If we care about preserving our history for future generations to study (if we didn't care, this wouldn't be an issue at all), then it's important to preserve all data, or as much data as possible.
'All' is a pretty expensive word to be using the way you did.
Are you saying that nobody should delete their spam, because someday historians might want to sift through the spam to learn it's historical significance? I guess everybody will just need to put out their old hard drive and put it in the closet and get a new one every time their computer becomes 'full' because there's no delete function in their email client anymore, now that the preservationists are enforcing the new 'retention for history' laws.
It's very VERY important to prioritize what is kept. Othewise you lose the signal in a swamp of noise. It's ridiculous to assert that 'we have no way of knowing what will be important.' The whole meaning of human culture is the gathering of knowledge and wisdom, not just piling up information somewhere.
Basically, if we want to present an accurate picture of our world for future generations to understand and learn from
It's very narcissistic to assume future generations will want to understand and learn from EVERYTHING to do with our culture. There's tons of stuff well worth forgetting.
The practice of an ignorant person would be to 'hold onto absolutely every record we can.'
The practice of a more educated person would be: 'rank and prioritize. keep what is important. but KNOW what is important.'
We can't just dedicate an ever-increasing amount of our resources to stockpiling more and more and ever more collected detris and information so that some day a century from now some Scientist will have 'raw data' to root through and justify his grant funding by sorting through.
Information hoarding is Ignorant. It's that simple.
Well, from the point of view of historians, perhaps it should be preserved. But it doesn't _need_ to be preserved. We can't look backward forever, and indeed, in order to move forward we need to be able to let go of parts of the past that don't matter. I don't hear of anybody who is stockpiling all the unsolicited junk mail they receive. Is anybody archiving all the spam email they get? What if a historican fifty years from now _needs_ that spam to study our culture of today. Maybe we need to assign a few of the 'keep all information, forever' zealots to guard the archives of penis enlargement spam from 2004.
I know how the thinking goes, because I am pretty anal myself about keeping copies and records of everything. I recently shredded a bunch of financial papers going back a decade, because it wasn't necessary to keep them any longer. You can easily lose the important stuff if you try to keep _everything_ so the important thing is to prioritize what you retain and keep it well.
The notion that 'modern mainstream culture needs to be preserved' sounds a little desperate, in a way. Like the kind of thing a narcissist would insist. Like, uhhh, you'd feel less important if someone pointed out that lots of it is totally irrelevant drivel? A few samples of it can be canned and put away so people in the future can check back and say 'yeah, it was terrible, wasn't it?' and move on to something important.
Yes, yes, I know. We can't possible decide what will be important in the future. So we need to stockpile and hoard and keep everything forever. Unfortunately such practices will insure that the future does NOT happen. I guess we can all just listen to Beatles albums, since all the resources are being used up to preserve them, and nobody can afford musical instruments now.
Okay, so the decoders are 'free' and the masses can watch their TeeVee and listen to pop tunes. I find it troubling that apparently the encoders aren't free. So what you're saying is that anybody can play 'em back for cheap, but there's an artificial 'royalty' type of cost to produce and distribute content. And not just a cost, but a licensing requirement. Hmmmm, that sounds a lot like some of the older technologies which sorta held a monopoly on content production in the past....
Communications is a two-way process. Any open codec has to go both ways openly and for free. Though I guess people who own Apple stock might not agree.
Linux and *BSD give me the maximum amount of freedom to do this. Apple comes in a solid second. Microsoft is as low on this list as is mathematically possible to get.
Correction:
Microsoft openly opposes the idea of Free Software and Open Source.
Apple is being like Sun and some of the other companies: they are 'embracing' a degree of 'Open Source' because they're not big enough to fight against it any other way.
It's not that big a difference, and it's certainly NOT a case of good versus evil.
attempting to keep the core of their own platform open and devoid of ridiculous activation methods
Not hardly. Apple uses one of the most obnoxious copy protection schemes in the business. A hardware dongle. (an arbitrary bit of hardware that severely restricts where their software will run)
You keep making that comment, over and over and over. Do you have a cite? Why are you not linking your cite in each comment?
Is it possible that you're one of the other teams in an Apple 'triagulation' effort? There are plenty of shills for Apple on this site and I don't doubt that a few of them are paid. Hope you're not one of the unpaid suckers.
Yes. Apple is more evil, or at least on parity, with Microsoft.
This isn't the mid 1990's any longer. We don't have to fall for the idea that there are two poles, Microsoft and Apple, and that we must 'choose sides' between them and pick one or the other.
you're okay with Microsoft ripping the entire UI off and making a few cosmetic changes? You don't mind one company shamelessly ripping off another?
Apple were right to sue then, and only a lack of fortitude on their part lost the case.
Actually, if you look at the actual history of the period and not just the 'Microsoft vs. Apple' rewrite of things, you will discover that Microsoft was the entity that finally stood up to Apple's legal operation and won. Prior to the Microsoft/Hewlett-Packard NewWave case, Apple had already run all the other PC clone GUI vendors out of the market. There were several other competing GUI layers for MS-DOS machines, including GEM, and Apple's legal muscle ran them out of the business.
In effect, what Apple did was clear the floor so that Windows could take over the entire GUI market on the x86 platform. Uhhh, thanks Apple.
They were and are a pack of festering lawers and 'Intellectual Property' profiteers. Don't some of you still REMEMBER the position that Free Software folks took against Apple back in the day? There are essays by Stallman on the topic that seemlingly few people remember. It wasn't any different than the kind of position the FSF still takes today. Apple's operation is just as repulsive today.
Apple has always been about proprietary, closed in, locked down platforms.
Not really. They only became that with the introduction of the Mac. The Apple ][ was rather open. I think Jobs felt 'burned' by the Apple ][ cloners and that was when the company changed. I know for a fact that at the Macintosh product launch when Jobs got up at the lectern (at a National Press Club speech broadcast on NPR if I am remembering correctly) and boasted that the Mac was a sealed-unit box that was 'hacker proof' (and in 1984, the common usage of 'hacker' was different- he _did_ mean Us when he said that,) that he made enemies of a lot of us.
So let's just say Apple has been closed proprietary locked-down platforms since about 1983.
It's stupid because Apple has long tried to market itself as different than MS, more progressive than MS, and honestly, until relatively recently they've done a damn fine job of it.
Well, they've done a good job of 'marketing' themselves as such. A tremendous job, if you look behind the veneer at what Apple really is. But is it a tautology for me to say a company whose main business thrust is hype and appearances does a good job of marketing that fact?
I use a Bittorrent client that runs on curses. No fancy-schmancy Tcl for me!
(it never crashes, and I have this creeping suspicion from how other clients have been running lately that anti-torrent forces are exploiting bugs in torrent clients to crash them. Like in any thing else, the all-singing all-dancing graphical 'goodies' lead to instability)
Perhaps you could more accurately say that this provides for a single-chip PC architecture.
Indeed. When you translate the jargon 'chipset' that is exactly what it means.
I am not sure what you mean 'manually controlled DRAM refresh' though. There was additional hardware, made up of TTL gates, for that function, on machines before the 'chipset' market took off. For example, the IBM PC-XT, the PC-AT and the earliest 'full AT footprint' clone motherboards generally did this, with big bunches of 74xx TTL gates. I don't consider that the processor doing something 'manually', it is actually just completely separate hardware doing the task. I have examples of those motherboards in my collection, and in additon all the schematics for all of it in my collection of Tech Ref Manuals.
The 'chipsets' brought this all into proprietary large scale chips and ushered in the era of the 'Baby-AT' motherboard (dramatically reduced size from the Full-AT layout.)
Probably the earliest example of 'integrated' x86 chip design was the 80186 and 80188, which brought a bunch of the functions of the 8088 processor on-chip, for embedded applications.
I think you're asking about the 80186 and the 80188, which have had a long history in embedded use. They're not particularly popular anymore. They'd match your laptop if you still use a Toshiba 1000SE, of course.
Similar parallel offerings from Intel were the 80196 line.
Most people never write ASM code for 'big' processors. The little 8-bitters (6502, Z-80, 6809/11) are little ponds by comparison to the 'lakes' that bigger processors (68000, 8086, etc.) represent. In the 'classic' period the home computers used the little 8-bit parts, so most people who started hacking ASM as kids played with these machines. Processors with pipelines, etc. are more complicated. You just don't hear kids hearkening back to the time when they hacked ASM on their PCs the way they did on Commies and Apples. By the time the PC was affordable enough for kid-hackers to get them to play around on, there were Turbo Pascal and similar beasts to code with.
If you have the bare processor to work with, and can implement it however you want, i.e. you don't need to map it into some arcane IBM-PC clone thing, the x86 processor has some neat features for small-model coding. You can, for example, use the segmenting features as an advantage. I am talking about the 'classic' x86 model, i.e. the 8086 and the 80286. And Assembly Language, of course. Segmentation is pretty cool when you use it that way. However, most programmers are terrified of environments where they don't have system calls and libraries to rely on.
But if you use the processor the way IBM kludged it for the IBM-PC many of these features are lost, let alone if you write mere applications for an 'OS' that (usually badly) uses the 'x86 processor. Features in the '286 and '386 were ignored for decades by people running DOS and the 'doze. Early on there were some (a few) cool Unix boxes that used the '286 and protected mode 'correctly' as the Intel engineers apparently intended, not as the 'fast 8088' that most people ever used it as.
Well, this discussion appears to be about an 'x86 Chipset,' not an x86 processor. Which means more than just the processor. So there is an 'x86 architecture.' If there wasn't, this topic would be meaningless.
I run NetBSD on the desktop. Please, oh please, don't tell me that I'm obsessed with running an OS with 'lots of market share.' I could care less what OS junk other people run. My chosen 'desktop' OS gets along fine with it's *huge* market share. It doesn't matter a wit to me if a bunch of the rest of you make other choices.
And you've missed the point that the Apple hardware is a specific narrow range of devices. Much more narrow than the typical 'PC Clone' arrangement. There are fewer permutations of components, so it's easier to develop well-integrated driver support.
Whew. Too many buzzwords in above. In plain English:
There isn't much/any variation in the hardware. You have a MacBook model xxx, everybody knows what's in it.
Well, the Apple hardware base is a narrow platform with very few variations. There are magnitudes fewer permutations of hardware combinations for a Macbook than there are for, say, a typical Dell laptop. It's not surprising that a tightly integrated narrow platform like a Macbook works well. I mean, even something like MacOS runs pretty good if the hardware it's required to run on is limited enough. It would be like if there was a Linux distro with a well-funded development team who wrote their distro for a specific narrow range of hardware, all of which they had full specs for. I'd venture further that if the hardware specs from Apple were totally opened up, nothing would run better on Apple's hardware than Linux. Apple's main protection for their OS is the trade secrets of their hardware.
But is Microsoft even _capable_ of adding DirectX 10 to XP? Microsoft is a 'look forward' company and they throw away code bases and start over with every release. Backwards compatability is only important in a check-list fashion, i.e. 'does xxx binary application still work in regression tests?' Then they go in and add whatever kludge makes xxx binary work on the new OS codebase and the bloat grows and grows.
I imagine they've already coded DirectX 10 to well past the point where it could be merged back into XP. That's the Microsoft Way!
My main concern would be driver support. Is shiney-new Vista hardware coming out that has no driver support for XP? I would expect that to be used as a lever to force people onto Vista, sooner or later. Those screws have started to be turned to try to force some of us off W2K now.
Ever since Bill Gates had to add a chapter about the Internet (Internet? It'll never catch on!) to his book The Road Ahead,
Microsoft really didn't plan on the Internet becoming the phenomena that it has been.
I was a beta user of Windows 95. Microsoft had MSN (the proprietary Microsoft Network, not the 'MSN' of today which is just a layer on the Internet) deeply built into Windows 95. Pre-release of Windows 95 if you had a beta of Win95 installed, you had free no-limits dialup access to MSN, which was like the AOL or CompuServ of the time, an 'Online Service.' There was a gateway to the Internet in MSN, though. I mostly used the MSN service to download stuff for Linux. I'm sure I am not the only person whose first Linux experience was through off-line things like the InfoMagic CD sets, before there was much off-campus high speed 'net access. MSN was a godsend for me at the time. Cheap bandwidth to download Linux stuff! Not really what Billy had in mind, I don't think...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh come on! Somebody, somewhere, once downloaded a Debian .iso image with bittorrent. So it's completely legitimate.
'All' is a pretty expensive word to be using the way you did.
Are you saying that nobody should delete their spam, because someday historians might want to sift through the spam to learn it's historical significance? I guess everybody will just need to put out their old hard drive and put it in the closet and get a new one every time their computer becomes 'full' because there's no delete function in their email client anymore, now that the preservationists are enforcing the new 'retention for history' laws.
It's very VERY important to prioritize what is kept. Othewise you lose the signal in a swamp of noise. It's ridiculous to assert that 'we have no way of knowing what will be important.' The whole meaning of human culture is the gathering of knowledge and wisdom, not just piling up information somewhere.
It's very narcissistic to assume future generations will want to understand and learn from EVERYTHING to do with our culture. There's tons of stuff well worth forgetting.
arguments from ignorance rarely hold any water.
The practice of an ignorant person would be to 'hold onto absolutely every record we can.'
The practice of a more educated person would be: 'rank and prioritize. keep what is important. but KNOW what is important.'
We can't just dedicate an ever-increasing amount of our resources to stockpiling more and more and ever more collected detris and information so that some day a century from now some Scientist will have 'raw data' to root through and justify his grant funding by sorting through.
Information hoarding is Ignorant. It's that simple.
Well, from the point of view of historians, perhaps it should be preserved. But it doesn't _need_ to be preserved. We can't look backward forever, and indeed, in order to move forward we need to be able to let go of parts of the past that don't matter. I don't hear of anybody who is stockpiling all the unsolicited junk mail they receive. Is anybody archiving all the spam email they get? What if a historican fifty years from now _needs_ that spam to study our culture of today. Maybe we need to assign a few of the 'keep all information, forever' zealots to guard the archives of penis enlargement spam from 2004.
I know how the thinking goes, because I am pretty anal myself about keeping copies and records of everything. I recently shredded a bunch of financial papers going back a decade, because it wasn't necessary to keep them any longer. You can easily lose the important stuff if you try to keep _everything_ so the important thing is to prioritize what you retain and keep it well.
The notion that 'modern mainstream culture needs to be preserved' sounds a little desperate, in a way. Like the kind of thing a narcissist would insist. Like, uhhh, you'd feel less important if someone pointed out that lots of it is totally irrelevant drivel? A few samples of it can be canned and put away so people in the future can check back and say 'yeah, it was terrible, wasn't it?' and move on to something important.
Yes, yes, I know. We can't possible decide what will be important in the future. So we need to stockpile and hoard and keep everything forever. Unfortunately such practices will insure that the future does NOT happen. I guess we can all just listen to Beatles albums, since all the resources are being used up to preserve them, and nobody can afford musical instruments now.
Okay, so the decoders are 'free' and the masses can watch their TeeVee and listen to pop tunes. I find it troubling that apparently the encoders aren't free. So what you're saying is that anybody can play 'em back for cheap, but there's an artificial 'royalty' type of cost to produce and distribute content. And not just a cost, but a licensing requirement. Hmmmm, that sounds a lot like some of the older technologies which sorta held a monopoly on content production in the past....
Communications is a two-way process. Any open codec has to go both ways openly and for free. Though I guess people who own Apple stock might not agree.
Correction:
Microsoft openly opposes the idea of Free Software and Open Source.
Apple is being like Sun and some of the other companies: they are 'embracing' a degree of 'Open Source' because they're not big enough to fight against it any other way.
It's not that big a difference, and it's certainly NOT a case of good versus evil.
attempting to keep the core of their own platform open and devoid of ridiculous activation methods
Not hardly. Apple uses one of the most obnoxious copy protection schemes in the business. A hardware dongle. (an arbitrary bit of hardware that severely restricts where their software will run)
You keep making that comment, over and over and over. Do you have a cite? Why are you not linking your cite in each comment?
Is it possible that you're one of the other teams in an Apple 'triagulation' effort? There are plenty of shills for Apple on this site and I don't doubt that a few of them are paid. Hope you're not one of the unpaid suckers.
Yes. Apple is more evil, or at least on parity, with Microsoft.
This isn't the mid 1990's any longer. We don't have to fall for the idea that there are two poles, Microsoft and Apple, and that we must 'choose sides' between them and pick one or the other.
They're both repulsive in their own ways.
Actually, if you look at the actual history of the period and not just the 'Microsoft vs. Apple' rewrite of things, you will discover that Microsoft was the entity that finally stood up to Apple's legal operation and won. Prior to the Microsoft/Hewlett-Packard NewWave case, Apple had already run all the other PC clone GUI vendors out of the market. There were several other competing GUI layers for MS-DOS machines, including GEM, and Apple's legal muscle ran them out of the business.
In effect, what Apple did was clear the floor so that Windows could take over the entire GUI market on the x86 platform. Uhhh, thanks Apple.
They were and are a pack of festering lawers and 'Intellectual Property' profiteers. Don't some of you still REMEMBER the position that Free Software folks took against Apple back in the day? There are essays by Stallman on the topic that seemlingly few people remember. It wasn't any different than the kind of position the FSF still takes today. Apple's operation is just as repulsive today.
Apple has always been about proprietary, closed in, locked down platforms.
Not really. They only became that with the introduction of the Mac. The Apple ][ was rather open. I think Jobs felt 'burned' by the Apple ][ cloners and that was when the company changed. I know for a fact that at the Macintosh product launch when Jobs got up at the lectern (at a National Press Club speech broadcast on NPR if I am remembering correctly) and boasted that the Mac was a sealed-unit box that was 'hacker proof' (and in 1984, the common usage of 'hacker' was different- he _did_ mean Us when he said that,) that he made enemies of a lot of us.
So let's just say Apple has been closed proprietary locked-down platforms since about 1983.
It's stupid because Apple has long tried to market itself as different than MS, more progressive than MS, and honestly, until relatively recently they've done a damn fine job of it.
Well, they've done a good job of 'marketing' themselves as such. A tremendous job, if you look behind the veneer at what Apple really is. But is it a tautology for me to say a company whose main business thrust is hype and appearances does a good job of marketing that fact?
I use a Bittorrent client that runs on curses. No fancy-schmancy Tcl for me!
(it never crashes, and I have this creeping suspicion from how other clients have been running lately that anti-torrent forces are exploiting bugs in torrent clients to crash them. Like in any thing else, the all-singing all-dancing graphical 'goodies' lead to instability)
Perhaps you could more accurately say that this provides for a single-chip PC architecture.
Indeed. When you translate the jargon 'chipset' that is exactly what it means.
I am not sure what you mean 'manually controlled DRAM refresh' though. There was additional hardware, made up of TTL gates, for that function, on machines before the 'chipset' market took off. For example, the IBM PC-XT, the PC-AT and the earliest 'full AT footprint' clone motherboards generally did this, with big bunches of 74xx TTL gates. I don't consider that the processor doing something 'manually', it is actually just completely separate hardware doing the task. I have examples of those motherboards in my collection, and in additon all the schematics for all of it in my collection of Tech Ref Manuals.
The 'chipsets' brought this all into proprietary large scale chips and ushered in the era of the 'Baby-AT' motherboard (dramatically reduced size from the Full-AT layout.)
Probably the earliest example of 'integrated' x86 chip design was the 80186 and 80188, which brought a bunch of the functions of the 8088 processor on-chip, for embedded applications.
I think you're asking about the 80186 and the 80188, which have had a long history in embedded use. They're not particularly popular anymore. They'd match your laptop if you still use a Toshiba 1000SE, of course.
Similar parallel offerings from Intel were the 80196 line.
Most people never write ASM code for 'big' processors. The little 8-bitters (6502, Z-80, 6809/11) are little ponds by comparison to the 'lakes' that bigger processors (68000, 8086, etc.) represent. In the 'classic' period the home computers used the little 8-bit parts, so most people who started hacking ASM as kids played with these machines. Processors with pipelines, etc. are more complicated. You just don't hear kids hearkening back to the time when they hacked ASM on their PCs the way they did on Commies and Apples. By the time the PC was affordable enough for kid-hackers to get them to play around on, there were Turbo Pascal and similar beasts to code with.
If you have the bare processor to work with, and can implement it however you want, i.e. you don't need to map it into some arcane IBM-PC clone thing, the x86 processor has some neat features for small-model coding. You can, for example, use the segmenting features as an advantage. I am talking about the 'classic' x86 model, i.e. the 8086 and the 80286. And Assembly Language, of course. Segmentation is pretty cool when you use it that way. However, most programmers are terrified of environments where they don't have system calls and libraries to rely on.
But if you use the processor the way IBM kludged it for the IBM-PC many of these features are lost, let alone if you write mere applications for an 'OS' that (usually badly) uses the 'x86 processor. Features in the '286 and '386 were ignored for decades by people running DOS and the 'doze. Early on there were some (a few) cool Unix boxes that used the '286 and protected mode 'correctly' as the Intel engineers apparently intended, not as the 'fast 8088' that most people ever used it as.
Well, this discussion appears to be about an 'x86 Chipset,' not an x86 processor. Which means more than just the processor. So there is an 'x86 architecture.' If there wasn't, this topic would be meaningless.
I run NetBSD on the desktop. Please, oh please, don't tell me that I'm obsessed with running an OS with 'lots of market share.' I could care less what OS junk other people run. My chosen 'desktop' OS gets along fine with it's *huge* market share. It doesn't matter a wit to me if a bunch of the rest of you make other choices.
And you've missed the point that the Apple hardware is a specific narrow range of devices. Much more narrow than the typical 'PC Clone' arrangement. There are fewer permutations of components, so it's easier to develop well-integrated driver support.
Whew. Too many buzzwords in above. In plain English:
There isn't much/any variation in the hardware. You have a MacBook model xxx, everybody knows what's in it.
Well, the Apple hardware base is a narrow platform with very few variations. There are magnitudes fewer permutations of hardware combinations for a Macbook than there are for, say, a typical Dell laptop. It's not surprising that a tightly integrated narrow platform like a Macbook works well. I mean, even something like MacOS runs pretty good if the hardware it's required to run on is limited enough. It would be like if there was a Linux distro with a well-funded development team who wrote their distro for a specific narrow range of hardware, all of which they had full specs for. I'd venture further that if the hardware specs from Apple were totally opened up, nothing would run better on Apple's hardware than Linux. Apple's main protection for their OS is the trade secrets of their hardware.
But is Microsoft even _capable_ of adding DirectX 10 to XP? Microsoft is a 'look forward' company and they throw away code bases and start over with every release. Backwards compatability is only important in a check-list fashion, i.e. 'does xxx binary application still work in regression tests?' Then they go in and add whatever kludge makes xxx binary work on the new OS codebase and the bloat grows and grows.
I imagine they've already coded DirectX 10 to well past the point where it could be merged back into XP. That's the Microsoft Way!
That's a good point. We should not consider PCs sold by Dell with Ubuntu preinstalled as part of the Linux market share.
The only people who seem highly concerned with said 'market share' figures are Microsoft types. The rest of us just use what works.
Which happens to not be Vista at this time. It's a great time to explore alternatives.
My main concern would be driver support. Is shiney-new Vista hardware coming out that has no driver support for XP? I would expect that to be used as a lever to force people onto Vista, sooner or later. Those screws have started to be turned to try to force some of us off W2K now.
Microsoft really didn't plan on the Internet becoming the phenomena that it has been.
I was a beta user of Windows 95. Microsoft had MSN (the proprietary Microsoft Network, not the 'MSN' of today which is just a layer on the Internet) deeply built into Windows 95. Pre-release of Windows 95 if you had a beta of Win95 installed, you had free no-limits dialup access to MSN, which was like the AOL or CompuServ of the time, an 'Online Service.' There was a gateway to the Internet in MSN, though. I mostly used the MSN service to download stuff for Linux. I'm sure I am not the only person whose first Linux experience was through off-line things like the InfoMagic CD sets, before there was much off-campus high speed 'net access. MSN was a godsend for me at the time. Cheap bandwidth to download Linux stuff! Not really what Billy had in mind, I don't think...