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Slashback: 640K, Pioneer, Payback
Kudos to the guys behind Pioneer 10! Soft writes: "As a follow-up to yesterday's story, Pioneer 10 was successfully contacted for its 30th birthday, as announced in sci.space.news. The commands that were sent yesterday have been executed by the spacecraft, and more data has been collected by the Geiger Tube Telescope." lostchicken adds a link to Associated Press wire story on Yahoo!', writing "Not bad for a 30 year-old spacecraft. Perhaps those making time capsules could learn something from this?" Several readers also pointed out the SpaceDaily version of the goings on.
What, in the middle of Canadian winter?! schon writes: "An update to this /. story - The Canadian Copyright Board has announced the details of the public hearings on Canadian Digital Copyrights, at http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/rp00838e.html. Interested parties should register before attending (details available on the page.)"
Sent to you in compliance with the current Federal legislation An Anonymous Coward writes: "Back in June of 2000 Slashdot.org reported a story called ' Taking On A Spammer' about a spammer being hacked by a pissed sys-admin. The Behind Enemy Lines web page talked about a pump-and-dump spam done by Premier Services and Mark Rice."
(See this page for more information on that scam.)
"Well on February 25, 2002 the SEC filed charges against Mark Rice!"
Death of a legend? Jean-Luc writes "The New York Review of Books has published an article that contains an e-mail from Bill Gates denying he ever said the infamous "640K should be enough for anyone" quote. He foists the blame on IBM and claims he tried to convince them to include more address space from the get go. Very technical and fairly convincing, showing that for all his might Bill is still basically a geek's geek."
They hadn't even gotten to the bowlderizing chip yet ... Dan Gilmor pointed out Intel's strong statement Thursday on copy protection front, "much stronger than the letter sent yesterday. Surprising given their history..." Maybe Intel believes they can do a better job of what deciding what goes into Silicon than a committee of bureaucrats steered by the entertainment moguls can.
That they contacted Pioneer 10 with two tin cans and a very long string.
do they have any plans to have voyager ten still be usefull?
One post every two minutes ought to be enough for anyone.
Bill is still basically a geek's geek Has slashdot finally sold out to the man? Do the full page commercial ads mean that slashdot now swims in the scum under the refrigirator of corporate cold storage?
I thought it was Pioneer 10, not Voyager 10. IIRC, there was no such thing as voyager 10.
No, I don't want a free iPod
You mean Pioneer 10, right?
The software on the voyager has been running for 30 years without crashing. You know it couldn't be running Windows :-)
A don't miss for the /. community.
The future of MPORPGs is here.
Progress Quest
-ElvisGrbac
Of course the explination is going to sound good, common he's only had, how many years??! to come up with it? ;)
There was no Voyager 10. As we all know, the Voyager program was cancelled after Voyager 6 disappared into that black hole... :^}
They sure don't make 'em like they used to.
Hooray for Pioneer 10!
Because Bill Gates would never lie.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
I love music and movies. I'm slowly becoming an afficiando of the art of film--more so than most other J6P I know. The SSSCA would only introvert me--I would not consider to purchase any product that met the required compliance. I'd buy everything I could from Taiwan--mostly b/c you damn well know they are going to capitalize on any openings in the market that they can.
I've written my representitives, have you?
A new Voyager program what channel upn or fox?
does it have that hot borg chick?
I'm glad to see some of the big players in the tech industry are standing up for consumers. I hope AMD and other companies will follow suit and maybe make Hollywood realize that they can't change technology and the internet, they will have to change their buisness model to adapt to this new medium.
After reading all the pushing the media industry was doing it sure makes me feel better that someone with some money and power is standing up for end user rights and even going so far as to express their dislike of the DMCA.
Then came PowerPoint.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
How can /. publish an article on Pioneer 10 one day, then muck it all up by calling it "Voyager 10" the next?
Guess it's easier to type "Voyager" than "Pioneer" when you've got you've got your left thumb stuck up your butt...
-JT
... but he is also still Microsoft's Chief Software Architect. He very much isn't stupid when it comes to the internals of the PC. MS-DOS tried to work around the 640k limitations IBM set in place using EMM386 and HIMEM.
The bloody problem was that segments overlapped.
.. FFFF full 64k .. FFFF full 64k (total 640K)
:)
i.e. Only 16 bytes *didn't* overlap in 2 consecutive segments -- meaning there was 65535 different ways to address the *same* memory location. (Ok, 64K wrap-around in a segment sucked too.)
Why the heck couldn't Intel just have "zero" memory for when the CPU accessed segmented memory that didn't exist.
i.e.
segment:memory
0000:0000
0009:0000
000A:000
: all zero when read
B7FF:0000
B800:0000 frame buffer (mono or cga, I forgot)
A000:0000 VGA frame buffer
At least "real mode" is dead (finally
I would be incline to go rent of buy them.
I saw Rushmore, I loved Rushmore, I purchased the DVD, they got my money.
I saw Tank Girl, I hated Tank Girl, if for some perverse reason I want to see it again I'm going to Kazaa and burn it, they don't get my money.
We have just recently passed through the 32-bit limit and are going to 64-bit
I'm sorry I must have just been dreaming about alpha's and sparcs these past few years.
had a turbo button from 4.77Mhz to 10Mhz.
640kb (instead of 512kb), and
a huge 40Mb HDD. And I thought that was great.
:)
I won't compare it to my Athlon 1600XP now
From the referenced email by Bill Gates:
In three or four years the industry will have moved over to 64-bit architecture, and it looks like it will suffice for more than a decade.
- W. Gates, 2002
Maybe you should put it in the bank for fourteen years, to quell the cries of nit pickers everywhere.
Thanks for Bitch-slapping Hollywood. I don't know what else to really say but I'm glad finally Companies with money are starting to get tough, and we need more of it or one day I'm going to wake up and everything in my house is branded, regulated and monitored by the the MPAA/RIAA..
..There's a-dooin's a-transpirin'
"Ten years from now, they could do it in a few seconds." -- The Racketeer of the Hellfire Club, 1993, Phrack 42
So did we /. the pump-n-dump site already or was the information taken down as a legal precaution? I'm getting a 404.
Shame on Slashdot for beginning to use popup ads (via DoubleClick)!!! I suppose Slashdot contributors (aka customers) are "wrong."
Exercise for the reader: Reconcile a commitment to "open source" (and the enriched democracy/freedom entailed with this) with foisting a popup ad on a user by launching a separate instance of the user's browser without the user's consent (which will almost always never exist).
Note: I was actually considering subscribing to Slashdot before the popups started. Now, I am backing away from that, and probably burning up Karma to boot. Does Slashdot understand the "Consumers vs. MPAA/RIAA/Eisner" fight now?
Steve Magruder, Metro Foodist
Rice has consented to the entry of an order that would enjoin him from future violations of the foregoing provisions
Could someone explain...it appears that Rice has agreed not to break the laws he already broke?! Damn... "I promise not to rape, pillage and plunder any more!"
It looks like a panty-waist settlement. Does anyone know the punitive damages etc the FTC is asking for? This looks like a PR move, but no real action.
Cheers
Update: 03/05 00:19 GMT by T : "Pioneer," not "Voyager." Asleep at the keyboard.
Asleep? Sure... I know the truth.
The more Slashdot I read, the greater my suspicion that its trollish inhabitants furiously post only to attempt to beat back the undead editors.
Am I alone in thinking that? The truth is still out there, isn't it?
We, the people, need a charismatic, high-profile champion with no stake other than the public interest. Who will take up the mantle?
Yes, Dan Gillmor is absolutely right, we need a champion for individual rights. Someone who can make a case for the public domain that doesn't devolve into an argument about which company can make more money.
Intel isn't going to do it, because Intel is interested only in Intel's profits.
Someone needs to say things like:
- Copyright is not an absolute right, it is a compromise. There can be, and there is such a thing as "too much copyright"
- There is such a thing as public domain.
- All inventions and writings should end up in the public domain, because that's where they came from.
- Dead people's works don't need copyright protection.
- Individuals copy because they want to. A government interested in "freedom" should find a way to ensure people can do what they want. A corporation interested in "capitalism" should find a way to profit from the things people want to do.
- America is about Opportunity, not Guarantee (I believe Lincoln said words to that effect). If your business model doesn't work, find another one.
and so forth. Normally, the Government is supposed to represent the People. Unfortunately, the Government has been priced out of reach of the People.We have a moratorium on internet taxes.. why didn't we have a moratorium on internet copyrights until things got sorted out?
So indeed, who will pick up the mantle?
The only person I know of who makes a moral argument for this is RMS, but unfortunately he doesn't quite fit the description "charismatic"....
While I don't know if BG actually made the 640K quote or not, the history that he provides (i.e., we really wanted to do things right, but the evil hardware people wouldn't let us) is self-serving and not exactly correct.
The Motorolla 68000 did have a 32-bit design, but it only had 24-bit addressing when it came out, which was the same as Intel was attempting to provide with the 80286.
However, it was impossible to use the address space of the 286 because it required the chip to go into protected mode, and MS-DOS made assumptions that made this impossible. While DOS 1.0 certainly couldn't have predicted this, MS had early access to the 286 specs, but they never made the appropriate changes. Digital Research did, with Concurrent CPM-86, but by that time, the MS-DOS juggernaught had pretty much rolled over everyone else.
I'd trust Gates about as far as I could throw a Buick.
Anyone remember words to this effect?
"Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft Corp. a fiercely competitive company(...)" - Microsoft Encarta, 1996
"Bill Gates, CEO of Microsoft is a contributor to several charitable causes, including...(...)" Microsoft Encarta 2000
Bowie J. Poag
The way I see it, if all kinds of near-3rd-world countries around the world can develop the technology required for a nuclear bomb despite all kinds of oversight, then it ought not be too difficult for Americans to make computers that thwart the **AA lobby.
:P
We already have the software technology to rip/encode audio and video without copy-protection strings. When it comes down to it, for copy-protection efforts to stick, congress would literally have to pass a law that says - "ALL HARD DRIVES MUST HAVE UNBREAKABLE COPY PROTECTION BUILT IN AT THE CONTROLLER'S MICROCODE LEVEL". Anything less than that is pretty much circumventable without too much effort, and it's actually questionable how effective that type of measure would be in the first place.
The lesson to all this being, of course, that the RIAA/MPAA should just quit their whining because there's nothing they can do about it anyway
-JT
The Canadian Copyright Board has announced the details of the public hearings on Canadian Digital Copyrights...
What? Aren't the DMCA, UCITA, and SSSCA good enough for them?
Why some backwater state in the USA would need their own special laws on this is totally beyond me...
(Before you flame, yes, I know.)
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
Suddenly, 64 bits is no longer adequate..
char *sz = (char*) malloc(18446744073709551616);
cpeterso
Update: 03/05 00:19 GMT by T: "Pioneer," not "Voyager." Asleep at the keyboard.
And I'm expected to pay for this?
7.42 billion miles, a little over 22 light hours away. Lesseee, divide by 22, times 2, divide by 27380 mph, divide by 24 hours/day: so in 1026 days, or about 3 years, it will cross the 1 light day boundary...
Larry Lasher mentioned in the message:
The spacecraft is extremely cold, with many of the temperature readings at the bottom of their scales.
It would be interesting to see the actual temperature readings from Pioneer. Considering the location of the satellite relative to any decent heat sources, I would imagine that the temps would be approaching 0 K. Anyone seen the numbers reported anywhere?
Its all fine and dandy to deny something after the fact, but is he claiming he sent this email out before anyone at Microsoft had ever heard of the internet (long after 640K became a problem)
I don't think Bill's saying, "I never said that." I think that what he's saying is, "That was taken out of context." Perhaps what Bill G. said was, "640k should be enough for anyone ... for now." Which is pretty much what I always figured had happened.
Disclaimer: I think Microsoft sucks donkey balls, and the sooner they stop being a monopoly, the sooner the world will be a much better place.
It's nice to be reassured, directly by Bill Gates, that he didn't say something eminently plausible, and which fits the view of the world he enforced in his OS "design", but which would now make him look bad. It would be a different matter if he or his company had a regular history of blatantly false claims, ranging from claiming to have invented symlinks to claiming that IE could not be removed from a Windows system.
Why was this bullshit even *mentioned*? Surely, slashdot has enough unsubstantiated rumors already, and doesn't need to give credence to obvious crap.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
You all HAVE to read this. Seriously. This is a good bit of nice dry tech specs on the Pioneer 10.
Personally, this is a very good read. I found this bit especially interesting:
The processor is completely redundant with the exception of the interface circuits. Upon command from the spacecraft, the signal processor can be switched from the main logic system to a standby redundant logic system. The function of the processor is to sequentially accumulate data on a frame basis from the seven detectors. Data are accumulated in a 24 bit register and then compressed quasi-logarithmically to 12 bits for transmission.
As the other artices say, that baby is getting quite cold. There's a year by year printout of it's tmperature on that page too.
Anyway, I just thougt I'd point this out for those interested in a little more "dry" facts on the thing other than the hoopla of it talking back (which is a feat, don't get me wrong).
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
Guess it's easier to type "Voyager" than "Pioneer" when you've got you've got your left thumb stuck up your butt...
votahewr
voryager
vottager
pioneer
ppioneer
ioneer
I did a lot better with pioneer. And my left hand stinks now. Thanks a lot.
PUBLIC SPLIT ON WHETHER BUSH IS A DIVIDER -CNN scrolling banner, 10/15/2004
Yuk yuk yuk yuk
Holy crap!
I was working in the compiler group at Microsoft in the early '80s, so I remember some of the historical context.
:-))
I recall suggesting to my boss (who reported to Bill back then) that Apple made a mistake by choosing 128K as the initial memory size for the Mac. My argument was that they'd need 256K to eliminate code swapping in the apps that were under development. The next-generation memory chips would make 1MB machines affordable, and I thought that would be enough for the foreseeable future. (I'm not claiming I was a visionary, either.
My boss replied that the consensus opinion at Microsoft was that no one would ever buy machines with a megabyte of memory. Even if it were affordable, just consider how long it would take to clear it! An app would never really *use* that much memory on a PC; it would just be too slow.
(CPU speeds and memory speeds were not only much lower than they are today, they tended to be more closely coupled. Datapaths were much narrower. And Moore's Law wasn't widely understood outside a relatively small group of hardware-savvy folks.)
So Bill may have been fully prescient, and busy paving the way for large-memory machines. But that definitely wasn't the general belief at Microsoft around 1983. If he really did understand things as well as he says, he didn't manage to communicate it successfully even to his direct reports in engineering.
In any case, people generally aren't saying that Microsoft was responsible for the 640k limit. What Microsoft really is responsible for is delivering MS-DOS and Windows 3.x. If Gates did that despite knowing better, deliberately condemning the industry to more than a decade of blue screens and flaky software, that would be much worse. So, which is it: was Gates merely ignorant or callously opportunistic back then?
Excuse me but Intel is not the first major company to think the MPAA ans RIAA were living in wacko land. Phillips who makes cdr/w drives, and a large percentage of all CD media has been against all this crap for years Intel is getting into this a bit late in the game. With all the lobbying and economic power the entertainment industry has been harvesting the past few years even intel and its venerable army of lobbyists is insignificant in the grand scheme of things. Frankly I think sooner or later their will simply be to much bandwith, to many software hacks, and too many people (all of China) online for the RIAA to have much of a say. They should seriously learn a lesson from the whole VCR debacle and stop making a hissy fit over what amounts to insignicant piracy. At $18 + (THOSE TAXES ADDED ON JUST TO COUNTER PIRACY) a cd I think the POSSIBLE lost revenue that they MIGHT be loosing pales in comparison to the number of people they are pissing off with their monopolistic practices. There are what, a million Slashdot readers alone? I know that I haven't bought a CD in the past year not because Im busy pirating music over my 56K, but because the new Music sucks, prices are ridiculous, the RIAA has seriously pissed me off thanks to the DMCA, and did I mention the music today really SUCKS.
Quality control is more important in the SERVICE industry than anything else. Until they have congress pass a law forcing NSYNC to move to Afganistan the music industry will continue to experienve lower revenues. Seriously name one EXCELLENT group or even album released in the last year. There aren't any!
1) MS is based on upgrade software where more machine resources is required to run each subsequent version of the same software.
...
.. he is a liar and the father of lies." NIV
2) BG is the Anti-Christ, as such he is master of space and time (and other amusing parlor tricks)
3) BG knew for a fact the 640K would not last long, it fact it would be impede the upgrade treadmill for a number of years.
Thus, BG would never have said it. However, I wonder about
4) John 8:44 "for the devil
I could be wrong.
I can make a good case for 192 bit addressing.
64 bits local memory address plus
128 bits of IPv6 address.
So you could have a pointer to memory location X on IP address Y. Distributed memory access over a network.
256 bits might make more sense, then both parts would be equal (128 bits).
Just because it CAN be done, doesn't mean it should!
They readily admit they're just speaking out because they have a monetary stake in what happens. People on here seem to think that Intel is championing the consumer. Just like Hollywood, their only concern is their bottom line, not fair use or intellectual freedom. Why should they be given so much credit for just keeping their own interests at heart?
The ominous hints at cooperation between the Hollywood and the tech industry will end with consumers of digital media getting screwed over in the end.
Not really that cold. But then if you consider that it has a pretty hot on board heat source (i.e. reactor), and the ONLY means for dissippating it is black body radiation (yup, its a hard vaccuum)... This means its pretty dark (i.e. cold, since its a vaccuum, the only external heat source would be incident radiation).
;)
So, ya, its cold out in deep space
You guys are such easy sluts...I mean letting me have my homosexual ways with you. Fucking faggots!
If you people want my money, you'll at least have to start running a spell checker on your editorial content. Your overall quality is semi-pro at best, which probably makes you guys the highest paid editors of that class in the world. But spelling is easy to check. It can be done mechanically. There's no excuse for screwing it up.
It's "bowdlerize", not "bowlderize". Sheesh!
Yeah, like you really dodged the bullet and avoided that hack -- NOT! Bank switching was what LIM EMS memory (LIM standing for Lotus, Intel, and Microsoft) was all about. Because you never ported MSDOS to the 80286 or 80386, we developers had to resort to hacks like EMS to fit our bloated code (ok, that part is my fault) into the address space.
If Microsoft had kept up with the hardware technology, maybe I wouldn't have torn out so much hair in the 80s, and maybe I wouldn't hate them as much today....
... nah, I'd still hate 'em, because once better OSes started to show up for the 386 (e.g. OS/2 version 2) and people finally started saying adios to DOS, Microsoft couldn't stand the thought of it, so they started pushing Windows down everyone's throats, using dirty techniques such as preloads, per processor licensing, etc.
It's the same pattern that MS used with the Internet and the same that we'll see again with whatever comes next. Microsoft has always been about denying technology, and then when everyone gets fed up with their backwoods Amish luddite mentality and start to leave them, MS does something underhanded (usually involving a monopoly leverage) to lock people in again... only to let their followers/victims rot again while visionless Microsoft grows fat and complacent. Over'n'over because sheep are too stupid to learn. But some of us remember.
Damn, where did that pointless rant come from? Oh yeah, Gates quote reminded me of when I saw them kill the personal computer revolution. Funny how that always gets my dander up.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
All these addresses means position 0x10000 of phisical memory.
I think the problem was not the 640 barrier or the segmented address space. The problem was that DOS makes almost imposble to get an abstract view of the hardware. You have to use absolute addresses to access the video screen, or to read command line parameters, or to write to serial ports in a eficient way.
Also there were no standar C library functions for doing this things. So, all programs source code were linked to the hardware forever.
Minix is an example of an OS which ran on 8086 but programs could easily be recompiled for different hardware and programs automagically gain access to more memory, or memory protection.
MOD THE CHILD UP!
Gates didn't design the hardware.
The original PC came with a choice of 3 operating systems, CPM/86, Windoze (a cheap knockoff of CPM) and UCSD P system. It was _not_ 'designed' to Microsofts specs.
The software designers were (as usual) not consulted, and had to work with what they were given.
I work with embedded systems, and those mistakes keep getting made. Hardware designers design minimum-cost boards, without consulting the softies at all. We're presented with a finished board, and told to put s/w on it. I've seen hundreds of man-hours wasted on working around design decisions that saved 5 cents a board, and we typically ship in quantities of 100-200 boards per project.
The solution, of course, is to have a prolonged session with the hardware designers and a large bit of 4 by 2, but management doesn't see it that way.
Quidquid Latine dictum sit, altum videtur (anything said in Latin sounds important)
Perhaps because he gave away quite a bit of money to charitable causes during that time?
(Encarta 2000 was, after all, put out just around the time they were forming the "Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation" - I'm sure charity was on their mind at that time.)
I mean, I don't admire the guy particularly and I don't use his company's products, but slamming the guy for updating his bio (after 4 years) seems a bit silly.
-- My Weblog.
The Gates email, says "My first address space was the PDP-8. That was a 12-bit address space!"
Well, not really. The PDP-8 word was 12 bits long and had three, count them THREE bits for the instruction part, leaving nine for the address part. Only SEVEN were available for the address itself. One bit selected whether that address was in page 0 (the bottom page of memory) or the current page (the same page the instruction itself was in). Another selected direct or indirect addressing. In indirect addressing, the indirect address could indeed be a full 12 bits.
There were no index registers. However, certain addresses--I believe addresses 8 through 15 in page 0--were "autoincrement" addresses that got bumped by one every time you accessed them, so you had an effective *ptr++ although no *ptr--.
The instruction set and development tools were fairly sweetly designed and all of this worked well enough that for the most part it DID feel as if you were in a 12 bit address space. (There was, of course, an agonizingly awful bank-switching scheme that expanded it to 15 bits later on).
The funny part was that despite the initial feeling of power you got on a PDP-11, the PDP-11 wasn't really all that much easier to program in assembly language than the PDP-8. And many people believe the PDP-8 was the most core-efficient instruction set ever designed. Generally speaking, equivalent programs written in PDP-8 and PDP-11 assembly language used roughly the SAME numbers of instructions--but a PDP-8 instruction used 12 bits, while an average PDP-11 instruction tended to use nearly 16-bit words.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Hmm. I have a Tandy 2000 in my closet, which is an 80186-based machine. (Yes, 80186, not 80286.) MS-DOS was initially being pushed as a CP/M-like system, tied to CPUs but not specific hardware, and Radio Shack built the Model 2000 as an MS-DOS machine that wasn't PC-compatible. And you know what? It could address more than 640K of memory.
"Protected mode" has to do with whether the machine's memory can be addressed all in one contiguous space or has to be addressed in segments. MS-DOS was written with the assumption it had to be addressed in segments... but it could still address all the memory the CPU could address in that fashion. The 640K limit came from the way the IBM PC mapped video memory. The Tandy 2000 mapped its video memory to the top of the machine's physical RAM--however much it happened to have, up to the 1M limit the 80186 was able to address.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"2^64 Bytes should be all we ever need"
Bill Gates, 2002
As I am a South Carolina resident, I'm about to ship off a letter to Fritz Hollings. Please critique it and feel free to suggest ways to improve it before it goes. I wonder if complaining about the draft of the SSSCA at this point is worthwhile since they seem to ignore its existence. I also wonder if I'm going overboard by insinuating he's acting in the interests of his contributors and not citizens. It seems fair to me, but I want my arguments to look reasonable and not have my letter ignored.
The Honorable Ernest F. Hollings
United States Senate
Washington, DC 20510
Dear Mr. Hollings,
I am a professional software developer and a constituent in your state. I've recently become concerned with your proposed bill, the Security Systems Standards and Certification Act (SSSCA). I am against such a bill, and I'll explain why below.
No Public Participation / No Regard for Fair Use: In Section 104(b)(1)(A), the proposed bill describes the security standard as being determined by "representatives of interactive digital device manufacturers and representatives of copyright owners." In effect, you are permitting corporations to determine the scope of this law, with no input from the public who will be using such devices. The public's fair-use rights have been slowly whittled away by recent laws. The SSSCA will continue this disappointing trend of protecting the profits of media companies at the expense of the consumer.
Open Source Software: There is an entire industry of software manufacturers and support organizations that write software that is freely available. This software is installed on millions of computers around the world, including servers that run the Internet. Software engineers like myself earn a living supporting this software. Open source software contains software code that is freely published. Your draft bill could, in effect, make this type of software illegal, since developers would be unable to "hide" security software in open code.
Digital Devices: There are any number of digital devices that have no need for these protection schemes. My scientific calculator is a "digital device." So is my Global Positioning System unit. They have absolutely no need for built-in protection systems. Your bill would place an undue burden on digital hardware manufacturers to protect things that don't need it. This will result in less hardware being produced, and increased development expenses which will be passed on to consumers.
Copyright protection can be maintained with state-of-the-art technology. Your bill will encourage companies to create mediocre protection schemes backed by the threat of prosecution. Piracy will continue unabated in foreign countries.
I am not sure exactly how you think you are benefiting South Carolina with this bill. My reading of the proposal is that it will only benefit the large corporations in this country, especially the media conglomerates. Please don't act solely in the interest of your high-dollar contributors.
I believe you are doing a disservice to South Carolinians and Americans by proposing this bill, and I urge you to do away with it.
One month should be enough for anyone.
Okay, that was flamebait. =)
Is anyone able to access the CCRB site? I get a blank page...
(I hope that's not a really bad sign of just how restrictive our copyrights are going to become!)
--
Don't like it? Respond with words, not karma.
Look, guys, I know that most people named "Gilmore" spell it that way but you reference Dan's tech writing often enough here that you ought to know how to spell his name by now. Set your autocorrector to change "Gilmore" to "Gillmor" and you'll come out way ahead of the game, at least here on /.
Learn to spell: nickel, missile, lose, solely, amendment, speech, kernel, probably, ridiculous, deity, hierarchy, versus
It's full of stars!
Computers don't copy content, people do :)
Below is the Date/Site & Contact info for the Dept.of Ind & Cdn Heritage hearings -- please, if you life in any of these cities GOTO these hearings. If not to present/speak, at least to applaud && boo at the appropriate times.
This is the final step before Canada gets its very own DMCA.... What fun that will be.
Halifax, Nova Scotia - Friday, March 8, 2002
Citadel Halifax Hotel
(902) 422-1391
Vancouver, British Columbia - Friday, March 15, 2002
Sheraton Vancouver Wall Centre Hotel
(604) 893-7257
Montreal, Quebec - Thursday, March 21, 2002
Holiday Inn Montreal-Midtown
(514) 842-6111
Toronto, Ontario - Tuesday, March 26, 2002
Holiday Inn On King
(416) 599-4000
Ottawa, Ontario - Thursday, April 11, 2002
Government Conference Centre
(613) 990-6700
Keyboards ? Screen displays ? 2K RAM ? I had some Little bit of circuit board that my Dad built ! It had a tiny scummy led digit display ! It had 256 bytes of RAM ! It played a pivotal role in driving me INSANE ! AND LOTS OF LITTLE FSCKING TINY SWITCHES TO ACTUALLY PROGRAM THE FSCKER! This would all have been ok if it was ages and ages ago. But this was when the kids at school started getting them. And they had Keyboards ! And TV out ! But 'COS MY DAD BUILT it we couldn't complain ! IT HAS BLIGHTED MY LIFE ! You Lucky,Lucky ...
From the letter puportedly by Bill Gates:
The answer is that in that 1M of address space we had to accommodate RAM [random access memory], ROM [read-only memory], and I/O addresses [Input/Output addresses used for "peripherals" like keyboards, disk drives, and hard drives],
BZZT! As I recall, Intel doesn't use memory-mapped I/O. The I/O address space and the memory address space are separate.
Also, even if Billy could get the technical points right, should we trust what he says? Past history shows him to be very veracity-challenged.
"that's not encryption - it's a new perl script that I'm working on..." - from some Matrix parody
Bill Gates is also quoted as saying, "We believe that OS/2 is the platform for the 90's." Now this is on video clips around the web, so go find one and prove it to yourself.
Bill will tell you anything to sell his software. Use your head, don't listen to Bill.
Ouch! The truth hurts!
Glad it works now, but in a couple hundred years Klingons will blow it up for target practice. See "Star Trek V: the Final Frontier".
'nough said :)
There comes a time in every man's life when he must say, "No mother! I do not want any more Jell-O!"
Flame me if I'm completely utterly obliviously wrong, but back in the very early DOS days the hardware limit was a non-issue - trying to "get around" those hardware limitations came much later; himem.sys and the gang were basically a kludge. Backward compatibility being all the rage at the time.
DOS was written in a non-scalable fashion, thusly necessitating the use of high memory managers to fool appz written for the 640 limit.
Did Gates even write DOS? I seem to recall otherwise..
--you have been trolled--
Absolutely. Richest man in the world, but just look at the hair.
"Check out the bowl-job, Marge!" --Homer
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
It was from a company in Ithica called
Ironics. 512K ram, a 10MHZ 68010, a 40MB
hard drive and SysVR2. You could have about
2 people doing something at any one time, but
it was Unix, (real Unix, no f***ing near/far
pointers (brain scars still there) like the 80286
abortion that replaced it) and it was mine,
-- at least after the project (embedded controller
for an Ion Implanter) was done and I traded some
documentation for the old development box.
Lots of fun writing the C so the '010 went into
"loop mode" and ran real fast.
The HD died about 6 years ago and it got a
"Sky Burial" out behind our last apartment
(we're homeowners now) in DC.
Sniff.
-- pld fogey ac at home
[1] well, except for the turbo button
...whatever happened to it, anyway? My last computer that had one was a 486/66. It was actually useful for slowing things down...
In five years the cost of computation will really be effectively decreased. We'll be able to put on somebody's desk, for an incredibly low cost, a processor with far more capability than you could ever take advantage of. Hardware in effect will become a lot less interesting. The total job will be in the software, and we'll be able to write big fat programs. We can let them run somewhat inefficiently because there will be so much horsepower that just sits there.
This makes is unlikely he ever thought 640K would be enough...but he also said, in the same interview (p. 18-19):
16-bits is extremely important, and it is not because of speed...the main reason for the 16-bit micro being advantageous is its increased address space...The logical address space limit...is for all practical purposes gone away. The chip is designed to address a megabyte."
So he did seem to indicate that one megabyte address space was basically limitless.
- adam
In case you haven't heard, Fritz Hollings is opposed to "cash-and-carry" government. What are you worried about? This has to be in your interest, otherwise, he wouldn't be bringing it up.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
What is important to note here is that the department feels that anti-circumvention may already be covered by copyright law and that restricting devices to circumvent protection is too broad. If you read the original paper (http://strategis.ic.gc.ca/SSG/rp01099e.html) the tone is very much in favour of making these laws so that they strike a balance between the public and rights holders (i.e., those who provide content).
Of course, this is not the final law and there is much to be addressed. However, the outlook, in my opinion, is good. There is no way the reform, as discussed on the department's site (so far) is indicative of DMCA-ish measures. People should keep this in mind before shooting their mouths off about Canadian copyright reform (of course, this is
This does not mean, however, that those interested in truely keeping the balance of copyright in a sane manner can just be apathetic. My comments are registered on the department's site and I'm probably going to one of the meetings (either in Toronto or Ottawa).
Woz
Yes, yes, we've known for years that Gates didn't *really* say that 640K was enough for anyone. And they want us to *pay* for this kind of shoddy background work?
(* The good news is, they're still operating well! Voyager 2 is unfortuantely running low on propellant, though. *)
Does it need propellant to point its antenna toward Earth? If not, then why would it make any difference? It is cruzing on momentum alone, and there is nothing known to bump into out there.
Table-ized A.I.
What's up? Are you okay? Don't work so hard!
OK, that's not quite a legitimate question. Bill is and always has been a geek on his good days. (and a nerd on his bad days, and a sleazball on the other 90% of the days)
However, his version of events doesn't correspond with anyone else's, or with recorded history. In other words, Bill Gates is a liar.
Now let's quit quoting him and saying, "oh hey--we were wrong all these decades."
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I'll be there, with bells on and a pointy hat. Those gov't dickwads need to be told whassup in no uncertain terms, else they'll make us into a Yankee vassal..
--you have been trolled--
Guys, I can't believe no one has yet posted the true reason why the 640K limit was a problem. Well, I'll explain it.
The IBM PC BIOS was designed to abstract the hardware. These days Linux or Windows do that for us, but in those days the BIOS was what you had. Your DOS programs were never supposed to talk to the hardware, they were supposed to go through the BIOS.
The problem was that the BIOS sucked. Want to draw a character on the screen? Fine; there is a BIOS call for that. (BIOS calls were called "interrupts" because you used an interrupt to call them, but I'll just call them "BIOS calls".) Want to draw a whole string of characters on the screen? You would think there would be a BIOS call for that too, right? But there wasn't. You would have to do one interrupt per character, and poke your string onto the screen one character at a time! And interrupts were really expensive; remember that we are talking a 4.7 MHz chip with slo-o-o-o-w memory.
And suppose you wanted to read the keyboard? Not a problem; there was a BIOS call for that. Of course, it had a few limitations: it could only recognize a little more than 500 distinct keypresses. If your app wanted to recognize Alt+F1, no problem, that was one of the recognized keys. But if you wanted to recognize Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F1, too bad. The obvious and correct way to read the keyboard is to return the scan code for which key was pressed, coupled with a chord of which shift keys were down (e.g. Ctrl and Alt were down, shift wasn't, or whatever). With two bytes of data, you could handle any combination of Alt+Shift+Ctrl+whatever. But the BIOS didn't do it that way.
There are other examples, but I think those two are enough. Given this broken a BIOS, the application writers all decided to go around the BIOS and talk directly to the hardware. Get the address of the keyboard controller, find out what keys the user hit, and support any combination of keys you want. Get the address of the video card's character buffer, and use MOVS to blast a string into it with zero overhead. Now your copy of Microsoft Word 1.0 runs much faster than if it used the BIOS.
Guess what address the video card was at? That's right, 640K. By the time people began seriously hurting for more address space, there was way too much software out there writing directly into the character buffer of the video card, so it was now too late to move the buffer somewhere else. The 640K limit was set in stone.
Even if everyone had used the BIOS, there would have still been a 1024K limit, since that's all you could address on an 8088. But that would have been much better, and it would have been much easier to write environments like DesqView. (You could have done something like DesqView on an 8088 if it only had to run well-behaved apps, i.e. apps that never went to the hardware but always went through the BIOS.)
P.S. Slightly offtopic, but I have fond memories of using a multitasking environment called OmniView. It did much the same thing as DesqView, except that it didn't try to do the overlapping windows thing with the apps; it ran your apps full-screen. You could use function key combos to switch your full screen among app sessions, almost exactly like using Ctrl+Alt+Fn in Linux to switch full-screen among virtual ttys. DesqView got the fame and fortune, but OmniView was a little bit more efficient and I got some real work done using it on my 33 MHz 386 system. I used to run compiles in parallel: one compile would cause the disk to load the source, and the other compiles that used the same source file would find the data already buffered. I could finish four compiles in only a little more time than a single compile took on its own; the compiles were fairly disk-bound.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Admit it: you just made that story up so you could add in the tagline, didnt'cha?
Accessing memory over a network?! What in the hell?! Already memory latency is one of the largest bottlenecks in computers today (hence the reason for L1, L2 and in some cases even L3 caches on chips), and there we're talking about access times in the hundreds of nanoseconds! You're suggesting that we access network memory that would have approximately a million times worse latency?! (and that's assuming good ping-times :> )
Directly accessing memory over a network is just plain dumb. It may make sense to distribute data over networks in some situations, but that in no way requires or would benefit from being able to directly address memory in hardware. Even if for some bizzare reason you DID want to have direct memory access over networks, this would severly limit interoperability of systems! This sort of thing belongs entirely in the realm of software.
I know i risk taking yet more damage on this but what they hell.
/. is pointless, instead how about some intelligent comment on what they do wrong and what they do right - they must have done some things well, or are well all denying that they have done one thing for it?
/. and open source is doomed - inflexibility and an unwillingness to compromise or discuss issues is what has put Microsoft in the poisition they are in and yet day in and day out slashdot proves its not isolated to closed source.
Can someone explain how the hell my comment is flamebait?
I was aware that posting a non abusive microsft comment might be seen as slightly controversial but can you actually deny ANYTHING in the comment as incorrect ?
The meaningless microsoft is evil bashing on
I dont mind being modded down but i dislike immensely the flamebait tag - it shows that the moderator simply takes personal dislike to the post and marks it as such not on the merits. I moderate too and try to always be honest and on occasion i have also posted a comment to explain why i moderate down. Perhaps we need to attach a user name to moderations to stop this stuff ?
If you want to attack anything that does not toe the party line line then
do you all seriously think Microsoft are going to go away and die?
What the government will shut down a multi billion dollar company and plunge the industry into collapse in the process ?
Youre still going to have to put up with MS and they will still make and sell OS products, even if split up, bashing anything to do with them is a negative waste of time - if you can do something better do it, the world is your oyster and open source has so many wonderful reasons to succeed, but bitching and whining about MS wont make linux the worlds premiere operaiting system, it wont fix the numerous issues that prevent it being the desktop choice for everyman, it wont bring a unified face to kernel development or drivers, it wont convince companies to switch, all it will do is make the open source movement as a whole look petty and childish and thats not what we are at all.
I have used and supported open source for a long time, i started my career on HP UX and have never forgotten it and up until recently i ran a number of linux servers and desktops at home and work -i stopped because i couldnt take the lack of support and drivers, the endless make and configures and patches and work arounds and lack of documentation and a million other little things, i stopped because so many of you would rather attack anyone with a rational opinion as a flamebaiter or troll.
The sad thing is that so many people in the world get their opinions on what open source is about from sites like slashdot, god knows what they think.
Oh for the days when open source meant open minded as well.
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
You mean DOS, not Windows.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
Well, in any case, I'm probably not as knowledgeable as many of the respondents who felt your case needed stronger opposition... but I still think it might be viable.
Large scale SMP computers like the Origin 3000 series can be "partitioned" into multiple system images, so that they act as multiple independant computers. Inversely, multiple discrete machines can be linked with their low latency high thoroughput "Numa-link"(sp) cables so that they can be clustered into one system image.
Now while the current Internet is hardly up to spec for such a system, wouldn't having a large scale distributed machine cluster behaving as a single system image require a single large addressable space for memory? Please excuse the run-on, but wouldn't this be a requirement for a large scale vertical cluster (as opposed to a horizontal, discrete component beowolf-style cluster?)
I value clueful response over clueful moderation.
I value ignorant ignorance over ignorant moderation.
The pen is mightier than the sword.
That is, if the pen is used in a way to gather massive public support.
Similarly, the microphone is mightier than the handgun.
Again, the microphone at least provides the option of being less obnoxious than the handgun. Distributed systems have a far greater potential power, if harnessed effectively, than the isolated device. While higher tech may allow the isolated device disproportionately more power, it also provides greater potential for communication. The freedom fighter is more powerful than the terrorist.
The salient issue is this : Which is mightier, the Dollar or the microphone?
Unfortunately that question is more convoluted than it seems.
-castlan
I would have modded this up, q-soe, because it's pretty rich content-wise, but the spelling and grammar errors were just too much. Seriously, run this through a spellchecker and, if you have one, a grammar checker. The resulting content will be much easier to parse, and far more likely to be modded up.
Good point - my spelling and grammar tend to suck lately - too many years working in abbreviated speak i suspect - pretty lousy for someone who started out as a journalist !
I refuse to argue with Anonymous Cowards - if you want a discussion get an account....
He falls short of saying he invented Moore's law here, but by not crediting Moore it makes his later Intel bashing sound more plausible.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
It sounds almost like it could be a dirty-movie spin-off of the original Star Trek movie (Which was on HBO tonight, incidentlly).
Except this improved version would have an important change. In the original, 7th Heaven's Pastor Camden got to "interface" with the bald "V-ger probe" chick. Now imagine the possibilities of a successor movie, with Pastor Camden's oldest daughter Mary and the "p-neer probe"...
...and instead of Leonard Nimoy, Jolene Blalock - "Your interpretation of 'probe' is most illogical. No, you misunderstand, the mind meld requires my hand on your face, not..."
***ack***
"Status report."
"Captain, the poster has suffered neurological damage. Almost as if his head were about to explode!"
Uhh... Gates, William?
Guess I'm shooting for some of your negativekarma,now.
I really do deserve the wrath of a moderator for this one. Sock it to me!
Now that is what I would call a core dump!
This is what Bill Gates need : Don't blame me...
NASA omitted one very important little line from the plaque onboard Pioneers.
Alien A: OK. So now we know who they are, where they live, and how big they are.
Alien B: Umm...but where do babies come from?
All Rights Reversed.
Neo-Liberalism == Yankee Imperialism.
well, maybe voyager is fine but the earth is moving around the sun hence voyager needs to reposition it's antenna
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
...I suppose there could be confusion about this. While yes, it does need to aim at the earth by some means. I'm sure most people would assume it uses electric gyroscopes for this type of adjustment like many near earth satelites/probes do but this isn't the case for deep space probes, especially older ones. Even electricity is a rare comodity out past saturn. The solar cells pick up enough light to power the CPU and transmitions. It turns out, it is more efficient to send a deep space probe packing with compressed gas to do these minor adjustments.
--Let's hack root on 127.0.0.1 --panZ
I'm not saying its gotta happen tomorrow (nor am I saying I'd gripe if it did), but that is the ENTIRE point of the 2nd amendment. It has nothing to do with protecting ourselves from foreign invasion or hunting, its overthrow the government when it grows too far out of touch with the people.
I like lots of people. That doesn't mean I go carting them around the galaxy with me. --Dr. Who
*sigh*
It was the *hardware* design that put the bios et. al. up there at 640K. Ms har *NOTHING* to do with that decision. Blame IBM if you want to blame someone.
DOS was able to address the full 1Mb
if (!signature) { throw std::runtime_error("No sig!"); }
LOL !!!
Roofle!!!
A/S/L ???
THNKS
BrB
Cu l8r
-Linux is SO fast it does an infinite loop in 5 seconds.
"In three or four years the industry will have moved over to 64-bit architecture, and it looks like it will suffice for more than a decade."
Honestly, back then I realized that we should have skipped 64-bit architecture, and moved right to 128-bit, but nobody would listen to me. It was that me-damned Open Source movement, they were out to get me. Can you spare some change? Ahhhhhh! Penguins! Penguins everywhere!!!!
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
As a follow-up to yesterday's story, Linux was successfully contacted for its 30th birthday, as announced in sad.fucker.news. The commands that were sent yesterday have been executed by the kernel, and more data has been damaged by the shitty extfs2 file system." a sad bastard who chokes his chicken adds a link to Associated Press wire story on Yahoo!', writing "Not bad for a 30 year-old piece of shit. Perhaps those greasy fucking gnu hippies could learn something from this?"
update comments set karma=-1, reason='offtopic' where sid=26315
Actually, even MS was working on a protected mode version of MS-DOS in time for the PC/AT series of machines. According to Gordon Letwing's Inside OS/2, the development project that later resulted in OS/2 1.0 started as a protected mode DOS [confusingly code numbered DOS 3 & DOS 4 internally before being renamed to OS/2]. There are artifacts from this development process that migrated to the commercal release versions of DOS 4 and later versions [alternate entry points for DOS api's].
;-) ]
The principal problem was total incompatability with real mode programs, until the real mode compatible 'penalty box' was devised for betas of OS/2 1.0 . OS/2 1.0 would not have been too bad - had it shipped along with early PC/AT's.
[I still have a Microsoft OS/2 2.0 "Seeing is Believing" T Shirt around somewhere
The Motorolla 68000 did have a 32-bit design, but it only had 24-bit addressing when it came out
:) days, people would use the high byte of a 32-bit address for other things because the bits were ignored. That was ok, until the 68020 came out. Old Mac fans may remember the "32-bit clean" debacle.
And back in those memory-starved
The clearance system sounds logical. It is not. It is completely arbitrary. -- John Bolton
Much worse than th 1Meg barrier was the fact that IBM stuck the video memory right about in the middle, leaving 640K below, and perhaps 200K above. This was unbelievabley stupid. They could have at least mapped it at one end. Better yet a switch to turn the mapping on/off, which would also have prevented the huge number of direct-mapping programs that frozer hardware design for years.
The high memory managers were written by Lotus, I think. They were pretty awful and relied on copying small blocks from higher addresses by changing the segment overlap and writing them into the "hole" above the video memory and below 1Meg.
most likely it crashes from time to time. embedded devices that must be robust usually have watchdog timers in them that reboot when lock up occurs.
(* Even electricity is a rare comodity out past saturn. The solar cells pick up enough light to power the CPU and transmitions. *)
None of the probes past Mars have ever used solar panels as a significant power source. The Pioneers and Voyagers are nuclear-powered I believe. Thus, they don't "use it up" like batteries or propellant. It just slowly fades due to the ol' half-life of radiation and you have to turn off more and more things as time goes on.
Thus, to me it makes more sense to use giros for minor pointing. Then again, we don't really know what design and cost tradeoffs they had to make.
Table-ized A.I.
Yeah, and Bill Gates probably didn't say that the internet is just a passing fad either. But only because the Book in which he wrote this has undergone some massive editing, majorly in chapters which have anything to do with communication among computers.
But bill Gates is a great businessman, he'll manage to sell that "new truth" about the 640K Limit too.
--
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks