, though there's some concerns about how these engines do over long terms.

Hybrid cars have evolved quite a bit since they became more mainstream.
Pure electric cars are much more common... quite a big step..
Bio and Natural Gas powered cars... have become very common.. at least here in Sweden.

Design changes over many more years than 10... Compare cars from the 70'ies with the ones from the 80'ies etc..

2) Aviation. The only advances I see are a couple of space startups (SpaceX etc.) launching rockets and creating some prototype spacecraft. That's nice, but it's not really an advance since we've been doing that for decades, they're just figuring out now how to privatize it and do it a little cheaper. We have yet to see if any of the more radical ideas actually pan out or not; so far all they've succeeded in doing is launching satellites using newer, private designs rather than reused ICBMs.

SpaceX - it's not only a little cheaper... It's about half the cost..
NASA's Space Shuttle Program - $450 million per mission.
SpaceX Dragon mission - $133 million per mission.

The cost per pound of cargo is $10000 for SpaceX and $20000 for NASA.

3) Computers (meaning desktops, servers, etc.). Nothing new here at all, in fact a lot of giant steps backwards (GNOME3, Windows 8 Metro coming soon). For most computer users, they finally got an overdue upgrade to XP in the form of Win7, but there's no real advances there, just some updates. The CPUs have gotten better now that Intel's abandoned Netburst (P4), but clock speeds are stuck, they're just adding cores to try to make new ones look better, and the power efficiency has gotten slightly better.

Giant steps back?? Gnome3 is actually quite nice for allot of people... It all depends on what type of user you are, but with a few tweaks it's actually quite nice for the stuff i do at work.. At home i prefer XFCE.

There have been major advances of desktop's and servers..
Major shift seems to be : Desktop computer -> Laptops -> Tablets
More and more companies are using "the cloud" for infrastructure and storing data. For good and bad..
Virtualization has taken a extreme leap since 2000.. it's enough to just look 4-5 years back..

2001 - Linus Torvalds releases version 2.4 of the Linux Kernel source code on January 4th.
2001 - Wikipedia is founded on January 15, 2001.
2001 - Bram Cohen introduces BitTorrent on a public message board July 2, 2001.
2001 - Apple introduces the iPod and it goes on sell October 23, 2001.
2002 - The first of code that would later become Mozilla Firefox is made available September 23, 2002.
2003 - Apple opens the iTunes store April 28, 2003.
2003 - The H.264 standard is completed in May 2003.
2003 - Apple introduces Mac OS X 10.3 code named Panther October 25, 2003.
2004 - Mark Zuckerberg launches Thefacebook February 4, 2004, which later becomes Facebook
2004 - Google announces Gmail on April 1, 2004. Many people take it as an April Fools joke.
and around here it just sparks more and more stuff, more than i want to read... http://www.computerhope.com/history/2000.htm if you want to read it yourself.

Then on the hardware end..
Disk capacity:
2000 around 20Gb
2005 around 100Gb
2012 - 3Tb...

Number of transistors per CPU:
2000 - Pentium 4 - 42 Million using 180nm process.
2003 - AMD K8 - 105.9 Million using 130nm process.
2006 - Core 2 Duo - 291 Million using 65nm process.
2009 - Six-Core Opteron 2400 - 904 Million using 45nm process
2011 - Six-Core Core i7 - 2.270 BILLION using 32nm process.

And the GPU's have also evolved quite a bit... a Nvid

If apple devices are'nt computers, may God strike..., that judge, dead! "Computers" come in all kinds of forms, here's your proof... http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000984.htm

In 1990, A typical desktop computer had an Intel 80368SL and Trident TVGA9000 card.
In 1999, A typical desktop computer had an Intel Pentium III and integrated Intel video.
Since before 1995, some computers started having more powerful graphics card for 3D Gaming and Visualisation, but they were very rare. There were also monitors capable of displaying more than 1024x768 but they were expensive and not very common either.

http://www.computerhope.com/history/19902000.htm

Up until 2006, when Vista was released, most systems will had a Single-Core Processor and underpowered Integrated Graphics.
Vista (despite it's many flaws, and in some cases, because of it's many flaws), changed that. Dual-Core and 64-bit processors became ubiquitous and Accelerated GPU's from ATi and nVidia became necessities, rather than luxuries.

I shouldn't have said "all Windows Computer Hardware".
I should have said "the greater Majority of Windows Computer Hardware".
My Apologies, it was a gross generalisation.

Regardless, Developers only had to test against a handful of Systems. Nowadays with technology like DirectX and OpenGL, even high-end games benefit from the extra abstraction and shouldn't have to be too concerned about the specific Hardware.

Regardless of your definition of a "the first computer", I'm sure just about anyone can find their own definition of it here. And I don't think that definition will be after the work of going to the moon started.

Sorry, but we have prior art. See also Respawn.

Also, your system has a respawn lag time of about 3 days. Not very efficient. Especially for someone who claims his boss/dad created an entire universe in less than a week.

Added updated .dat file from McAfee to a keydrive, so it can be moved to c:\program files\common files\mcafee\engine. If machine is stuck in "no taskbar" mode, that is because svchost.exe has already been quarantined. If you right-click on the mini-taskbar, you can open taskmanager, then open a command shell by creating a new task, then typing "cmd" (sans quotes) in the popup prompt. Once you have a command window, you can xcopy the .dat file. Reboot the pc.

Copy the file svchost.exe out of this zip file to a key drive. You can then copy it to c:\windows\system32. Reboot and you should be OK.

If you are on xp sp2 or greater, you should be able to tab-complete paths for your xcopy command. THis means you start typing, then hit the "Tab" key on your keyboard, to help autocomplete the path/filename you are looking for. if you don't have tab, remember to put your path for c:\program files\... in quotes, since windows can't execute a command that has a space in it without them being wrapped in " ".

If you don't know xcopy, here is a fast man page.

It'll be a pretty short race, for all but a fairly dedicated hard-core.

In order for the USB device to do anything, the host OS has to load the appropriate driver. Until it does so, you aren't getting anything other than 100ma at 5V(higher amperages quite possible, depending on the situation).

Getting the OS to load a driver without noticing that it has loaded a driver(and without the benefit of exploit code, since you don't get to access that until the drive is mounted) would be quite a trick. Assuming this monitoring software isn't completely braindead, the fact that a USB mass storage device has been inserted, along with any interesting ID strings, will have already be sent to a monitoring server before your filesystem is even mounted. Any tampering you do at that point will just introduce suspicious discrepancies.

Now, there is(for instance, I'm sure the suitably creative can think of others) nothing stopping a truly dedicated exfiltrator from obtaining the USB device and vendor IDs and so forth for the brand of keyboard used at that particular establishment, then building a USB device(using one of the common and inexpensive USB-capable microcontrollers) that presents exactly those IDs, and is thus detected as a USB-HID keyboard, rather than a USB-MSC device. They could then use the fact that the keyboard LEDs are under software control as a method of getting data off the system. At least on a unixlike, anybody with some basic script-fu could probably be piping arbitrary files off the system with xset led in about 10 minutes. Your custom USB device would have a slab of flash, which it would fill according to the LED commands it received. I don't know if there is anything equivalent on Windows.

Using tricks like that, you could probably get something of an arms race going(though, still, anything that involves doing suspicious program/script execution is going to get your ass busted in any reasonably paranoid environment); but for USB MSC stuff, it is only the pure apathy of the administration, or the fact that they recognize that mass storage devices are extremely convenient and beloved by users, that lets you get away with it.

Then either you A-Researched your ass off before EVERY purchase, B-designed your entire setup around Ubuntu from the start, probably going so far as to buy an Ubuntu system, or C- really should be playing the lotto more, because you sir are one lucky bastard.

As for #2, lets be honest folks: the GUIs in Linux suck. While they look good on the surface if you try sticking to the GUI and ONLY to the GUI in Linux you will quickly find yourself screwed, and I can prove it

I found the GUI on Ubuntu quite nice and easy. Works like Windows pretty much that there was no learning curve. As for the computer I'm using it on, I'm running it on my old Acer 5920G laptop. Read up online on how to dual boot it since it had a seperate HD on it (read how to do that step by step from the desktop). Did that for about 2 months and released that for the 2 months I didn't even load Windows once so I just did a clean install which was a piece of cake. Only thing that doesn't work are the media/play dvd buttons, but never used those anyways

There is a chmod that will remove Bash from user access, yes? Do that. Remove Bash from your access for a single year. I'm willing to bet my last dollar that if you swore off CLI for a year you would have a broken machine in less than 6 months

And again, I'm going to look dumb... what is a chmod and a Bash? chmod isn't explained on http://www.computerhope.com/unix/uchmod.htm well, and Bash isn't explained either on http://ss64.com/bash/. I'm not saying I've had no problems, but none that a quick 'How do I do x on Ubuntu' search on google hasn't fixed with cut and paste commands. I'm not trying to sound like I don't know computers, because I do since I grew up with them. But thing is I know Windows computers, and found that even though Linux is a completely different system, it's not hard (read that it was 10 years ago but that has been really changing). I also understand your argument that CLI really is the most powerful way to do things in Linux, but the same is for Windows with the Dos Prompt, and even Mac OS has it's command prompt (http://ss64.com/osx/) and both of these OS's can more powerfully handled when done through a command prompt and if there users learned how to master these, then it would be better for them. But like many computer things, just because it can be done and learned, doesn't mean it has to be.

DC or BC are more than adequate, are already in 99% of the distros out there and are chock full of features!

DC or BC are more than adequate, are already in 99% of the distros out there and are chock full of features!

Very helpful site for those pesky "antivirus" viruses.

The 'C' in NIC stands for 'Controller', not 'Card'.

some people, including 3Com and Cisco, disagree with you.

Oh a gamer after my own heart. I have to have my DOOM and Quake and SOF. BTW, if you like DOOM you will LOVE Hurt Me Plenty which is a Puppy stripped down for gaming With DOOMsday and Quake already loaded with a ton of extras and WADs loaded up. Just drop your full DOOM and Quake WADs and you are good to game! Has all the non gaming BS stripped out so it runs really well on older hardware too. Nice thing about it is they have done all the work and tweaked the gaming engine for maximum FPS under Puppy. Pretty much just boot and frag.

Did not know about the Goodwill. I guess I'll have to go scavenge around my local GW to see if they got some good gear I can snatch. I know last time I went there I managed to get a killer F15 fighterstick for $0.50 because it was serial. Picked up a cheapo adapter for $2 and got a year out of it before giving it away. Never thought to look there for boxes though. Thanks for the heads up.

I try to avoid Win95, it was just too buggy as far as USB goes. I still have my copy of 98lite I picked up back in the day, and with the universal Win98 USB driver installed I found that a stripped down Win98 can give me the speed of Win95(especially if I switch out the Win95 explorer for Win98s) but with the better USB support. I still have plenty of the old USB 1.1 cards lying around from salvages so adding USB to those that don't have it is trivial.

I have to agree with the AMD chipsets. The worst was the Via ones. Good luck trying to get any stability at all out of those POS chips. That is the only reason why I am trying to save the Athlon mobo, as it has the Nvidia Geforce 2 chipset. The only chipsets for AMD that I have found to have stability is Nvidia ones. But at Doug's shop we would keep a "bad bucket" for fried CPUs and there had to be over 100 AMD chips in there. There was a grand total of TWO Intel chips in the bucket: one got hit by lightning, and the other was a damned OEM with the el crappo PSU that took out the board and CPU when it blew. While I have known gamers that have sworn by AMD, I have also noticed that they ended up with more crashes and problems than I ever did. So I've always looked at AMD about like having a Cyrix(remember those?) in that it is the poor mans Intel. That is why I have never had a problem getting rid of anything Intel over 233MHz. My heat&air guy says he has no problems unloaded my dual boots and actually makes a little scratch selling them. As long as they don't end up in the dump I say good for him.

And I can see why you have some difficulty being so close to LA. I'm out a little town in AR that looks like something out of "Gone with the Wind"(in fact my apartment building is from 1925 and used to have Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis stay in it during the chitlin circuit days) so there aren't as many newer cast off boxes. Now that I know about Goodwill I may have to hit the one in LR to see if it is a score.

While I would agree to the grapefruit rule, I have found an exception to that rule: the Optiplex series workstation from Dell. The funky Grey Optiplex towers from 300-750MHz had pretty lightweight PSUs but actually put out pretty clean power. I am lucky that one of my neighbors is an engineer so I can bring gear over and test power output on his equipment. The Optiplex series PSUs actually put out pretty clean power to the rails. You just have to follow the 15w rule as Dell is notorious for going under weight on the PSU. And don't forget with that P4 to go overboard on the fans. A P4 will run like a scalded dog as long as she don't get too hot. For a P4 I like a 80 or 120mm in the front and a slower 80mm or 120mm in the back, to keep the pressur up, same as you.

I actually know a guy that does the 2 PSU trick too. Of course he puts cards in his rig that suck more cash that mo

Witness how many legitimate products get flagged as "hacker tools" (like Angry IP Scanner)

A port scanner is a hacker tool. Of course you can use it for legitimate purposes as you can with many other tools. I can even use a malicious virus as a tool for testing my AV engines. But it is still a virus. If you are in the position to legitimately use a port scanner you obviously should also be in the position to get this program on your machine from being excluded by the corporate antivirus.

Apart from that, if I would discover some of my users to use such a tool without entitlement and the AV engine would not detect it, I would demand for a signature to be added by the AV vendor.

Apart from that the last time I checked they mentioned that not every AV vendor is used for comparison because they have to fullfill certain minimal requirements. But as a matter of fact I just checked again and concerning Trend they say:

TrendMicro may be tested separatly in 2008 and will be included in future

Oh, and:

[...]while their commercial counterparts are ignored (ostensibly after paying them off to get off their little black list).

Do you notice how I am much less likely to submit potential evil software for inclusion in the next signature update if it is commercial sw, as my users (and supposedly many hackers) are more likely to use the freely available software to piss me off?

Well I run all of these!

He is using windows, let him use EDLIN http://www.computerhope.com/edlin.htm

NT has a pretty powerful DOS batch scripting program. I'm not entirely familiar with Vista, but I suspect it still retains that capability. Here's how the Vista (and XP and Windows 2000 and NT) batch scripting will suit your needs: 1) simple 2) works in Vista 3) portable 4) not an online app 5) does not use Java It does fail miserablely in the F/OSS requirement, however - it will be proprietary to your needs. But on the upside, there are no libraries to install -- it's all built in. --------------- DOS scripting can do variable expansions, for loops of numbers, for loops of directory entries, and such. It can be configred to read in entries from flat files, and parse each line and split arrays, and such - perfect for your needs. --------------- Failing that, you can write simple Visual Basic files (.vbs files) that you can execute from the command line. These things are great, because you can use the Windows Scheduler to schedule execution of these batch files, the batch files can spawn other batch processes, kick off other jobs, etc. http://www.computerhope.com/sethlp.htm http://www.robvanderwoude.com/variableexpansion.html http://www.maem.umr.edu/batch/dadd.htm

This is how it is implemented. I have the P5E3 PREMIUM. The Linux boot is called Express Gate. It boots in about 5 seconds and gives the option to go into bios, the installed OS, or the express gate. You can use email, web browser, skype, and use flash drives (I believe this was first implemented to help update the bios more easily). Uses Splashtop desktop. Here's some quick info on it.

Please see http://www.computerhope.com/issues/ch000465.htm #4. This happened to me a while back, so I know this can happen.

they will be used to get data from voyager 2 on conditions at the edge of the solar system

however, a wobbly spacetime continuum means that voyager 2 must be running linux
because the wobbly spacetime is an infinite loop , only linux can escape it in 5 seconds
but time at the termination shock is slow enough that 5 seconds will be 2 years

You're right, it's not a laptop... it's a luggable

Power spike conspiracy? Umm yeah. Here's what the XP BSOD looks like. Its real. Sheez, I never thought I would have to defend the BSOD on slashdot.

>Not sure where you are going with the anti-virus, since Microsoft has never
>released one.

MS used to bundle an antivirus tool with DOS. They used to call it MSAV.
IIRC, there was one called MWAV too.

http://www.computerhope.com/msavhlp.htm

From the link,
"the Windows 3.x version may think Windows 95 is a Virus."!!! :-)

Actually DOS 6 used to ship with antivirus. Hardly anyone would remember it though. Remnant I found. MS got out of antivirus in a hurry. Even this product was licensed from Central Point.

I do not know why the ENIAC myth still pops up from time to time. Anyway, Konrad Zuse built the first computer, called the Z1. Even his famous Z3 was completed two years before the ENIAC.

http://irb.cs.tu-berlin.de/~zuse/Konrad_Zuse/en/Re chner_Z1.html
http://www.computerhope.com/history/194060.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3

Yeah, what the other poster said.

Use locate.

http://www.computerhope.com/unix/ulocate.htm

It's pretty sweet. Of course, Beagle/KAT should blow it away, but until they are more stable, locate is the way to go.

Thanks for the clarification, your definition sounds more accurate. TFA linked the word qubit to this definition:

Unlike binary a qubit is capable of representing a 0, 1, or both 0 and 1 bit.

Either way, 3 states or many many many states, it still doesn't seem accurate to claim each additional qubit will "double" the computing power.

this and this.

Hope those help.

Besides, it's not like MS hasn't had an antivirus program built into their OS before...

Perhaps the rest of the PC industry could counter this rise of the console by designing a standard PC spec for gaming. First create a few simple categories. I suggest "PC Gaming Machine 2005 Level 1, 2 and 3".

This was tried before, with the "Multimedia PC" standards. Remember those logos? MPC, MPC2, etc:

http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/m/mpc.htm

After 8 years, it's ancient. Three year support is closer to the "standard" in the industry with 5 years being a good company/product to deal with.

I've just started work for a government agency (not US), where there's a legal requirement that all documents have to remain accessible for a minimum of 25 years. The solution to this appears to be to keep them stored in a central repository (we use WorkSite from Interwoven).

The problem I see with this, which I intend to comment on at an appropriate time, is that everything stored in the repository is stored as a Word document. Even if the documents are available in 25 years, we're still relying on Microsoft to keep its products backwardly compatible for that long. You're absolutely right that the industry moves quickly, but unfortunately that's not an acceptable answer for us with file formats.

25 years before today, there was no standard platform, Windows didn't exist, IBM had only recently hired Bill Gates and Paul Allen to create an operating system for their new design of PC, and VisiCalc and WordStar had only recently been released and were in the process of becoming relatively popular.

I have personal Microsoft documents that are only 12 years old (notably MS Works 2.0) that are impossible to open with any modern software. Especially as I don't run Windows any more (just as I didn't 25 years ago), I have no way of opening them short of scraping out the text strings. The format was closed in the first instance, and Microsoft decided to drop support. Relying on old software really isn't an option, because it won't be available in any supported form in the future. (If the software's available, supported, and not coded to expire, the platform and API's that it requires probably won't be.)

If we even occasionally had to open closed format documents from 25 years ago as a legal requirement on our modern Windows/Office platforms, we've be having an awful time. The only thing letting us off to date (in my organisation) is that we've only been keeping electronic documents since the late 1990's. Open formats are tremendously important, because at the very least, they're documented. There's no more relying on a closed source vendor to access your data.

I don't know if Packard Bell licensed MSBob or not, but they had a windows shell called Navigator that was very similar. I beleive I saw it before MSBob came out.

You connect the mic and headphone to an acoustic transducer and fasten it to your phone handset with a rubber band: http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/a/acoustic.htm

300Bd broadband here we come...

Too late, Microsoft already owns it.

Xenix Information
http://www.computerhope.com/unix/xenix.htm

Enjoy,

It did basically the same thing for windows 3.1(1). That was the main I hated to do a factory restore on that computer. You had to manually remove the damned program after you were done.

You seem to forget that NT was released in 1993.

I picked 1994 because that was my first year to commit to Linux, but if you compare the GNU/Linux timeline and the Windows timeline, you'll see that Linux 0.96 was able to run X 16 months before Windows NT 3.1 was released.

It had flat memory addressing, and other OS's before it did as well.

Yup. OS/2, SunOS, VMS, etc. But not Windows 3.x, which was what Linux was really competing with. Remember NT's Hardware Compatibility List? Most *brand-new* PCs of the day couldn't run NT because something wasn't listed in the HCL. NT's minimum system requirements were also outrageous compared to Linux's. You could install Slackware on a 2MB RAM box in those days, and have flat memory + protected mode. Only the BSDs could provide the same on so little.

Loadable modules weren't new either. DOS had loadable modules for crying out loud. NT had them as well from the beginning (1993).

Um, TSR's are not loadable modules, even if they do have access to the hardware (since it's DOS and EVERYTHING has access to the hardware). You could easily hose your system trying to unload them in the wrong order, assuming they even supported unloading at all (most DEVICE= style drivers didn't). Most people had to use a commercial memory manager like Qemm or the shareware MARK/RELEASE utility to get their TSR's and DEVICE= drivers to behave. That's a far cry from "insmod cdrom" and "rmmod cdrom".

Windows NT 3.1 did indeed have "loadable modules", but again NT didn't run on the same hardware Linux could.

The whole point is innovation, right? Windows NT -- which came out 16 months after Linux 0.96 -- could do true pre-emptive multitasking (remember those flame wars?) but required almost Sparc-grade hardware. I give Linux (and *BSD) the victory for bringing that to the low-end 386, just as I give Geoworks the "innovation" title for GUI-based multitasking on an 8086.

In related news, Debian's security team announced late last night that their sendmail package is no longer vulnerable to the Robert T. Morris Worm.

Professor Morris had this to say: "You're kidding, right?"

A Debian user, who wished to remain anonymous, was glad to hear that Debian was taking a pro-active approach to package updates. "I've been using Debian for a year now, and I've got to say that it beats my old Windows 3.1 box hands down. It's good to hear that they're taking a pro-active approach to security and package updates."

Although we attempted to contact the Debian team for comment, their response was not available in time for the publishing of this article. A reply is expected sometime before March 2008.

Related Articles:
About the Morris Worm:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm

Problems plague Debian updates:
http://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2000/07/msg030 06.html

History of Windows:
http://www.computerhope.com/history/windows.htm

Real History of Windows:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0168122/

(Beware TPB)

...or, perhaps it's just that 2K/XP dosen't have that command anymore ;) (it's now RD /s)