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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.
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?
... 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
> How can
It's part of their new strategy for obscuring duplicate stories.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
"Ten years from now, they could do it in a few seconds." -- The Racketeer of the Hellfire Club, 1993, Phrack 42
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.
/. 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 :)
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
In Soviet Russia, sig types you!
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
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...
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.
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.
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)
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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