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"Microsoft knew ahead of time the update would cause problems for some users but decided to do nothing about it."

Have you given serious consideration to the thought that they deliberately caused KB3133977 to fail to enthuse users to upgrade to Windows 10. If this strikes you as being a little paranoid, MS did exactly this, as in causing Windows apps to crash on OS/2, causing windows clients to not play nice with Netware ref ref and throwing up an error when Windows 3.1 was installed under DR-DOS.

"As Windows 7 does not support Secure Boot, with the update of KB3133977"

How does 'upgrading' an OS cause it to lose functionality?

Perhaps you should learn your history. You're talking about the AARD code, which was never enabled in a shipping version of Windows. And, there were legetimate bugs in DR DOS that novell acknowledge that made it buggy to run Windows on it.

http://fringe.davesource.com/Fringe/NonZen_Companies/Microsoft/Tactics/1993.09.01.Locks_Out_DrDOS.html

"So whenever I've heard accusations that Microsoft practices so-called "cruel coding" to keep Windows from running on DR DOS, I look at the facts: Windows 3.1 Enhanced mode does run on DR DOS. Standard mode does not run, but that's because of a DR DOS bug acknowledged by Novell (see Undocumented DOS, Second Edition)."

"Consequently, if you didn't know how the error message in Figure 1 was generated, it's reasonable to think that it's the manifestation of yet another bug in Novell DOS. (It wouldn't be the first time company N's bug has been misinterpreted as company M's "deliberate incompatibility.")"

But, in the end, the point is that when Microsoft shipped Windows 3.1, it did so without the AARD code enabled.

The parent is wrong w.r.t. the factoring part, but it does make sense.

You don't factor the public key (it may even be prime), but you can factor the public modulo (which is part of both the public-key and private-key pair).
The modulo is a product of two prime numbers (with certain properties) and it mathematically links the public and private keys together.
There is only one correct answer to factoring the modulo, and if you do so you have figured the relationship between the public and private key. Then you can not only derive the private key from the public key, but then you also know for certain that it is the correct private key.

http://fringe.davesource.com/Fringe/Crypt/RSA/Algorithm.html

Apparently they are still in common use: http://www.genave.com/two-tone_paging.htm
and more interesting: http://fringe.davesource.com/Fringe/Hacking/Phreaking/Pagers/Protocols/pager.html

Monday, January 15
No. It can't be true! They really are writing about Steve Jobs -- I just saw the latest Wired magazine with an in-depth interview with the Boy Wonder. Why is he a "visionary"? I'm a visionary too. Why don't they call me a "visionary"? I'm tired of being "ruthlessly competitive". This guy got lucky too. I mean, you know, they always say I got lucky when IBM licensed DOS. That wasn't luck, it was skill. I negotiated a great deal from IBM then ran over to Patterson's place and snapped up Q-DOS. That takes *balls*. Jobs has no balls. Jobs is a guy who spends two weeks choosing a washer/dryer. Yes, *two* weeks. For what? Like, $500 or so. The guy has millions. Jobs is a guy who actually cares about his clothes "feeling really soft". What a loser --

It does graffiti excellently and you've obviously never used it.

I don't want "graffiti;" I want better than (or at least equal to) Microsoft! You must have never used Windows Journal, because if you had, you'd know how genuinely amazing Microsoft's handwriting recognition is. I can write in my normal handwriting, I can write in cursive... Hell, I can even scratch out words as fast as I can without taking any care at all and it'll still recognize it almost 100% correctly! It's light-years ahead of graffiti.

Suck, completely unusable, slightly comparable and anger... now I'm starting to feel like I'm talking to some kind of hyperbolic M$ troll.

First of all, it sounds no worse than you doing your usual anti-MS ranting. Second, I've talked with you enough that you should know I'm not a MS troll. In fact, it absolutely kills me that this one particular aspect of the system keeps me from putting Ubuntu on my Tablet PC, because you're right in that Windows sucks compared to Linux in every other way.

Of course there are plenty of games available...

Ink games (like sudoku, crosswords, tic-tac-toe, and other pen-and-paper games)?

...as well as sticky notes and all that jazz...

Ink sticky notes (that you write, rather than type, on)?

KDE's PIM blows everything else away, so I'm not sure what applications you are after and where you get your quality standards.

KDE's PIM apps have Ink input? (Okay, granted, Windows PIM stuff doesn't have ink input either, but I think we can both agree that the goal is for Free Software to be superior to Windows, not merely equal to it.)

The little drawing program from GPE and KDE protable are both good. Inkscape, which ports from Debian, is better.

I don't recall ever saying I had a problem with drawing programs. However, it doesn't even matter because I don't get much cause to use them in my engineering or programming classes.

I imagine you've tried those note taking applications about as much as you have xstroke. All of these applications work with xstroke because xstroke just take the place of a keyboard and mouse when you want it to...

I'm not stupid, Twitter -- I know how xstroke works! It superimposes the stroke on a 3x3 grid, figures out which grid squares the stroke passed through in which order, matches that against a list of defined gestures, and outputs the corresponding text event (it's all described in the man page).

However, it's still vastly inferior (oops... there's that "trollish" language again!) to the Tablet Input Panel in Windows, which not only allows you to input single characters, but also allows you to input entire recognized sentences at a time. This is both faster and much more accurate, because it allows the recognition engine to match entire words (instead of single characters) so that you don't end up with l33t speak (i.e., recognizing the word "Slide" instead of the characters "$" "1" ";" "d" and "e").

I've watched people try to use one note don't think very much of it, but to each his own.

Were they using it to take handwritten notes, keep them organized (by class and topic), and search them? If not, then they were missing the point.

I still think it's easier to use paper and pencil for lecture notes and then to take a picture to get it onto the computer then mark it up with a keyboard.

Exactly, which is why I'm so concerned with being able to take handwritten notes on the Tablet PC and have them

that would be the 'AARD' code.

http://fringe.davesource.com/Fringe/NonZen_Compani es/Microsoft/Tactics/1993.09.01.Locks_Out_DrDOS.ht ml

Careful with those stupid suggestions. Someone might do it.

http://fringe.davesource.com/Fringe/Information/Su icide_FAQ.html#Water

There is some information here : http://davesource.com/Fringe/Fringe/Hacking/Crypto graphy/Encryption_Class/class1
for more information, google on 2DES and weaknesses.

Houston, we have a problem...

After three years of work, in August 1998, the first chips came back from IBM Corp., which had signed on as manufacturer. To check out the performance of the chips, the Transmeta engineers ran several benchmarks, both for Unix and Windows. The chips ran Unix benchmarks as fast as had been expected; the first magic trick had worked.

But when the engineers assigned to performance analysis started testing Windows benchmarks, they had a nasty surprise. The Windows benchmarks reported scores far lower than expected. Transmeta had reached into its magic hat to pull out a rabbit and had instead come up with a turtle.

"It was like in the Apollo 13 movie," Laird said, "We wanted to say, 'Whoops, Houston, we've got a problem here.' "

Laird was philosophical about the situation. "We're engineers," he told Spectrum. "We didn't need to panic. We needed to understand what was going on. And so we analyzed it, moved teams of hardware and software people onto it, and started fixing it."

But not all the engineers at Transmeta were so sanguine.

"We had been riding high, blindly expecting the chips to do everything that we had promised," recalled Klayman. "When they didn't, it was a real morale killer." Some of them felt it was never going to work, and since nobody was motivated, no work was getting done. Then Doug Laird told them to drop everything else they were doing, as there was still a chance to right the ship.

The company held an all-hands meeting, in which Laird told everyone the truth--that they had run into a wall running Windows benchmarks. But he reassured them that, by working together, they could fix the problem. Murray Goldman, a member of the board of directors, pledged that the board would stand by their efforts, implying that more money would be raised, should it be needed.

Looking back, Laird said a problem might have been expected with Windows95 applications. "Most of us came from a Unix background, we knew how Unix applications behaved. But we didn't really understand Windows95," he said.

Apparently Windows95 still had a lot of old 16-bit code in it, whereas Unix (as well as Windows NT) used a flat memory model with pure 32-bit code. Supporting 16-bit code was something that Transmeta had decided to offload into software.

Once they realized this, they redesigned the hardware to give better support to Windows95 applications. They also increased the size of the caches because Windows95 applications tend to use more memory than Unix applications.

The redesign process added about a year to Transmeta's development time. In fact, getting products to market took longer than any of the founders had anticipated. "If we had had a better idea of how long it would have taken, we probably would not have done it, I suspect," said D'Souza.

Why Microsoft is evil Section 2.2.2

Java does fix many cross-platform performance problems by leaving the optimization up to the virtual machine, it's a similar to what Transmeta does. Some People are even claiming that Java programs are faster than programs written in C++. Less biased benchmarks still put the Java VM just a bit slower than GCC and a lot slower than a really optimized compiler(Intel's).

Our ability to think and reason was not the product of evolution

I'd like you to prove that.

Our ability to think and reason could easily be a product of evolution. Just because you can see the possibility doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Making such a blanket statement does not show your intelligence or knowledge, it shows your ignorance.

One only has to compare the security woes of Microsoft or Linux with the rock-solid experience of OpenBSD for an example.

Are you saying that these operating systems haven't evolved in an iterative process? Riiiiight... "Release early, release often"

The decision to use DR-DOS or MS-DOS for the hardware vendors was made at the beta phase. That's why it was so important. Here's a better link that explains in more detail, with better technical info. Here's a quote: "While it's difficult to second-guess the precise goal of the encrypted and obfuscated AARD code, its results are clear enough. Windows beta sites that used DR DOS rather than MS-DOS might have been scared into not using DR DOS."

They hid the detection code by encrypting the bulk of it and breaking single-step interrupts before decrypting it. I fail to see how this obfuscation was necessary if the aim was merely to detect possibly incompatible versions of DOS. Also the error message shown to the user was deceptive. See "Examining the Windows AARD Detection Code".

Honestly, if Microsoft had warned the user during install that DR-DOS may be incompatible with Windows 3.1, and that Microsoft cannot guarentee that non official versions of DOS will function properly, they would've likely had fewer problems. Instead they chose to be sneaky, and do meaningless checks on XMS driver versions, call undocumented int 21h calls to check for even more undocumented data structures, and then pop up errors that imply there's something seriously wrong with your system. Microsoft has no obligation to support DR-DOS, but this went further than that, to actually trying to sabotage DR-DOS.

What Happens When a Linux Geek Takes Over a Canadian Football Team ?

* Bob Young, founder of Red Hat and Lulu.com buys Canadian football team the Hamilton Ticats.
* Ticats playbook submitted to SourceForge for development. Fans of the Canadian Football League are invited to submit revisions.
* Initially puzzled by open source strategy, other CFL teams begin using the plays.
* Ticats adopt open-channel Wi-Fi for communications between coaches and quarterbacks using new helmet developed under the GPL, known as the GNU-Helmet. Xs and Os on playbook diagrams are replaced with 1s and 0s. Fans begin to show up at games with laptops to IM the assistant coaches.
* Ticats playbook becomes bestseller .
* First season is devoted to eliminating bugs. Bob Young called an eccentric, fringe player. Headline screams "Playbook Bazaar -- Bizarre!"
* Innovation in CFL play explodes. Stadiums host record crowds. US newspapers run stories, but most assume that the sport in question is actually soccer.
* Bill Gates surprises press by purchasing Seattle Seahawks.
* In the third season, CFL continues to gain momentum. Young brokers a revolutionary agreement with the Australian Football League incorporating new rules and tactics. Games become more interesting. Cable channel TechTV signs contract to air every CFL game. US viewers begin to abandon NFL games in droves.
* NFL sues, claiming a process patent on option plays
* Clear-Channel takes over 90% of US stadiums and inks 10-year contract with NFL. Fans are routinely strip-searched for illicit food and drink items as they enter stadiums.
* Gates responds to decrease in attendance at games by inking broadcast deal with all four networks to air games simultaneously.
* Canada announces increase in immigration. MIT Beavers win Division Championship.
* Electronic Arts announces that "Madden NFL 2007" will be open source. Furor erupts. New version quickly surfaces in which characters can be forced to play soccer.
* NYT article notes that enrollment in youth football programs across North America are up, as are demands for reinforced padding and elastic straps for eyeglasses. 'Football is all about brains!" bellow coaches.
* 2010 - Ticats win Grey Cup for the first time in decades. Average size of defensive lineman is 5'7", 155 lbs.

(Yep - i'm old enough to remember the "good old days" of Usenet with strange groups and strange FAQs. Now, where did i put my cane?)

Okay, so it's an 8-bit Turing complete machine. Many text editors, such as VI are complete but you ain't gonna see me playing Quake on them...

Yeah, it's nice for Java, after all, the more machines a VM can run on, the better for it. Unfortunately, the white paper reads more like marketing spiel rather than anything else.

If he had a point to make at all, it's that too many programmers don't write code with a view to reusability in mind. Now that is something worth reminding us...