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

Re:Pioneer 10, not Voyager 10

[BlackGriffen]

There may not have been a Voyager 10, but there was certainly a Voyager 6. Don't you remember? It cam back in that really big space ship and...

Or am I getting my Star Trek and Reality confused again? :D

BlackGriffen

Rock on, Intel!

[Merconium]

I have to say that the final statement in the article is exactly my assertion. Valenti and his minions cannot stop progress.

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?

Re:Rock on, Intel!

[Alsee]

Rock on, Intel!

I'm just as thrilled as everyone else to see intell fighting the SSSCA. But there's one thing that keeps nagging at me...

Remember the Microsoft Digital Rights Managment Operating System patent from a while back? I read most of that sucker. It parts of it require a matching Digital Rights Managment CPU. There is no way in hell that Microsoft has overlooked this point. SOMEONE must have plans and/or patents on this beast. Either Microsoft or a CPU manufacturer. The only company that comes to mind for this role is INTEL...

One key and unique phrase in the DRM-OS patent was "monotonic counter". What is so special about phrase? It generates unique serial numbers beyond the user's control. It enforces "trusted" control over an "untrusted" user.

Well, I just did a search of the US patent office database and found exactly 6 patents contining "monotonic counter". Two patents from MICROSOFT. Two patents from SEAGATE. Two patents from INTEL.

The two Microsoft patents are explicitly DRM. The two Seagate patents are for uncopyable encrypted harddrives. One Intel patent covers secure communications in a "pre-boot environment". This may or may not be DRM relevant. The other Intel patent is subtle, but claim 9 is "in a security device configured to provide secure monotonic counting functions" and later mentions use "In sensitive applications, such as electronic commerce, it is also necessary for the counting function to be secure against unauthorized intrusion and security breaches". This would be security against authorized users.

Is it possible that Microsoft, Segate, and Intel are involved in a secret DRM-Axis-Of-Evil?

Can anyone find any other evidence pointing to the required DRM CPU?

-

DUH?

[johnthorensen]

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

Re: DUH?

[Black Parrot]

> How can /. publish an article on Pioneer 10 one day, then muck it all up by calling it "Voyager 10" the next?

It's part of their new strategy for obscuring duplicate stories.

Bill Gates may be a business man...

[SynKKnyS]

... 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.

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

[gorilla]

he was there at the birth of the PC market, his DOS was the first one for the first microcomputer

Rubbish. When IBM started developing the IBM PC, there were oodles of microcomputers around. These could be classified into two major sets, either Apples, which ran Apple's proDOS, or CP/M systems, which ran CP/M. There were Apples which ran CP/M as well. Neither proDOS nor CP/M had anything to do with Microsoft. At that time, Microsoft was really only a Basic shop, plus a few other minor lines. When IBM were looking for an OS, they'd already been talking to Microsoft about including their Basic, and when negotigations with DR about CP/M were stalled, Bill Gates sold them QDOS, and then went out to buy the rights to QDOS.

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

[spitzak]

It would help if this post was not full of serious errors. Are you sure you are not trying to make defenders of Bill Gates look like idiots?

Bill Gates wrote BASIC, not "DOS". At that time the equivalent of DOS was CP/M. MicroSoft purchased the beginnings of MSDOS from another company that it later sued out of business, and that was a copy of CP/M. Claiming Bill Gates had anything to do with the creation of any early version of DOS is just so totally wrong it both demeans you and him.

If it was not for Bill Gates what would we have on the PC? Well I expect we would have some other monopoly selling some other PC operating system. Maybe even IBM. And Bill Gates would be here on SlashDot complaining about the evil monopolist who is running that company and rooting for the government's anti-trust suit. Don't think that Bill Gates did anything other than be in the right place at the right time, what happened would have happened exactly the same without him!

And there would be a GUI just as sophisticated as Windows, and Office software just the same (maybe better if the monopoly had held off some more, maybe worse if the monopoly had been claimed earlier, perhaps by Lotus). And lots of programmers would have started in whatever was on this monopoly system and does that make it good?

Unbelivable that you think that without MicroSoft there would be no alternative. The problem is that with MicroSoft there is no alternative, and people like you are so brainwashed you cannot picture that MicroSoft killed it's competition and that that competition was entirely capable of doing what MicroSoft did!

I won't go into the "windows drove Mac development forward" comment. You obviously have a very warped version of history. Try reading, even Gate's book is more accurate!

640k problem - segments weren't the problem

[UnknownSoldier]

The bloody problem was that segments overlapped.
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 .. FFFF full 64k
0009:0000 .. FFFF full 64k (total 640K)
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 :)

Re:640k problem - segments weren't the problem

[Eric Seppanen]

At least "real mode" is dead (finally :)

Tell that to the poor designers who

• Design x86 embedded systems, and have to write code to initialize the CPU.
• Design SCSI, network, or video cards, that still use BIOS extension ROMs.

Re:640k problem - segments weren't the problem

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

Never mind embedded, the regular Linux kernel has to switch into protected mode itself.

By the way, why is the obsolete (286 compatibility) "lmsw" instruction used there instead of mov cr0, eax, which works just as well. mov cr0, eax won't work on a 286, but since Linux doesn't run on those that's not a issue. :) We don't want to be one of the people that are forcing Intel to keep backward compatibility cruft in the CPU, do we?

Also, the Intel docs say you should immediately do an intersegment jump after entering protected mode - linux does a local jump first.

I patched my kernel to address these issues and it worked fine. Any comments?

(*) Also, the new SMM (System Management Mode) is a quasi-real mode which is becoming more popular for certain functions (such as power management, etc).

Re:640k problem - segments weren't the problem

[JabberWokky]

I patched my kernel to address these issues and it worked fine. Any comments?

You'll get plenty of feedback when/if you post it to kerneldev. Slashdot feedback isn't quite along the same lines. Seriously - send it in... it will either get accepted, or you'll learn some obscure reason as to why Linux initalizes the CPU like that.

--
Evan

Bill's history lessons

[RaAmun]

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.

Re:Bill's history lessons

[Zeinfeld]

Does anyone really believe that he had input on the hardware design of the IBM PC? That's what he's suggesting. I was under the impression that the architecture was already set by the time Microsoft was called. Would IBM really ask DR and MS for an OS for a machine that wasn't even specced out yet?

Read the email, Bill says that he had more input into the design of the Sirius than the PC. It is pretty obvious that Chuck Peddle would consult Bill over the design of the Sirius at an early stage as Microsoft Basic was the killer app of the PC world.

From all accounts the IBM PC was essentially designed and manufactured in just over a year. Microsoft was brought in at least a year before the launch because writing the code would take time, so yes Microsoft was in a position to make comments about the PC design at an early stage. As Bill himself states, they were not listened to.

It is also pretty obvious that someone in Bill's position would be pushing for the 68K since everyone arround at the time knew that the 68K was the better chip. IBM actually went for the Intel chip because they could reuse work from a previous failed wordprocessor project.

Those of us who had used PDP and VAX knew that a 32 bit address space was the most desirable improvement in going to the 16 bit processors. Even if you did not anticipate being able to have that much RAM any time soon VAX had demonstrated that virtual memory could work.

64-bit won't last forever?

[Chexum]

Even 64-bit architecture won't last forever, but it will last for quite a while since only servers and scientific stuff have run out of 32-bit space right now. 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.

Pardon? I don't wan't to be another BG, but I think this time he's over-cautious. Filling 2^64 bytes of memory, over a 66MHz/64 bit bus would take about 132 billion (10^9) seconds. That's about 4100 years. There could be some coding tricks which would be easier with more than 64 bits of address spaces, but handling this much data is... difficult. Even if the situation improves three magnitudes in the next ten years, it still years to initialize a database this big in "memory" (fastest accessible storage). And even if the addressable unit changes from bytes to 64 bit (or more) words, this makes the need to go over 64 bits of addressing still useless...

Re:History

[Xerithane]

Not only that, but I'm not sure about how his explanation makes him a "geek's geek". He was reciting common knowledge about address space. Also, in no way does his 640K statement have anything to do with his knowledge of addresses.

I still stick with my assessment that Bill Gates is a business man, not a geek. He knows about computers, but I wouldn't trust him to code his way out of a wet paper bag.

Re:will voyager 10 still be usefull

[alfredw]

Well, as far as PIONEER 10 goes, the answer is probably no. It's moving too slowly to hit any interesting features (that we know about) before its batteries fail.

Voyagers 1 and 2, on the other hand, are headed for the heliopause. The heliopause is where the solar wind meets the interstellar medium. The ISM is probably quite different than the energetic particles the sun spews out. They should be out into interstellar space in the near future (less than 10 years). The good news is, they're still operating well! Voyager 2 is unfortuantely running low on propellant, though.

Find updates at the Voyager Project Homepage.

And /. eds, make sure you have real spacecraft :). Voyagers 1 and 2 are headed at high speed out of the solar system. What would have been Voyager 3 is in the Smithsonian. And Voyager 6 is pure Gene Roddenberry :)

Re:Go Intel!

[ender81b]

Indeed props to intel for standing up to the RIAA and MPAA. Of course Intel could buy them both and still have enough money to purchase Rhode Island, but I digrees. But, give credit to microsoft also. Steve ballmer is mentioned as a signee of the letter sent to the Recording/Movie industy. Give credit to all EIGHT companies who signed the letter. They all realized that this would be the death of the PC as we know it and are trying to stop it - course I wonder why they haven't bought a few senators yet..

Spammer Rice

[GSloop]

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

Re:History

[Xerithane]

I've yet to see substantial backing as to his "great coder" skills. Paul Allen, yes I'd agree with. He started Microsoft with his parents money. He was sent to college on his parents dime (and IIRC, was not doing all that well academic wise).

Re:My first computer...

[dasmegabyte]

Oh, how very geek -- a my-computer-was-shittier-than-thine post.

Well, I'll bite. My first computer had a monochrome display, 40 character columns and 8k memory. We upgraded it with a hard drive for close to $3000; the hard drive was 4 meg.

That machine is less than a tenth of the power of my cellular phone. I emulate it on my Pocket PC while playing A Flock of Seagulls MP3s in the background. Ahh memories...

Seriously though, 640k WAS enough for most programs when they knew how to manage the top ram. They just had to treat it the same way we deal with swap files today -- stick memory up there if you don't want to get rid of it but don't actively need it. There are plenty of devices, programs and utilities that run with command stacks under 128k (the size of the biggest x86 command cache i'm aware of) that swap miscellaneous data (ie pictures, sounds, even text) out of the larger ram. The problem was that sloppy compilers (MS is not the only one to blame; if I remember Borland was the biggest player in the compilation game back when 640k was 'nuff) DIDN'T do the swapping for you.

Windows has spoiled us all by doing such things under the scenes -- to the point that code optimizers are hot commodities that are prized for their savant abilities. In short: the same practices that create the code bloat we all cringe at were responsible for the streamlining of some very sticky swap processes. Resource files, i hate you and I could kiss you.

who will fight for the public?

[Dr. Awktagon]

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"....

Revisionist history

[blamanj]

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.

Re:Revisionist history

[Zeinfeld]

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.

According to the Delamater history of IBM's anti-trust years Microsoft thought the 286 to be to broken to build an O/S that supported protected memory. IBM insisted that they had to ship OS/2 to support the IBM PC AT as they had promised it would support the new O/S.

This was the main issue that led to IBM and Microsoft parting ways, IBM insisted on supporting the 286, Microsoft wanted to skip it and move straight to the 386.

Re:Revisionist history

[mughi]

...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.

That it was not correct seems to pinpoint it. This interview with Bill Gates that's in the Smithsonian paints a slightly different picture:

http://americanhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/gates.h tm (A transcript of a 1993 interview). Specifically under the mouse: http://americanhistory.si.edu/csr/comphist/gates.h tm#tc44

"I laid out memory so the bottom 640K..."

So he seems quite clear that he himself did that. In the same interview he used "Microsoft" and "we" when appropriate, so it seems that in context this is indeed claiming that he himself did that.

Now, let's compare to the "spin" version of things:

1996 Bloomberg: "The IBM PC had 1 megabyte of logical address space. But 384K of this was assigned to special purposes, leaving 640K of memory available."

contrast that statement to the earlier one of:

1993 SI: "I laid out memory so the bottom 640K was general purpose RAM and the upper 384 I reserved for video and ROM, and things like that."

D'oh! By 1996 he 'forgot' that he was the one who did that. Ooops.

1996 Bloomberg: "We at Microsoft disagreed. We knew that even 16-bit computers, which had 640K of available address space, would be adequate for only four or five years."

contrast that with his statement from the SI interview:

1993 SI: "But to my surprise, we ran out of that address base for applications within -- oh five or six years people were complaining"

Look's like 20-20 revisionist history. Seems to be in-line with having held the opinion that 640K (ten times the shipping memory of the IBM PC) would be enough. In 1993 he was defending it. In 1996 he was denying it.

Re:Revisionist history

[mughi]

I don't have an exact source, but The Smithsonian has a very enlightening interview with him from back in 1993.

For a quick summary, you can see my other comment

Gates, and revisionist history.

[Bowie J. Poag]

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

Re:Gates, and revisionist history.

[befletch]

I hate to date myself like this, but here it goes:

Gates gave a little 'get to know you' talk the University of Waterloo in Canada in 1988 or 1989. It was basically a recruiting effort, from what I could see. Anyway, I distinctly remember him making a self-deprecating joke about that 640k 'ought to be enough for anyone' business.

Maybe I'm misremembering, but I don't think so.

Re:Gates, and revisionist history.

[Jayde Stargunner]

From Encyclopedia.com

(William Henry Gates 3d), 1955-, American business executive, b. Seattle, Wash. At the age of 19, Gates founded (1974) the Microsoft Company, a computer software firm, with Paul Allen. They began by purchasing the rights to convert an existing software package. In 1980 they agreed to produce the operating system for the personal computer being developed by International Business Machines (IBM). That system, MS-DOS (Microsoft Disk Operating System), and subsequent programs (including the Windows operating systems) made Microsoft the world's largest producer of software for microcomputers.
In 1997 the U.S. Justice Dept. accused Microsoft of violating a 1995 antitrust agreement, because the Windows 95 operating system required consumers to load Microsoft's Internet browser-thus giving Microsoft a monopolistic advantage over other browser manufacturers. In late 1999 the trial judge decided that Microsoft was a monopoly that had stifled competition.

Gates, who is chairman of Microsoft, is the wealthiest person in the world. He founded (1994) the William H. Gates Foundation (focusing on health issues in developing countries) and the Gates Learning Foundation (1997), renamed the Gates Library Foundation (providing education assistance). In 1999, he merged the foundations into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, a philanthropy that was worth $17.1 billion, after Gates's donation of $5 billion that year.

Gates has written The Road Ahead (1995, with N. Myhrvold and P. Rinearson) and Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999).

From Encarta.com
Gates, William Henry, III (1955- ), American business executive, who serves as chairman and chief software architect of Microsoft Corporation, the leading computer software company in the United States. Gates cofounded Microsoft in 1975 with high school friend Paul Allen. The company's success made Gates one of the most influential figures in the computer industry and, eventually, one of the richest people in the world.

Born in Seattle, Washington, Gates attended public school through the sixth grade. In the seventh grade he entered Seattle's exclusive Lakeside School, where he met Paul Allen. Gates was first introduced to computers and programming languages in 1968, when he was in the eighth grade. That year Lakeside bought a teletype machine that connected to a mainframe computer over phone lines. At the time, the school was one of the few that provided students with access to a computer.

Soon afterward, Gates, Allen, and other students convinced a local computer company to give them free access to its PDP-10, a new minicomputer made by Digital Equipment Corporation.

In exchange for the computer time, the students tried to find flaws in the system. Gates spent much of his free time on the PDP-10 learning programming languages such as BASIC, Fortran, and LISP. In 1972 Gates and Allen founded Traf-O-Data, a company that designed and built computerized car-counting machines for traffic analysis. The project introduced them to the programmable 8008 microprocessor from Intel Corporation.

While attending Harvard University in 1975, Gates teamed with Allen to develop a version of the BASIC programming language for the Altair 8800, the first personal computer. They licensed the software to the manufacturer of the Altair, Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS), and formed Microsoft (originally Micro-soft) to develop versions of BASIC for other computer companies. Gates decided to drop out of Harvard in his junior year to devote his time to Microsoft. In 1980 Microsoft closed a pivotal deal with International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) to provide the operating system for the IBM PC personal computer. As part of the deal, Microsoft retained the right to license the operating system to other companies. The success of the IBM PC made the operating system, MS-DOS, an industry standard. Microsoft's revenues skyrocketed as other computer makers licensed MS-DOS and demand for personal computers surged. In 1986 Microsoft offered its stock to the public; by 1987 rapid appreciation of the stock had made Gates, 31, the youngest ever self-made billionaire. In the 1990s, as Microsoft's Windows operating system and Office application software achieved worldwide market dominance, Gates amassed a fortune worth tens of billions of dollars. Alongside his successes, however, Gates was accused of using his company's power to stifle competition. In 2000 a federal judge found Microsoft guilty of violating antitrust laws and ordered it split into two companies. An appeals court overturned the breakup order but upheld the judge's ruling that Microsoft had abused its power to protect its Windows monopoly. (For more information on the history of Microsoft, see Microsoft Corporation.)

Gates has made personal investments in other high-technology companies. In 1989 he founded Corbis Corporation, which now owns the largest collection of digital images in the world. In 1995 Corbis purchased the Bettmann Archive of 16 million photographic images and announced plans to digitize part of the collection. In 1994 Gates and Craig McCaw, a pioneer in the cellular telecommunications industry, became primary investors in Teledesic Corporation. Teledesic planned to launch several hundred low-orbiting artificial satellites to create a global, high-speed telecommunications network.

In the late 1990s Gates became more involved in philanthropy. With his wife he established the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, which, ranked by assets, quickly became one of the largest foundations in the world. Gates has also authored two books: The Road Ahead (1995; revised, 1996), which details his vision of technology's role in society, and Business @ the Speed of Thought (1999), which discusses the role technology can play in running a business.

In 1998 Gates appointed an executive vice president of Microsoft, Steve Ballmer, to the position of president, but Gates continued to serve as Microsoft's chairman and chief executive officer (CEO). In 2000 Gates transferred the title of CEO to Ballmer. Gates, in turn, took on the title of chief software architect to focus on the development of new products and technologies.

Re:Progress Quest

[Rothfuss]

I don't know which topic this is in regard to, but it looks hella cool. Some friends of mine mentioned playing it. Apparently it is developing quite a following.

Freeware also. Nice.

Check out their forums. Not bad.

-Rothfuss

Canadia?

[grammar fascist]

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.)

Almost a light day...

[vanyel]

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...

It doesn't seem to be a denial of 640k...

[Rimbo]

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.

Re:Hollywood's Efforts are Futile

[Arandir]

You know how the liberals go around saying that if guns were outlawed no one would have guns?

I think the RIAA and MPAA are really liberals in disguise. They think if they can just get a law passed banning certain kinds of hardware then that hardware couldn't possibly exist any more.

Pioneer Tech Specs

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

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).

Re:Pioneer Tech Specs

[cicadia]

As the other artices say, that baby is getting quite cold.

Cold? The thing's practically burning up! I thought it was getting cold, too, until I saw that the most recent temperatures are actually negative, and then realised that the table is in degrees Farenheit.

As of 1991, the spacecraft was still at 251K, and it had only cooled off about 40K in the twenty years since launch.

I mean, -7F is still pretty cold -- you'd probably get your tongue stuck to it out there -- but it's a lot warmer than its environment. Probably has a lot to do with the onboard nuclear reactor...

It most certainly is NOT

[UberQwerty]

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.

It wasn't as clear-cut as Bill makes it sound

[Allen Akin]

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.

Re:It wasn't as clear-cut as Bill makes it sound

[Allen Akin]

You haven't worked for Bill, have you?

Re:Pioneer 10, not Voyager 10

[LagDemon]

Silly boy, Star Trek IS reality!

Proof that BillG is not lying about the 640K Quote

[gewalkeriq]

1) MS is based on upgrade software where more machine resources is required to run each subsequent version of the same software.

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 .. he is a liar and the father of lies." NIV

I could be wrong.

Re:will voyager 10 still be usefull

[TheFrood]

Voyagers 1 and 2, on the other hand, are headed for the heliopause. The heliopause is where the solar wind meets the interstellar medium. The ISM is probably quite different than the energetic particles the sun spews out. They should be out into interstellar space in the near future (less than 10 years). The good news is, they're still operating well! Voyager 2 is unfortuantely running low on propellant, though.

What does Voyager 2 need propellant for? If it's heading out toward heliopause, won't it keep moving that direction forever? I'm sure it must be using propellant if it's "running low", and I'm sure there must be a reason for that. Just curious about what it's actually doing with the propellant. Attitude adjustments, maybe?

TheFrood

Uses for more than 64 bits

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

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).

Re:will voyager 10 still be usefull

[alfredw]

Just curious about what it's actually doing with the propellant. Attitude adjustments, maybe?

Yep. It's keeping the dish pointed at Earth (which moves, of course). This allows it to send and receive data.

I thought so too, but then I saw this

[nyet]

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 ;)

Bank switching, LIM EMS

[Sloppy]

Amazingly people like Bob Harp (Vector Graphics?remember them?) went around the industry saying we should stick with that and just use bank switching techniques. Bank switching comes up whenever an address space is at the end of its life. It's a hack where you have more physical memory than logical memory. Fortunately we got enough applications moved to the 8086/8 machines to get the industry off of 16-bit addressing, but it was clear from the start the extra 4 bits wouldn't be sufficient for long.

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.

Blame the hardware designers, not Gates

[The Famous Druid]

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.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

My Letter to Fritz

[mikeboone]

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.

Re:My Letter to Fritz

[em.a18]

Your arguments are all good. (Although on your digital devices point, I like to characterize this as mandating breathalyzers on all wheeled vehicles, like wheelbarrels and matchbox cars, because of a few drunk drivers.)

But my friend in the know suggests that Hollings is really concerned about the health of the media industry. Right or wrong, you need to address that concern. I think you need to say something like "stealing music is already illegal. The existing laws have put Napster out of business."

You could also offer the opinion that the music industry is free to offer their own music-delivery platform, with all the security they want.

Re:My Letter to Fritz

[ewhac]

Most of the previous comments are spot-on, so I'll only suggest one addition (which would likely make the document too long, so feel free to ignore it):

Lack of Compelling Need: Mr. Eisner is on record as saying that the protections mandated by the proposed Bill are absolutely necessary to facilitate healthy, sustainable commerce in digital works. Yet this is demonstrably untrue. The computer game industry -- whose gross earnings have exceeded that of the motion picture industry for the last two years -- has achieved this result selling digital works without any such legislation in place. Surely it is possible for The Walt Disney Company and other motion picture studios to achieve similar results absent this legislative burden.

Just my two cents...

Schwab

Re:My Letter to Fritz

[RatFink100]

My only suggestion is this. You lay out the issues very well and then at then end get into what looks like a personal attack (I'm sure you don't mean it to be). Here's the changes I'd make FWIW

I am not sure exactly how you think you are benefiting South Carolina with this bill is very confrontational and slightly insulting - it implies he doesn't know what he's doing. How about I do not believe this bill will benefit South Carolina?

Please don't act solely in the interest of your high-dollar contributors. This is even worse - you're implying that he's been improperly influenced by contibutions from business. That's a serious allegation, insulting to his integrity. Mention instead the other side of the coin, following on from your previous sentence i.e. My reading of the proposal is that it will only benefit the large corporations in this country, especially the media conglomerates. Please make sure that you are also acting on behalf of non-corporate interests, the individual constituents who voted for you.

The last sentence can stand if you tone down the other two because you modify the you are doing a disservice with by proposing this bill. Otherwise I might have suggested this bill will do a disservice

The thing to remember is that you are trying to influence this guy's opinion not run against him in the next election. You may believe that he's an idiot who doesn't understand the issue and is in the pockets of big business - but if your letter comes over that way any chance of persuading him will probably be lost.

Re:My Letter to Fritz

[darkonc]

Making your children into criminals
People have an urge to share. We sing songs, we retell stories. When we see a good movie, or hear an incredibly good song, we go to our friends and try to share the experience with them. Sharing information is a part of human nature, and the purpose of the hundreds of languages that mankind has created over the ages.

The founding fathers of the United States recognized the human need for the sharing of information when they penned the First Ammendment. They said that the right to share information should not be infringed. They did, however, create one, small exception. They allowed congress to give creators of the arts and sciences a short term monopoly over their created works, in the hopes that.

The apparent intent of that constitutional paragraph was that, after a short period of time the works created as a result of that copyright protection would fall into the public domain, where the people could make full and wholesome use of it.

Current copyright law is, however, an abomination of the original intent of the copyright exception. Instead of giving the creating artist control of his or her work for a short period of time, this control is being treated like permanent property. The original 14 year copyright period has now been extended to about 10 times that number -- and hat number is stretching faster than time itself.

Lost knowledgeElectronic information is fragile and ephemeral. A doomsday laser disk created only 15 years ago is now far less readable than it's 16'th century counterpart. The technology used to create it is now obsolete and almost forgotten.
Technical audio tapes of the apollo moon landing were almost unreadable when researchers rescued them from archives only 30 years after Neil armstrong uttered his famous words "One small step for (a) man, one giant leap for mankind".

When Mandella was sentanced in 1961, the speech of the future president of South Africa was recorded on (then) hi-tech plastic strips. Less 40 years later it took researchers years to recreate the technology needed to extract sound from those strips.

And when was the last time you tried to play an 8-track tape?

If history is any predictor of the future, the recordings of today are going to be opaque to the next generation. If the Media industry has their way, todays recordings will be taboo to future generations.

As NASA archivists have found out, the only way to keep yesterday's electronic information available is to transfer it to storage formats available today. The proposed terms of the SSSCA would, however, make such transferr illegal -- especially if the person or company who created the original work was dead, defunct, or simply un-locatable.

Our grandchildren would then be left with the unenviable choice of being forever unable to view what we creating today -- or becoming criminals by attempting to read such mundane things as videos of their parents' first steps.

By the year 2100, todays digital recordings will be far less readable than the scratchy vinyl recordings of the 1940s, but people may be unwilling to decoding them -- fearful of the legal implications of having the technology necessary to decode something recorded today.

If the sssca is allowed to pass, it will, in all liklihood, create a digital black hole in the history of the arts and sciences of the world.

Register Now!

[SubtleNuance]

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

A Geek's Geek?

[sharkey]

Absolutely. Richest man in the world, but just look at the hair.

"Check out the bowl-job, Marge!" --Homer

Two things Bill Gates really did say

[AdamBa]

In an interview in the very first issue of PC Magazine, February-March 1982 (a copy of which I am looking at right now), he said (p. 21-22):

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

You're wasting your time.

[rho]

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.

Re:will voyager 10 still be usefull

[Alsee]

[running out of propellant]
It's keeping the dish pointed at Earth

If the limiting factor is the propellant supply they could extend it's lifespan simply by not tracking the earth. Of course we would then only be able to communicate with it during twice-a-year-windows. It's the old "a stopped clock is right twice a day" trick.

-

Views on the Copyright Reform

[Nagash]

Before you get all alarmist about the fact that Canada is looking to reform their Copyright Act to incoporate the points in the WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996 (WTC), you would do well to read what the deparment who drafted the Consultation Paper on Digital Copyright Issues has to think about copy protection measures:

2. Legal Protection of Technological Measures

b) Perspective

...

The departments are of the view that providing a sanction against an act of circumvention, where the act is motivated by an infringing purpose, may [already] be addressed under copyright principles. A broader prohibition, including a prohibition against the manufacture and distribution of circumvention devices, may, in its effect protect rights that are beyond the scope of copyright protection (e.g. contractual rights). Such broader prohibitions may need to be considered under different policy principles and under a different legal regime.

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 /. we are talking about).

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

Blame the IBM BIOS!

[steveha]

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

The biggest secret in the Universe

[Peter Lake]

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?