Slashdot Mirror
Through The Steve Ballmer Looking Glass
Class Act Dynamo writes "I was browsing for a video clip I saw the other day, and I came across this clip from 15 years ago of Steve Ballmer pitching windows 1.0 in a television commercial. All I can say is WOW. Apparently, there was a big demand for integrating "LOTUS 1-2-3 with Miami Vice." You'll understand when you see the clip." Let it not be said that Microsoft has no sense of humor.
I believe I speak for everyone when I say..
.
"That explains SO much."
"All I can say is WOW." very...apt statment.
"Apparently, there was a big demand for integrating 'LOTUS 1-2-3 with Miami Vice.'" no crap? I mean....whoa!
"$500 dollars? $1000 dollars?" . .
You're right. I can no longer say that MS has no sense of humor.
Oh how I wish that was a false statment...I mean, it even goes along with the new goatse.
Actually, not really.
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Billy G will personally steal your idea AND take over your company!
Let it not be said that Microsoft has no sense of humor.
:-)
But that's not funny!
-Aaron
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
I've seen in a long time. LOL
Sig* sig = theOneSig();
I saw this, like, 15 years ago.
Okay, I guess a small firm might use a low budget format like this, but hadn't M$ already make good money from MS-DOS sales.
/. will teach the eBaums webmaster not to post microsoft stuff.
Bacardi + slashdot = negative karma.
Judging from the way my XP machine behaves, they still have yet to reach that 1.0 milestone... :)
its "stories" like this that keep me from becoming a paying subscriber. Mildly humorous but the blatant, useless MS bashing from a submission with no news quality whatsoever is juvenile and unbecoming for the business that is slashdot.
According to this commercial, it was priced at $99, now if you want a vintage copy of M$ Windows 1.0, its $200+. Take a look on ebay.
Reminds me of the Crazy Eddie electronics outlet commercials, that used to air on the east coast in the early 80's.
I clicked on that wile browsing from my throne (laptops with wireless connections = the new newspaper folded under the arm) and essentially saved myself from pissing all over myself.
Sound waves should be free!
Am I the only one who can't hear the audio on this file? I've tried totem, xine and vlc, and nothing wants to play the audio...
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
Assuming, that is, the EULA didn't prohibit resale. That was disturbing. But the XT brought fond tears to my eyes, as did reversi.
Amor omnia vincit. Occasionally.
There are at least a dozen of these videos floating around, some starring Bill & Steve together. They were made for the amusement of the employees and played at the yearly company meetings.
http://www.albinoblacksheep.com/flash/sellswindows .php
Hooray for Gasbag!
If I ever saw a line that is going to adore slashdot comments for months to come, there it is.
I can see it now.
I for one welcome our new (INSERT ADJECTIVE RELEVANT TO NEWS STORY HERE) overlords, except in Nebraska!
Or.
In Soviet Russia, the blank, blanks you! Except in Nebraska!
What signature defines me as a person?
Considering that this is from Ebaum's World, I find it hard to believe it's not just a joke/fake.
... look at their product linueup. :)
sigs are like a box of chocolates, they all suck remove the underscores to email me
I saw this vid about ten years ago. Ballmer didn't make it for use on TV -- it was shown at an internal Microsoft sales-team meeting. You know -- pump 'em up. Monkeyboy could do well selling used cars, methinks. Just the sort of person who can take a mediocre systems-software company and turn them into a globe-trotting monopoly.
The crazy talking head on the television asked me several times how much i thought it was worth. I kept saying "nothing" but he just kept talking. Crazy man. im scared.
--- Caffeine is directly responsible for some of my greatest ideas, and some of my most embarrassing moments...
$99... same price as XP Home Edition I believe.
Which also still has Reversi.
The coolest voice ever.
Only old Koreans use Windows 1.0
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Per usual, I've mirrored the video here.
Although, this really looks like a fake... I'm not sure why, but something doesn't sit right about the info at the end and the product ordering. Or maybe it's just me.
-Steve
What?.....no steak knives?
Ctrl-Alt-Del
Ctrl-Alt-Del
Ctrl-Alt-Del
Please make it go away. Blue screen of death anything pleeeeeeze.
Stop the Slashdot effect! Don't read the articles!
Someone needs to put together some humorous Linux "commercials". For the in-crowd, it would be hilarious. For the rest, it would be potentially good advertisement. If there are any that I've simply not seen, please offer links.
You fiends! After watching Balmer in this horrible commercial I was forced to push a 30 watt soldering iron through each of my corneas. I will never see again thanks to this slashdot article!!!
... and in the DRM, bind them.
It's good to see Microsoft did at least one appearance on TV without Windows Crashing.
I don't get it.
Slashdot posts a story with a link that goes (almost) directly to the file. And then it's 5 minutes later and the server happily crunches over a hundred kilobytes per second.
Now either eBausmworld knows how to put up a content server, or slashdot just lost its edge.
Check the P.O. box for one thing: 286-DOS? Yeah, right. For another, Lotus 1-2-3 was a competing product, and wouldn't have been "included" with Windows at all. (In fact, the only programs included were MS-DOS Executive, Calendar, Cardfile, Notepad, Terminal, Calculator, Clock, Reversi, Control Panel, PIF (Program Information File) Editor, Print Spooler, Clipboard, RAMDrive, Windows Write, Windows Paint - some of which were featured.) The price is right, however, at $100 or so, but when Mr. Ballmer was hired in June of 1980, he was hired as a finance/org/resource person, not a marketer or salesman at all. (He wasn't moved to "Office of the President" 'til 1992) I can understand the confusion, though - it's pretty-well put together... I guess...
I [may] disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.
Why Nebraska?
or does WMP suck ass at compressing at low bitrates?
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
The video had been on that site for many years. So now that some random guy came across the video, he puts it on slashdot and it makes it to the front page. What's the need? Slashdot is a *news* site.
Shoot, I live in Nebraska. Curse you Steve Ballmer!
http://www.walkingtaco.com
Steve Ballmer is still the same cheezy salesman. has not changed a bit, except he lost his hair...
Having been a user of Microsoft operating systems since elementary school, and having never actually purchased a copy myself - I think that this sort of balls-out funny advertisement...
Well I actually think that I like Windows now. Even though I hate it (I really hate it). This ad makes me love it.
If the last shot was the mailing address in the form of a "Fatal Error" I think the ad would be complete.
I will now go out and buy Windows.
The clip was included in Robert X. Cringely's Triumph of the Nerds series on PBS in 1996. It was as funny then as it is today.
Chip H.
Well, after seing both this video and The Funny Steve Ballmer Video Thing">the ones on this page, I now understand why Microsoft products are... well... you know :P
the 1.0 release plays it just fine. Either that or the latest mplayer should be able to handle it. WMV's kind of a moving target, you've got to constantly update your software to play it....
Oh, and Totem and xine use the same back end (xine-lib) so if one can't play it, the other won't (unless you've got something screwy going on where they're using different library paths). Just a heads up....
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
If what has been said about it being an internal video is true then it just joins "Developers, Developers, Developers..." and 'I love this company' in the "Horrible vault of Microsoft Internal Movies". Can you imagine being subjected to that? Even those three instances over 20 years would be too much for me. I shudder to think that there may be more that haven't surfaced.
My audio for this works fine with xine.
/etc/apt/sources.list entry for mplayer
I'm using debian sarge.
I also have mplayer installed.
Here is my
deb ftp://ftp.nerim.net/debian-marillat/ unstable main
You have solved the case!
I really fail to see how this is News for Nerds or Stuff that Matters. It's just as bad as Bill Gates in 1983 Teen Beat Magazine.
Editors, can we have a Childish Microsoft Bashing section so I can filter this crap from my frontpage?
People don't go around thinking that Steve B and Bill were the stars of the 'original' Matrix, do they? But just like the Microsoft-Matrix video, this was done for the pure amusement of Microsoft.
User error.
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
There's a progman.exe in XP sp2, (\windows\system32\progman.exe) but I can't get the thing to run. I've used progman.exe in ME before. It's been updated with each release of windows and is probably kept for legacy purposes.
If you happen to be using a browser that doesn't suck, you may need to right click and "save link as".
Why does it always have to be about Microsoft?
...I'll point you to where you can download an episode of "Geeks in Space."
Ironically, the word ironically is often used incorrectly.
So what the fuck is a pretten?
Right now, just above these here posts, an animated flash Microsoft ad is playing, banging on about Windows' supposed lower Total Cost of Ownership, according to 7-11. What the hell is OSDN doing selling advertising to these jerks?! Inviting them right here into the enemy camp to peddle their propaganda?!
Still, I suppose it *could* be worse. Imagine if every time you logged into slashdot you risked having a bug-eyed Steve Ballmer shouting at you (shudder). I think I'll keep the silent flash ads.
Another interesting "motivational speech" from Microsoft...
http://fun.sdinet.de/movies/developers.mpeg (1.6MB)
I wonder if MS would had more buyers if he did something like this. ;)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Obviously, this is someone who has way too much time on their hands. Maybe they should try something more productive like... programming windows?
Every year over $1,000,000,000,000 (that's trillion) worth of free goverment grants (including small business grants) are given out to over 30,000,000 (that's million) people! That's 6 times more than what the country spends on automobiles. And you probably bought a car in the last few years, so why didn't you get your share of small business grants, goverment loans and free goverment grants!?!
Actually, there are tens of thousands of worms and viruses out there. Several thousand unique worms and viruses (when you exclude variants).
No, not all of them run on Windows, but most of them.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
If I recall correctly, Windows 1.0 was ASCII windows - not graphical. They didn't do the graphics until 2.0 and even this was a sort of "tag along" with other programs. You bought, say PageMaker for Windows and Windows was only launched as a wrapper around PageMaker.
You do have your speakers turned on don't you?
Ripping an new rectum in the fabric of spacetime.
There's a progman.exe in XP sp2, (\windows\system32\progman.exe) but I can't get the thing to run. I've used progman.exe in ME before. It's been updated with each release of windows and is probably kept for legacy purposes.
I think progman.exe can still be used as the default shell by tweaking some registry settings though I haven't tried it.
Other than that, some legacy setup programs rely on being able to start Progman.exe & install some icons on it.
Plus, there are a lot of icons available in progman.exe which can be used otherwise.
Ballmer and Gates have the same timbre in their voices. Almost as if they'd grown up in the same home. Must be a Northwest thing because it seems more unique than an accent.
... I can see why the M$ crew loves this guy. Can't stand their OS, but Ballmer is one hell of a cheerleader. Hey, if they can integrate Miami Vice and Lotus, maybe they can find a way to wedge some security into Windows.
This is my post. There are many others like it. If you don't like what you read here, go try one of the others.
I can tell you what MY next OS will be. The clock on XP doesn't even fill the whole screen.
That's because /. is trying to ease everyone into their new section: Slashdot Retro.
It's super cool - it has 15 year old news, coverage of IBM PC jr. and all the dupes you could ever want... from more than a decade ago!
Think of it as Easy Listening for the blog generation - we aren't getting any younger you know.
To continue the offtopicedness of this, make sure that if one is going to start with Debian (and I'd second that, so long as your willing to take the time to learn), grab the sarge installer. Telling a newb to start with Woodie would not be the best and brightest idea. However with the way the Sarge installer turned out, it would get my recommendation.
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-installer/Don't want to go too deep into this right now, but with Debian, you'll get a great package manager with easy updating, and a vaste array of packages, a system that actually works quite well and is subject to fairly thorough bug purging, runs on lighter resources than a number of other distros, and plus, perhaps most importantly, is free both in cost, and in ideology. They're not trying to sell you something, just the notion of freedom :-)
My sig seems to get +5 funny, every day.
I like big butts and I cannot lie.
...does Balmer in this ad remind anyone else of this guy?
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Sorta unrelated but... this article reminded me of this video on the same site. Behold the wonders of... The Internet :O
Check out the part at 2:30, pretty interesting put into today's context.
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
I've heard the word "developers" so many times the word has lost all meaning!
"When the atomic bomb goes off there's devastation...but when the atomic bong goes off there's celebraaaaation!"
If I'm not mistaken, that video was clipped out of an early episode of the MSDN online TV show. Nice of them not to give credit to the source and claim it as their own.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
Windows 1.0 looked very much like the MS-DOS Executive application. It was not graphically enabled.
-Aaron-
Poorly translated and transliterated from Arabic, it's "All your base are belong to us."
If anyone hasn't seen Triumph of the Nerds by Cringely, I highly recommend seeing it. It's the best documentary about computing ever made. It offers a historic and insightful view of the people that created the personal computing industry. Cringely interviews everyone from Gates and Jobs to relative unknowns like the creator of the MITS Altair computer.
What really makes it a great documentary is that it's as entertaining as it is interesting. Not an easy thing at all to do given the subject matter but Cringely pulls it off in spades.
Chew: You Nexus, huh? I design your eyes.
Roy: Chew, if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes.
Ebaum is going to wish he didn't post this on his site.
Bye bye bandwidth.
Slashdot 1|0 Productivity
Hey, there were no Windows 1.0 viruses or worms.
Windows 95, yes, but Windows 1.0? Nope.
There wasn't a WWW, and DNS was only 1 year old at the time... There were maybe 2000 hosts on the internet.
he still looks like Peter Boyle as the monster in Young Frankenstein.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Yikes, I hope it's a BYOK (bring your own keyboard) type of deal.
Eh.
Windows 1.0 falls under the abandonware title
You mean abandonwarez. Last time I checked, 1985 > 1923.
It's there in Win2K as well.
/mnt/win2k/winnt/system32/progman.exe and got an ugly old Win3.1-esque program manager. It was useable as well.
;)
I just wine'd
Well, when I say useable, I mean it ran. Notice the distinction between that and 'usability'.
The only difference i could see between that and the 'real' Win 3.1 program manager i used in the old days were that Wine saw to it that the fonts were antialiased.
I was around in the 80's. It was my teens and it was in 1984 that I found computing as a hobby. Not too long after that, still in the 80's, I woundup doing work for a trader in one of Chicago's commodity markets and pretty much everyone and their mother used Lotus 1-2-3. Microsoft had "Multiplan" - their answer to Lotus 1-2-3 (the reigning spreadsheet of the day) but no one really cared.
n .p ng
l ic s-info/symbolics.html
In fact, Microsoft's software lineup was incredibly diverse since it was a young company trying to put its hand into every market to shore the perception that they had a hand in anything and everything. Sort of like today except back then companies constituted real competition vs. today where you're practically assured of being roadkill if Microsoft sets its sites on you. There was "Microsoft LISP" (no, I'm not kidding; it was actually another company's product repackaged) and Microsoft even had software that worked on the Commodore 64 home computer. I mentioned Multiplan earlier, Microsoft's spreadsheet, well not only could you buy it for the IBM PC, check out this screenshot of their Commodore 64 version:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:C64_Multipla
Am I rueful? A little bit. Do I miss those days? Not a chance. What you can do today with a home computer vs. back then is night and day. In retrospect it is slightly surprising that things held my attention as they did. The Net, tons of free software (open source and otherwise), powerful desktop computers all were quite some time off. If you thought dialup today is bad, try operating on the common standard of the day, 1200 baud modems, as in 120 characters per second, as in, yes it took several seconds to fill an 80x25 text screen which most people had in the form of MS-DOS (forget GUI desktops, they weren't common place for quite some time to come).
What I so miss however is the the sense that there were lots of great things happening. They're happening today, but the attitude back then was different. For example, you could realistically expect a company to try something "way out there." For example, I was aware of one Chicago trading company (again, commodities markets) had purchased LISP machines to see if it could come up with AI strategies to improve their trading systems:
http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbo
While open source is prevalent today in some circles, companies have moved to a situation where vendor support is an end all, be all when it comes to decision making. They can be risk averse to the point of self-detriment resulting in very staid environments at times. One example of this is the IT department for the state of Texas. A friend who works there told me once that unless some set of software came on the HP-UX CD, forget about using it. For him, this meant forgetting about PERL since it was not shipped on the HP-UX CDs (this was a few years ago). Even my situation today reflects this to a degree. I work at a very large financial institution and Apache is non-existent in our production systems. While internal Apache sites can readily be deployed to share infromation with coworkers Apache on customer facing servers is a no go.
There just seemed to be more variety in what companies might try because the IT market hadn't settled down. While open source is great (something that I personally have great faith in), back then we did not have today's situation where IT like the automotive industry had just a handful of companies owning respective markets, a.k.a., consolidation. As a frame of reference around the turn of the 20th century there were 30+ automotive companies in the USA. By the 30's things had settled down to the "Big Three" that we've known internalized for quite some time. Today Lotus' 1-2-3 is just a memory as are Symbolics machine, the Commodore 64 and many, MANY other things.
-M
PS: Having said that, I have a pretty sweet desktop these days - a 64 bith Athlon system. The things I do today are pretty amazing in and of themselves... thanks to Moore's Law.
oh... wait... *weeps*
You are correct about the wrapper, or "run-time". Excel 2.0 for Windows could boot from DOS, load the Windows 2.0 runtime, then itself.
Every .exe file for 16-bit Windows had a short DOS stub. Some just printed "This program is designed for Microsoft Windows" or the like, but other, more sophisticated stubs looked for win.com somewhere on the PATH and started Windows if possible and fell back to the error message otherwise. I'm guessing that the smaller programs (such as winver, notepad, and calculator) used the short stub that just errored out, while larger programs used a larger stub. Eventually, as Windows 3.x became more widespread, more developers just linked their apps with the short stub out of laziness.
We can still say their sense of humor sucks, right?
I have a website. It's about Macs.
... That was the fscking funniest thing I have ever seen.
The scary thing is that there are ads of the same quality on late night television that are flogging off refurbished PC's with "Pentium 2 power" for only $599. And they even include Windows 95 and a modem. (So you too can be part of a bot net).
I recently picked up 5 Pentium 2 computers headed for the dump. I am thinking on upgrading my Pentium 166 gateway and servers. If anyone wants one I'll sell it for only $598.
it is only after a long journey that you know the strength of the horse.
Windows 1.0 couldn't have Windows on Windows (ie more than one program open) and did not have cut-and-paste.
Hm. Works for me, and brings back painful memories of Windows 3.x. I shuddered as I created a program group and put an item in it...
I posted this once in the comments section for some slashdot story. I guess I should've just submitted it, eh? ;)
Oh well...
I think the subject line says it all.
Well?
I was looking at slashdot today and decided to try and see if I still had an account here...
Loe and Behold... I have an account from before the subscriptions were offered...
So like that ancient microfuts ad somethings never seem to go away..
"A learning experience is one of those things that says, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.'" - DNA
Anywho, I'm not surprised how the first feature they pimped was Lotus 1-2-3 support, as Lotus 1-2-3 was the "killer app" of the day. In fact, there are bugs in Excel that were put their purposely to allow for true Lotus 1-2-3 integration.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
progman.exe in Windows XP is just a stub to intercept DDE calls and process launches for Explorer, typically for older Windows 3.x programs that were written to depend upon its presence.
The number of appcompat hacks, workarounds, et al is really very staggering. Linus has the benefit of just changing something and telling everyone to fuck off when their stuff breaks. Microsoft has paying customers that don't take kindly to the same sort of treatment.
Natural != (nontoxic || beneficial)
Yep - It's currently up on Torrentspy.com.
I don't know who posted it, but it's there - not too many seeds though.
progman.exe in XP exists mainly to provide a DDE bridge so legacy programs' installers can put shortcuts in the start menu using the old (win3.1) API.
http://albinoblacksheep.com/flash/sellswindows.php
There's a flash version, which should work a bit better on linux than a WMV.
Besides, Ebaumsworld is terrible >.>
I take it all back. Whatever Ballmer's getting paid, he's earned it. Cripes. I wonder how many more pieces of embarrassing, early-career moments are out there, their stars secretly hoping they are lost forever, but in fact just waiting to surface on the vast expanse of the Internet... ...enough to support Compfused, et al, it seems.
Here is the torrent for Triumph of the Nerds, if anyone is interested (torrent details)
If this guy walked into our office (ad agency), there is no way he would get a decent ad. We would certainly try, but how can you work with the "NOOOOOO....IT'S ONLY $99!!!!" mentality, not to mention a complete lack of any artistic sensibility? If you wonder why Microsoft's products looked like hell for the past 20 years (pre-XP) now you know. Gawd that's awful, even for internal use. Just because something is internal doesn't mean it has to be complete crud.
What's the "Except in Nebraska" line at the end mean?
[sig] 10 + 10 = 100 [/sig]
If you heard it, you would know the difference. There is no way not to.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
I don't consider this bashing, nor do I (generally) bash Microsoft. Like any big organization, Microsoft has done some things that deserve criticism (adjust tenses to reflect ongoing and future offenses :)), but on the whole I am anything but a Microsoft basher. My 5-second thought on Microsoft is that it is a large, smart, lucky, successful software maker which one day will cease to exist.
:) But my note attached to the story is sincere -- I like that this shows off a fun, exuberant aspect of Microsoft (though it would have been as funny if it was a similar ad from the early days of *any* software maker), and that is what I liked about this little video.
Maybe the submitter secretly throws darts at taped-up pictures of MS executives, I don't know
Cheers,
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Ahh! My eyes! The goggles do nothing!
It would be cool if it didn't suck.
How much is 99$ in todays value?
yeah, but didn't dos viruses work beautifully back then?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
I have a full, working copy of Windows 1.0 on 5.25" floppies, complete with manuals. Unfortunately, the package has been opended, and I no longer have the original box. =(
Wonder what it's worth today?
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
Nebraska. What's up with that? Ah microsoft again proving that they are nothing but a bunch of money grubbing gluttens.
Kosh: "Understanding is a 3 edged sword, your side, their side, the Truth."
I remember the long, long hours spent with friends playing Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge! Incredible game! Play the "training course" and silently watch as opponent's fuel bar slowly nears zero, and he must make a decision, let you take over and refuel or try that one remaining lap :)
Then Lotus 2, with that monstrous swamp level, and Lotus 3 (TURBO ZONE!)
I managed to create a level in Lotus 3 where after 3-4 checkpoints of relatively normal track with sparsely placed "turbo zones" you began riding downhill, down a VERY steep hill, straight ahead, maybe 15 laps and all the time in the turbo zone. Slowly closing to 400MPH...
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
That video makes them propose a shitty operating system as always and will always be.
How old are you? I ask because you appear to be blissfully ignorant of the hundreds of DOS boot-sector viruses which spread themselves around long before the widespread adoption of the Internet. Let's also not forgot the rash of Visual Basic macro viruses which were common for a short while back in the mid to late nineties. They didn't rely on a network to spread either.
Besides the high squeeky voice from Steve, what leads me to believe it was for fun was the price! Just kidding, the true give away was the address!
286-DOS
Was the street name.
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
Nowadays it costs more. And they no longer ship it with Reversi. D-': Bwaaaaaaaaaaa!
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
In 1985, a PC cost $4000 and Windows cost $99. In 2005, a PC can be had for $500 (1/8 the cost), and Windows costs $199 (twice as much as it did twenty years ago).
Unless you think going from Windows 1.0 to XP is 16 times as much improvement as from the original IBM PC to a modern P4 system, Windows has become a ripoff...
0 1 - just my two bits
windows wasn't an OS back then, just something that ran atop MS-DOS.
the normal viruses of that day spread through boot sectors and piggybacking on dos programs - and were plentiful enough. there's no 'MAYBE' about it.
ambulance...
and are we talking about viruses or worms anyhow?
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
That wasn't a very nice thing to show me. I feel like I should take a shower.
WHAT?! a WMV FILE? : Now how am I going to watch it with my x86_64 Linux and 64-bit mplayer? :(
Can anyone encode it to XviD or something?
I'm dead serious.
You misunderstand my argument. I was not arguing that the guy from London and the guy from Liverpool must sound exactly the same. Far from it. My point was that even though there are clear and well defined distinctions, multiple accents (or fruits) may be justifiably lumped together based on their similarities.
It is plainly not the case that these accents are "completely different". They are after all all speaking the same language. Even if your well trained ear finds the comparison ludicrous, an untrained ear won't pick up on those differences.
For example. To a trained apple eater a Red Delicious is "completely different" from a Granny Smith. One's sweet, the other's tart. One's mealy, the other is firm. Yet any 5 year old can tell they're both apples.
So yes, the OP was ignorant when he said "british accent", but there's nothing wrong with that. There's so much information in the world that everyone is ignorant about almost everything. Have you ever complained about a help-desker with an indian accent? Did it ever occur to you that in a country as big and as old as india there will be many different dialects and accents? Can you distinguish between a Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Colombian, and Chilean accents? Can you tell which borough a New Yorker is from just from his accent? No? Well, that's ignorance.
But it's not stupidity. Stupidity is an inability to understand things. Like the fact that distinct things can have similarities.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The same language? Have a listen to a glaswegian, and see what you think then.
Whenever (and wherever) I've been in the US, most people seem convinced that I'm either from Australia or New Zealand (which I'm not - I'm from the UK - East Midlands, and outside the US have never had my accent mistaken for an Aussie).
I get the feeling that most Americans seems to be able to distinguish between US and non-US accents, and that's about it.
But then, most Brits I know couldn't tell the difference between an Aussie or a Kiwi accent.
Joe Llywelyn Griffith Blakesley
[This post is in the public domain (copyright-free) unless otherwise stated]
> "British accent"? Which particular accent is that? Irish? Scottish?
> Welsh? Scouse? Geordie? Cockney? Werzel? Mancunian? See how meaningless
> the phrase "British accent" is?
No, there's a particular accent we mean when we say "British accent" over
here. I don't know what it's called over there, or which part of Britain
it's from. It's definitely not Cockney, and it's also not Welsh, Irish,
or Scottish, nor is it the mumbly speech of BBC commentators. There's a
certain accent that is meant. Those others we call by their specific names,
but the one in question we just call a British accent or sometimes we also
call it an English accent. (The words "English" and "British" are used
_mostly_ interchangeably over here, although I've never heard the English
Channel called the British Channel. It's not that we don't know the
difference (okay, some people don't, but that's another matter); we just
don't feel the need to make the distinction most of the time.)
Similarly, the phrase "Southern accent" doesn't mean "any accent from south
of here". A Jamaican accent is a Jamacian accent, and a Texan accent is a
Texan accent, and New Orleans has its own peculiarities, but a Southern accent
is the one spoken in Georgia and the Carolinas (among other states).
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Ey up mi duck, owya goin? It's black ovver bill's movvers. :`)
'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes'
For ages I've been waiting to see if there's an advert more annoying than the man yelling on the Savestyle UK ad. Fair to say this one passes with flying colours, I'm glad it's in the past!
mplayer can play WMVs.
286-DOS
Funny yet horrible at the same time.
Funny thing, I was cleaning out my home office and came across my original box of "The Norton AntiVirus" Version 1.0. From the box "Runs under MS/DOS (PC/DOS) 2.1 or higher". "Includes both 3 1/2 and 5 1/4 disks" WooHoo!
Wonder if I can still get updates for it....
And if memory serves this was when wave after wave of Mac viruses shut down the computing labs at colleges within minutes. -- It's true-- usually the virus was carried by floppy by a student, unknowingly, moving from macine to machine as each one died. it would take about 10 minutes for a lab of 50 machines to be useless.
Wouldn't Corbis change the description to something more suitable for Gates' current status? When Microsoft bought Funk and Wagnels encyclopedia and made it into Encarta, one of the items that was changed was the entry for Gates. It was made much more flattering than it originally was.
The film is just me in front of a brick wall for an hour and a half. It cost $80 million.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
/. used to have REAL problems with MS - namely, bad technologies and bad security attached to them.
I think the editors here got themselves stuck in the "hate MS" rut - there's nothing newsworthy about MS here. And it's been consistent, too.
Yeah, there's the usual "MS has security updates! They must suck that much!" headline, but the last 3 MS headlines I saw were about (1) bashing a tech EVERYONE knew sucked, (2) showing B.G. posing for some spread, and now this.
Maybe the next newsworthy headline will be when I make a site and put up the MonkeyBoy videos.
i'm amazed that i survived - an airbag saved my life.
I'm thinking that Steve was a big fan of Andy Kauffman. Actually, maybe he gets a Starbucks espresso enema to get as much caffeine as possible...
Developers Developers Developers Developers!!
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
I'm plenty old enough. There were hundreds of DOS based viruses. And hundreds of Mac based viruses. And no Unix viruses (to my knowledge).
And absolutely no Windows based viruses. The virus writers never bothered to write viruses that could infect Windows executables.
The root cause of all of those viruses? File swapping on dial up BBSs. They weren't self propogating, the user had to install them.
gl4ss: My point exactly - there were no Windows viruses.
So a Windows advertisement wouldn't mention them.
Would you expect a Mac advertisement to advertise all the Mac init viruses that went around then? In 1985, viruses were a far bigger problem for Mac users than they were for PC users (Mac users seemed to download stuff from BBS systems more than PC users did - mostly little system utilities etc).
Ballmer has been a jackass for more than 15 years. Big surprise. I did notice that the price for windows was $99.00USD. Nice to see that they've held firm to one price structure for the last 15 years. (:p)
-Goran
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
I feel dirty now...tainted...
I didn't finish watching it, and deleted it as fast as I can...but, unfortunately, that image will be forever burned into my retinas, and that shrill voice will forever ring in my ears...
Why did I ever click on that?
This clip once again proves my theory that Bill Gates hates Nebraska.
Education is the silver bullet.
Slim shady, If you watch the video in a small window...
Only proves that Balmer has always been obnoxious. He has no style, no charisma and is NOT funny !
It was the required program loader for Solitaire!
That which does not kill her only prolongs my agony.
Man, I know how some folks hate change, but, holding onto a circa 1994 program is a little extreme. What kinds of programs are we talking about here?
I'm not tense. I'm just terribly, terribly, alert.
Quite a few install programs for the first year or two of Windows 95 used those interfaces to create program groups (i.e, Start menu folders). Newer software from small firms using old installshield versions and similar stuff probably did the same still around 98-99. Suddenly, it doesn't seem that old.
In fact, the most expensive stuff was writing text to the screen. By manipulating the B000 (monochrome) or B800 (color) memory segments directly, even from C or Turbo Pascal, you could get far superior performance in stuff like scrolling in text editors and other screen refreshes, which affects the user experience quite significantly. I can imagine assembly was more useful for something like Lotus where the actual calculations could be sloooow back in the days, though. Just wanted to point out that I think that hardware manipulation for central routines was more common than writing it in assembly.
windows wasn't an OS back then :)
and still isn't!
You're lucky. I was born in Kentucky and people mistake me for having an Australian accent. In Kentucky. I suspect the "accent" for me is simply that I clearly enunciate my words and in a lot of peoples' minds, that means "foreign."
This sig has absolutely no significance and serves only to take up screen space and waste the time of the reader.