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

Actually, for the sake of nitpikking <g>, the 'rm' command was around a long time before 'deltree' was introduced in MS-DOS 5

http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/a/acpi.htm

I believe the redscreen code is turned off in release builds, meaning you are not likely to see one.

I went and got one of Samsung's camera phones a few months ago. My reason for getting it (even with the two -year contract) is that it I can hook it into my laptop and go online from anywhere I can get a cellular signal. My connect speed is somewhere around 300Kbaud (the older phones would have been limited to about 56Kbaud)

Wow... I read the 300Kbaud as 300 baud for a while there, and was going to joke that I didn't know they made accoustic couplers for mobile phones. I also remembered thinking that it wasn't such a damn stupid idea for occasional use on things such as (text-only) email and browsing with Lynx (though 300 baud would really be pushing things too far).

Since GSM is limited to (IIRC) approx 9kbps (and that's assuming you can inject the digital information directly as digital call data), I assume that you are using GPRS and getting it on your minutes allowance?

setfacl and friends.

Try this laptop battery refresh article. I thought I needed a new battery on my T20, did this a couple of times, and now it works great!

In Win2K/XP, create a new power profile that doesn't ever turn the laptop off or suspend it. Save it as "Battery Refresh" or some other name so you don't inadvertently select it. (Also disable all warning messages). Then just unplug and walk away. Your laptop will run till it drops. Recharge without turning on the laptop. Repeat 2-3x for a REALLY dead battery if needed, cuz that'w what did it for me.

I was getting 20 minutes, at the most, out of my battery until I did this.

Well, but EDLIN was a TRUE nightmare as well :)

CC.

/me thinks they are not just monitors mirrored in the glass.... they are an artistic vision of what is to become Windows OWNAGE!!!!!!

Lineage

Why isn't Linux on every desktop then? Maybe windows has evolved over the decades.

So, which would you rather have as a desktop - Windows 3.0 or last year's linux distro? More relevantly, who is going to be further ahead in the NEXT 10 years?

Microsoft has lost momentum, and is now reduced to trying to play catch-up in terms of features.

In terms of ease of install, and ease of maintenance, and ease of updating, linux distros win (just did an upgrade at the office from SuSE 9.1 to 9.2 Friday - almost 6 gigs of software brought up-to-date painlessly ... impossible with Windows where every service pack and update is feared for what it will break).

The problems with Windows are three-fold

1. the core has too much crud that was grafted into it that seemed like a good idea at the time (performance, etc) but shows its age ... there's some really OLD stuff in there that can't be rewritten without breaking too many other things. Their designers have admitted as much. Look at the way that numerous Microsoft products use undisclosed windows api calls, then they can't modify/fix something related because those calls, while not part of the public interface, have to be maintained because removing them will cause their software to puke. They end up having to write more code to handle more special cases ... over and over and over

   Linux, on the other hand, has no undisclosed api.

2. Windows target market is to be all things to all people - Gates himself has said "I only want our fair share of the market - and that fair share is 100%". In trying to be everything, it is neither fish nor fowl.

   Linux, on the other hand, is a kernel. It's agnostic in the sense that it is up to YOU as a user/developer/distributor to do what you want with it.

3. Reputation - Microsoft and Windows both have a terrible reputation, in terms of public relations (convicted monopolist, all-grasping with their "passport", etc...) and technology (everyone knows what the "Blue Screen of Death" means).

   The BSDs and Linux have a much better reputation. People don't use Windows because they want to, but because they have to. But that's changing.

Good for SkyOS, possibly, rather a non-event from a Firefox perspective, at least numbers-wise.

That's right. SkyOS is too small of a project to be any of significance. And everybody knows no small projects ever become big ones, right?

Some things you might want to consider, try having just a couple small lan parties at your house or somethin, just so you can get the feel of what needs to be setup. Try looking at these sites:

LAN Party Setup Info
Lanparty.com

Or just search google for "Hosting Lan Party" (without quotes, not sure if it matters).

Good luck to ya, a well-setup lan party can be a blast. The last one I went to, it was quite a few years ago, we played UT I believe. Each team got a room pretty much to setup, so you couldn't see the opponent, but you could year them when they yelled because you just killed them again =).

AGP is a point-to-point bus. That is, you cannot have more than one device on the bus. That is why you don't see multiple AGP slot solutions. While I'm sure someone could find a way hardware wise you would need software to do its part as well. PCI Express will change all of that.

JOhn

an excellent post. volts don't kill people, amperes do! and since watts are the product of voltage and amperage, and voltage will be likely low... this would lead me to believe that yes, these could be dangerous devices with a good amount of current going through... a physics professor of mine once said "it only takes a single amp to stop your heart"... oh yeah! now we can play flatliners without the need for a power outlet! sweet!

an excellent post. volts don't kill people, amperes do! and since watts are the product of voltage and amperage, and voltage will be likely low... this would lead me to believe that yes, these could be dangerous devices with a good amount of current going through... a physics professor of mine once said "it only takes a single amp to stop your heart"... oh yeah! now we can play flatliners without the need for a power outlet! sweet!

an excellent post. volts don't kill people, amperes do! and since watts are the product of voltage and amperage, and voltage will be likely low... this would lead me to believe that yes, these could be dangerous devices with a good amount of current going through... a physics professor of mine once said "it only takes a single amp to stop your heart"... oh yeah! now we can play flatliners without the need for a power outlet! sweet!

Looks like this idea's been around for god knows how long ... So much for innovation, we seem to be going backwards here ?.

1968 was an important year in world history, no doubt about it. In 1998, there was a wave of documentaries, books and essays about that year. The authors focused on yippies trashing democratic convention in Chicago, Warsaw Pact invading Czechoslovakia, student uprising in Paris, Mexico massacre, flower-power, maoism, Vietnam war, Beatles recording white album or Che Guevara in Bolivia.

Almost nobody noticed that 1968 was also the year when Noyce an Moore founded Intel, Douglas Engelbart demoed for the fist time GUI, mouse and word processing, UCLA and Stanford started to build their networking connection. Even today, scholars seem not to notice the relevance of these facts.

If you go back another generation and also to the first generation, you get the true floating point units on different chips, with the 8086 and 8087 co-processor and the 80287 coprocessor for the 80286 processor.

The next generation after the 80286 processor used the "enable" "disable" scam along with the strange naming conventions, all of which you may find here. So I would agree that the 80287 was a true floating point co-processor; I'm not so sure about all of the 80387 co-processors.

The advantage of having these floating point operations on the same die is, of course, speed. I wonder if the "Alti-Vec" enhancements to the G4 and G5 IBM-Motorola RISC processors is along the same lines as a multi-core processor with different functions in the two cores.

I have found the perfect site to store this stuff HERE

1. Given that XP isn't just Win2K SP5 but is in fact Win2K with an awful lot of extra chrome tacked on, it was never going to be more stable to begin with.

Windows NT came out in 1993.

Windows XP came out in 2001.

It is now late 2004.

Windows XP is the latest in a chain of operating systems starting with Windows NT.

If XP isn't stable now, maybe they shouldn't have added all that extra chrome in the first place? (If that is even the reason for the stability problems; I'm not convinced!)

Now Longhorn isn't going to be shipped until late 2006. Let's give them the benefit of the doubt and say they'll hit that date (just in time for Xmas!). OK, so that means that they will have been working on this thing for a MINIMUM of 5 years. If there was any release overlap, and I am sure there would have to be, it is probably more like 6 years. WTF have they been doing in Redmond!? You can't tell me that everyone there has been working on XP service packs.

Now I am not discounting the complexity of software and what it takes to release something of this magnitude. But we are talking about the largest and richest software company on the planet! Surely if anyone could do this, it would be..... Hmm. Perhaps what seems to be an advantage is actually a disadvantage in this case. If you look at their OS timeline (I used this one ), it seems that it was usually around 3 years between major instances of their OS lines. Now, that has doubled for some reason? Maybe they had to start over from scratch and are putting some security into this one. (the good kind, not the DRM kind)

I guess we'll just have to wait and see. It's good for me that they are delaying, at least they won't be changing the "corporate standard" again where I work. I really don't care for XP and wish I had 2000 back...

What's your favorite help sites?

Computer Hope's Unix
Tech-recipes's Unix
Tek-tips forums
Sun's BigAdmin

Help me add to my favorites...

Davak

In 1988 I had a system with an ATI EGA Wonder 800 card. This card could do 800x600 in 16 colors, which was significantly beyond what the equivalent Macintosh hardware could do, which was 1 bit monochrome in 512x384. This card was nothing special.

The first color Mac was introduced in 1987, and the second model (IIx) didn't come out until September 1988. Incidentally my system was about $700. The Macintosh II would have run close to $4k in that time frame. The max resolution was 640x480x256. Of course, you could just as easily have bought a VGA card that supported high resolutions, if cost were no object. Virtually no one owned the above - let's compare apples to apples. (heh heh)

Where does this 'square pixel' shit come from? Because at low resolutions they were blocky looking? That applied to both a Macintosh and clone PC. Are you trying to imply that Macintoshes had round pixels. Please...continue...entertain me.

Most Macintoshes had sucky video compared to PCs, the IBM compatible systems just didn't know what to do with it.

System 7 was a buggy piece of shit and didn't settle down for a long time. You're welcome to it. I liked 6.0.x - or 7.5.3, far better. By the time 8 came around, I gave up on Macintoshes.

GEOS for the PC was released in November 1990, sadly after Windows 3.0, which had already taken over the PC GUI world by then.

Bzzzzt. You lose on the facts, dude. Mac zealot.

I think you mean "Going out of business since 1977":

Apple becomes Incorporated January 4,1977.

A couple decades? You must be including DOS in your calculation, or generously rounding your decades (I suppose the 90s and 00s...). Windows has hardly been hard-hitting since 1990, when it was released as 3.0, arguably not even until 1992 with 3.1 (which had decent networking).

But anyway, back to the topic at hand. I think we both agree that at the moment, usability for most people is equated to having a Windows look and feel. The real challenge to the Linux community will be to get to a point where Linux's usability can be judged independently of whether or not it looks or works like Windows. This is something Apple has been quite successful at.

Or 1985. The problem with the web rears its ugly head once more.

You're right. The plant started as a CDC (Control Data Corp.) operation. A few years back I had an HDD (Imprimis brand, I think) whose label said it was from that plant.

I believe that they no longer manufacture anything there anymore. From their website:

Seagate's Oklahoma City operation enjoys a 40-plus year history in Oklahoma City. The facility makes a significant contribution to corporate business objectives and strategies by serving as the company's worldwide center for customer technical support and by employing a significant Information Technologies staff.

So they're mostly a support operation now. Who knows how long that will last.

Interestingly, Creative Labs North American tech support operation is here in Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Before 1998 there wasn't Google, MySql, iMac, Seti@Home, Microsoft Access and well... Microsoft Windows 98. :)
Look here for more.

Being able to carry out multiple tasks in parallel, to have several applications available to facilitate workflow... ...the multiple application, flexible workflow side of things is what truly mattered...

Have you used SCREEN by any chance?

Screen is a full-screen window manager that multiplexes a physical terminal between several processes, typically interactive shells. - From SCREEN - window manager

The History shows that version 3 of SCREEN was release on 3.00.01 1991-07-08, so that would make it older than Windows 3.1, though I'm not sure on the original creation date for SCREEN v.1.

While the CLI is still 1D, SCREEN sort of adds another dimension to it. Anyway, its a pretty old app, but its still incredibly useful.

MS got to be market dominant (which is NOT a true monopoly) by making genuinely good programs

Out of curosity, how old are you, and how long have you been using small / personal computers?

Oh, I'd say he's about 49 years old and has been using personal computers since 1981.

The only people who deny that Microsoft is a monopoly are Microsoft itself or its apologists. You can make the argument that the web browser SHOULD be part of the OS - after all, that's what Netscape was thinking at one point, to build a platform on the browser, and Mozilla has a good start in that direction - and you can make arguments against a number of the other cases that lead to the monopoly judgment; but you can't dismiss them all. Microsoft is a monopoly which has illegally leveraged that monopoly to drive competition out of most of the markets they've targeted. Those are the findings of fact produced by Penfield Jackson, a judge who was cherry-picked by MS after they claimed the previous judge, Daniel Sporkin, was biased against them; and then, of course, when Jackson judge ordered a break-up, Microsoft successfully got him dismissed for defending his ruling before the pro-Microsoft business press, helping Microsoft to stall the case long enough for a pro-MS administration to come in and pull the prosecution's fangs - as Jackson actually predicted (see the com.com link above)!

If the monopoly ruling had been used to enforce the imposition of standard formats for a handful of document types, to force MS to release their flagship applications for competing platforms, or best of all to divorce the applications product line from the platform product line via a break-up, we might see for all aspects of computing a degree of integration similar to what the web provides (common protocols that promote and ensure interoperability). Instead, we have hydraulic despotism - the entire world economy is beholden to Bill Gates' whims, because the only way a company can interoperate effectively with its corporate partners is through Microsoft on the desktop, and Microsoft on the desktop doesn't interoperate well with anything other than Microsoft on the network, except where Microsoft's competitors have made heroic efforts toward interoperability.

> CP/M, which is surely as old, if not older, than UNIX.

Sorry, but CP/M was made in 1974. UNIX was started in 1969.

>This statement will soon become true for anti-virus.

You mean MSAV, the CPAV rebundle for MS-DOS, right? Truth really is stranger than fiction. :-)

If this had anything to do with this:

"June 10, 2003 - GeCAD Software announces a definite agreement with Microsoft in acquiring GeCAD's antivirus technology."

Listed here along with a number of their other aquisitions.

Oh, and it's important to note here that nothing from Microsoft is "free".

Microsoft WAS in the antivirus business a long time ago.

Microsoft included "MSAV.EXE"--Microsoft Anti-Virus--with MS-DOS 6.0 back in the early 90's.

It was, essentially, a cut-down derivative of Central Point Antivirus, which was actually developed by a company in Israel, not Central Point. Central Point was purchased by Symantec in 1994, and Microsoft quietly removed MSAV from their OS's when Symantec refused to supply updates and Yisrael Radai wrote his now famous paper outlining how it was deeply flawed.

What country do you live in? Windows 95 come out in 1996! (hence the name ~_^)

From what backwards country was the mod who modded you insightful? You were probably going for funny (at least I hope so :)

For the record, in my country, and in what I'm pretty sure of the rest of the world, Windows 95 was released in (gasp!) August 1995

That's alot of nonsense as GPL software has been included with most commercial Unix variants as soon as Stallman could pump it out. Here's some info on that:"and thus quite often any machine running a commercial Unix variant would stock GNU versions of utilities to take advantage of these features and to have a standardized version of them.". In addition, Sun, RedHat, HP, IBM, Novell, MySQL, SAP and even SCO claim your wrong. GPL'd software is making money, and everyone wants to be in that market.

The BSD license (even the old, "bad" one) was the catalyst that ignited the entire Unix philosophy and mindset, initially in academia, but soon after throughour industry.

Your history is a little mixed up, as it was AT&T's code (not Berkeley's) that was initially circulating in academia. This is how Berkeley got a hold of it, and started tweaking it and eventually got into a lawsuit over it. Here's a timeline to help you out.

The BSD license allowed Sun to build the world's first computer deisgned to run an open OS, and Sun's competitors were all forced to follow suit, making the Unix "idea" the single most dominant way of thinking about computing throughout the world.

Sadly, I don't think I could convince you how bad it is to lock away innovation from the community as the private commercial Unix companies did. But, if you need proof as to the abusive result, take a trip to Redmond and ask them about the countless man hours lost to the Blue Screen of Death.

Damn straight that couldn't have happened under the GPL: all the incentive would be gone. Linux itself owes its very existence to BSD, for without it, that young Finnish hacker would never have heard of Unix and thus to want to do somethinng so daft as to get a copy of it running on a PC.

Umm, how old are you? Please refer to the links I give above for Unix history and how not all Unix variants descend from BSD.

I really wonder what great opportunities we're missing now simply because som much good code is rendered useless for commerce by the GPL.

I understand how a certain perspective can make the mistake, but I believe you meant "rendered useless" for theft.

I jsut made the call on an embedded OS for a proposed product at out new startup: it will be BSD-based rather than Linux based.

Thank you for ejecting yourself from the competition. Natural selection is best viewed in the marketplace.

Partly for BSD's greatly superior stability,

Clearly not up on reading the news. That old argument is no longer valid. Linux is often more stable in recent versions that some of the free BSDs, and as stable as the others. As time goes on, and Linux's maturity continuous and BSD begins to be simpy academic toys, you'll start hearing of how hobbyists wish their favorite BSD variant could support x-number of clients at x-number rate with x-percentage uptime. This is the natural course of things.

, but mostly so that we can freely modify the system and offer those improvements as a real benefit to our customers. That's simply not possible with the GPL...

I wouldn't be overly proud of hiding your sourcecode improvements from your clients. That doesn't engender much sympathy during a time when transparency is in vogue and clients begin demanding that they have access to the code. If you're still in the embedded business in a few years, you'll be using Linux in some form.

= 9J =

The term "Web Technologies" usually refers to interactive web sites.
That's why HTML and HTTP are some of the Web Technologies, aren't they? You obviously don't even know what you are talking about...

The term didn't exist when I started programming HTML back in '96 or even when I was coding servlets in '98
When you type "didn't exist" you obviously mean "I hadn't heard about". I excuse your tendency to generalize your own experience to reality.

Perhaps they meant web browsers and HTTPD servers, but that's not what they said.
When HR usually say "7+ years in Web technologies", they just want to make sure that the candidate has an in-depth knowledge of a) the web technologies and b) the techologies they rely on (which you seem to exclude from the Web Technologies): HTTP and HTML, to cite two of them. I think it is fair to say that I (for example, I am just one of them) have 7+ years experience in the web technologies.

Since Netscape 2.0 was released in 1996, it is fair to say that Javascript will soon be 8. Dynamic Web content (such as CGI) was common even in the 1995's. Wiki is one example of that. So long for your "interactive websites" limitation.

According to the Computer History, 1990 is the year the first commercial Internet dial-up access provider comes online. And in 1993, Fifty World Wide Web servers are known to exist. Hmmm, that put web technologies more than 10 as of today. Finally, this 7+ years doesn't sound so pathetic now.

Sounds to me like you're too insecure in your own skills to find the humor in the "10+ years in Java" type job ads.
Well, the 10+ years in tech X doesn't surprise me if the tech is 15. In this case, it's 7+ and the tech is 10-12. Sounds about an experience someone could actually have.

Sure, you could probably find some sort of rationalization
Like 10>7? Yes, I found it.

but the truth is that these things are written by HR departments that don't know any better.
Not all people in a HR department are idiots. While I can see some funny ads from time to time, this one in particular wasn't stupid.

In other words, don't be such a stick in the mud. It's funny! Laugh!
Humour is made of plenty of things. I am actually laughing at your ignorance of the history of the web technologies.

Thank you for your excellent reading. This should definitely be modded up. However, I'd like to add a couple of comments.

First, by your reading, it seems that only VFAT is affected. This is bad, but not as bad as it could be.

Second, some other people have posted that the license applies only to embedded devices. This has nothing to do with the infringing or noninfringing nature of Linux. All this means is that the only group Microsoft has offered to license to *legally* use long filenames on FAT is the embedded folks. This means that there is currently no option (if indeed the VFAT kernel module infringes, as it appears to do) for Linux folks to have uninfringing use. There is no requirement for Microsoft to provide such a licensing option, and they may sue for damages regardless of whether or not they provide such an option.

Third, my reading is that your argument about the patents being invalid due to prior art is incorrect. The relevant section is USC 35, Part II, Chapter 10, Section 205. The relevant clauses are (a) and (b). (a) does not apply because it only relates to prior art as produced by others. (b) does not apply because it refers to *public* use or sale -- not a couple of MSDN members or whoever got to play with Chicago betas. Windows 95 was released in August, 1995. This is less than a year before the patent application in April, 1996.

Actually, Sir Haxalot was talking about The Floptical drive created by 3M & Iomega that could unreliably store 21MB on 1 VHD diskette. It also took 30 Minutes to format, the drive could not read 2.88MB Floppies, and couldn't create a boot floptical disk or boot from a disk in a floptical drive, So it quickly became obsolete.

Edlin. ahh those were the days ...

Render video to CD? Do you mean VideoCD, by any chance?

"Also known as VCD, VideoCD is a concept introduced in 1993 by Philips, JVC and Sony that allows for the storage of MPEG-1 video on a CD-ROM."

Source

In the late 1970's Microsoft licensed UNIX source code from AT&T

Delpart.exe is unnecessary. FDISK.EXE has a complete host of undocumented command-line arguments which allow you to create/modify/destroy partitions on the command line.

FDISK Info

Code, by Charles Petzold is what I'd give my 12 year old self. At that time 1984, my dad gave me the C Programming Language, the Unix Programming Environmnet, and a new computer loaded with a copy of Microsoft's XENIX operating system.

Try using the unmount command.

Ughh... i hate bad puns :|

Windows is not a generic term now. If someone says Linux, you know what they are talking about (the specific OS). By the same terms, if someone says that a program they wrote "runs on Windows" you know, with 100% certainty, that they are referring to the specificMS OS called Windows.

But if someone says their program "runs on X windows" we will also know what it means, that their program folllows the X11 Windowing System Protocol and probably runs on UNIX. This suggests to me that while the word Windows alone, used as if it were a software platform, is very not generic, "it sounds like Windows" is certainly a generic at this point. "Lindows" seems about as close to "Windows" as "X Windows", and it has X11 *in* it, so..

I'm not sure they could win this case even were the trademark a valid one when it was filed. According to this X-windows was developed and in use in MIT student labs in 1984 (although W, the precursor to X, existed before that) and was being commercially deployed by 1988. According to this MSWindows was announced in 1983 and was being commercially deployed by 1985. As far as i'm concerned, if Microsoft has problems with things that sound like 'cheap knock-offs' of their Windows trademark.. well, if Windows is a microsoft trademark, then 'X Windows' certainly sounds like a cheap knock-off to me (X-Windows isn't the product's name, but a lot of people call it that.). Microsoft didn't do anything about this in 1988, their trademark is now diluted, and they can't complain about this now.

Beyond this, it seems to me any arguments you could use to claim Windows is a non-generic could be equally applied to Office: If you say "this is an Office document" people know exactly what you mean. Microsoft has spent ungodly amounts of money on marketing the name Office. But yesterday in CompUSA, i quite definitely saw a box for sale clearly marked "Hancom Office".. with "Hancom" in little tiny letters, and the visual design of the box very similar to that of the MSOffice v.X packaging. That seems more to me to be profiteering off of a trademark MS has built up than "Lindows".

Here's the thing.. everything i've said above makes perfect sense to me. However, I'm not sure it means a damn thing from a legal standpoint. Is the whole "X Windowing System therefore MSWindows can't trademark-collide with similar-sounding products" a valid legal argument? Is there some SPECIFIC legal reason that it's okay for people to stomp all over the Office trademark but not the Windows one?

For example, when you say "hand me a Kleenex" you probably don't give a hoot if I give you Kleenex brand tissues, Puffs brand, or Wal-Mart brand. But if I say I want a Windows program, you know that I don't want some program written for Linux.

So what would you assume if i told you "Hand me some Leenex"? ^_^

Windows didn't have pre-emptive multitasking till Windows95 and I'm not sure about Macs (but check the link in the first paragraph..) but I remember a Mac-mate of mine getting all excited about OS X because of the "pre-empted many-tasking" he had heard about.

In early versions of Windows the operating system (and I use the term loosely) only regained control when a program issued a GetMessage() or PeekMessage() call (well, mainly, there were some others as well). A program could easily tie up the system if it didn't call any of these API functions in a timely manner.

Here's some info about it: http://www.computerhope.com/unix/xenix.htm

Or Xenix.