Slashback: 640K, Pioneer, Payback

Slashback tonight with an mini-avalanche of updates and corrections on Pioneer 10 (it's not a Star Trek series), Canadian copyright hearings, Intel's stance on SSSCA and similar laws, and -- Oh Yes, whether 640K really is enough for anyone. Read on for the details. Update: 03/05 00:19 GMT by T : "Pioneer," not "Voyager." Asleep at the keyboard.

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.

Comments

My God

[Henry V .009]

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?

History

[geekoid]

Because Bill Gates would never lie.

640K?!

[Oculus Habent]

I remember when 16K was everything you could possibly want. Of course, business apps weren't really prevalent at that point. But 128K was DEFINATELY enough.

Then came PowerPoint.

Glad to have that cleared up.

[seebs]

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.

Re:Shame on Slashdot!

[smagruder]

To-MAY-toes, to-MAH-toes.

Re:Bill Gates may be a business man...

[q-soe]

I dont mean to sound funny but dig out some books and do some reading on the subject - pirates of silicon valley is a good start - read about bill gates the 13 year old working finding busgs in Digital software - finding more than anyone, read about him getting caught hacking into systems by the police, read about him writing DOS on paper having never seen a the altair it was for, read about him developing most of the early microsoft sofwtare himself.

We all simply treat this guy as evil and stupid forgetting that he was there at the birth of the PC market, his DOS was the first one for the first microcomputer and the most widely copied piece of software for it, without him it didnt exist. Maybe we should all step back and look at what he has built from that.

Im not defending microsoft in any way but i am against the microsoft is evil so everything they have ever done is wrong.

If it wasnt for them what would we have on the PC?
Would there be a GUI as sophisticated as windows (love it or hate it you can argue it drove the Mac development forward better than anything)
Would Office software have progressed to the level it has?
What about Development languages - we all throw off at VB and the like but how many programmers got started on it ?
Plug and Plag and USB - without windows where would these be (i know PnP has problems but its getting a lot better fast)?

Im simply saying that to attack a man based on what you feel he has done is to bypass the fact he was and is a geek like us.

Whatever microsoft has become (and i wont defend their undefensible business practicies) they helped give birth to the industry and the technologies we use today , we dont need to thank them for it and it doesn't excuse their actions (nothing can) but it is something worth thinking about.

PS and everyone knew the 640k statement was apocraphyl over 10 years ago - and at the time it was not the arrogant statement you all make it out to be - its easy to look back and laugh at the past but unless you have lived there you have no idea - it wasnt so long ago that a 486DX33 with 16mb of ram was blisteringly fast and the most computer you would ever need.