Microsoft introduced MEMMAKER into DOS 6.x solely as a reaction to the introduction of a similar utility into DR-DOS. To claim that Microsoft did this to get QEMM infers that DR-DOS had the same reason.
Brett was probably referring to EMM386.EXE and not MEMMAKER. QEMM was an expanded memory manager not a configurator.
And I must agree with Brett it was a shame for QuarterDeck to pass on that way. DESQView could run multiple "simulated" x86 environments on your 386. Each one was lightning quick, was windowed inside DESQView/X, and you could even have remote X11 applications displaying side by side with a DOS box. I remember the classic example was Win-3 in a window with an xterm on the same desktop.
A "real" admin would get on the various security lists, go through the MS checklists, apply the high-security template, and download the scripts that Microsoft used to help secure their own W2K webservers.
No, the install should simply be secure by default. I would apply the same standard to Linux distributions, and they often fail the test. Microsoft isn't alone here but I don't think this makes it "right". It just makes it common.
Re:Borders in the Stellar Theme Park??
on
Tito In Space
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· Score: 2
I find it unsettling that Slashdotters have the mentality of 'free or die' and 'bad, bad profit-mongers!' and still end up saying "You can't fund such a project unless you can be sure you will make a profit"
I find it ANNOYING that more and more often I see statements like this. You saw one person say one thing, and a different person say something else, then you used the faulty logic that because they both posted on a common website that there's only one person (!) with two contradicting views.
And even if you do manage to find an individual who can't think clearly enough to make statements without contradicting themselves, this doesn't mean all "Slashdotters" think the same way.
I'm getting sick of the "Slashdot people think this" or "Slashdot people are this" stupidity. I don't want my individuality erased because you're too lazy to use your common sense.
Are we heading the same way as we did with open source email clients? Search on freshmeat and you can take your pick of a couple of hundred crap(*) mail clients, and maybe 2 or 3 good ones. And it seems we don't go a week without yet another open source media player (streaming or otherwise). Wouldn't it be more effective if all these projects were to merge and have a large number of developers working together?
Sure, but what direction should this merged project take? You say there are only 2 or 3 "good ones" in the email clients section of freshmeat, and I agree, but I doubt your 2 or 3 are the same as my 2 or 3.
What is best? What you like? What some author dictates? What Microsoft says we'll all have? The concept of "best" is personal. For example I use VIM and MUTT, and I think this pair is the "best" combo possible, but I don't think everyone would agree with me.
Having 100 projects gives you choice, and this can be painful, but I'd rather have 100 projects that will make 100 people happy than 1 monolithic "best" project that makes nobody happy.
I have a feeling Neverwinter Nights will be huge, esp in the Linux crowd since a lot of us are Role-Players.
Says who? Since when did you become the expert on the social strata of the "Linux crowd"?
Sheesh.
Re:3000' wide base, 3700' tall ...
on
First Arcology?
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· Score: 2
That is a classic case of the triumph of reality of simulation. For those who don't know the London Millenium Bridge is a new type of bridge - horizontal suspension. The architects and engineers extensively modelled it and worked out that it would perform within acceptable design parameters. What they missed was that when people walk across the bridge they exert a vertical force (the foot going down) and a horizontal one (which is usually small, and therefore usually unimportant).
What is most important is that the designers and engineers reckon it can be fixed with only minimal modifications.
As you say, this is a new bridge design. The Bridge Building Literature had very little to say about this kind of problem, because no bridges before had ever had this kind of problem. Keep in mind the huge problems with the first suspension bridges in the early 1900s: I'm sure everybody has seen the films of the bridge swaying metres side to side before it collapses into the river.
Engineers like to build things, watch them break, and only then figure out why. I think that's why Engineers like lego so much...
It looks to me that with the X-box being a simply a PIII 700 with a GeForce 3, 64MB of Ram and 32 MB of video texture RAM, as well as Ethernet and USB I.O, that the hardware alone will sufficiently beat a PS2. The Playstation 2 lacks ethernet out, has only 8MB of texture and 38MB of system RAM. and firewire/USB out.
If you're the kind of person who judges the speed of a computer based on the "MHz" then sure, you'll think the X-Box is better hardware.
The PS2 is a completely different design. It has 10 dma channels with multiply-accumulate on the data stream, 3 vector processors configurable at runtime, and bus bandwidth that makes last years mainframes look rather average. It's a 2560 bit bus!
PS2 is doing everything correctly from a 3d streaming point of view: huge pipes and small buckets. The PC design that the X-Box uses is a flawed design: small pipes and huge buckets.
This isn't to say the X-Box gets lackluster performance. It's actually impressive. But it's a forced design. They compensate for the bad PC design by throwing more local texture memory onto the video processor, exploiting video processor features to avoid using the system processor, and generally doing everything they can to avoid the limited PC bus.
The struggle PS2 has is (a) people like you, judging computers based on mostly irrelevant figures like MHz and (b) games for the PS2 must be written to take into consideration the unique design.
Linux will continue to get better, but there is harm in thinking that you can keep it all to yourself.
Who said anything about keeping it to myself? The whole point of Linux is that everyone can use it, share it, enjoy it, participate.
If they choose not to participate, then it is THEIR LOSS. But that doesn't affect me. Drivers? I won't get *less* drivers if they don't want to join in. You seem to believe not having something is a loss, even though you didn't have that same thing before! That's not a loss: that's called a break-even situation.
So let the "Linux is a toy" people enjoy their brief feelings of superiority. In 12 months time half of them will probably be using Linux. In 24 months time they'll be wondering how they got by with the crap they used before.
I know that "Linux is yesterday's technology" is bullshit. I know that "Linux is a toy OS is bullshit." So let's not encourage anything that would lead people to think otherwise, mmmkay?
Who cares what other people think? Linux will still be there. People who care will still write code for it. Linux will continue to get better. Anyone who doesn't use it is losing out but it's their loss, not yours.
Leave well enough alone. I want games. I don't have Windows at all, and I don't even have very modern hardware (still using a celeron 1), so I don't care if I have to play older games. In fact I prefer it. I'd rather get the cream of the crop than have to wade through the mountains of shit, like the Windows gamers have to do.
Huzzah for Loki. I've bought all your releases so far and I'm buying the next two right now.
Idrema should change its business model. Create a hardware spec that says, in so many words, that if you have the following hardware, you can run our software. If you run our software, all you have to do is buy a CD with the game on it, mount it in your drive, and it will play with no hassles.
Hahaha, so they can repeat the brilliant success of the 3DO, perhaps?
Yeah, that really annoyed me about the Mission Impossible movies. The Mission Impossible TV series (though lame) was at least always a team effort with everyones skills coming together to pulloff some brilliant result.
The movies, on the other hand, were just lame attempts to clone the James Bond concept. One massively skilled dude who does everything single handedly and ends up saving the day for all the weaklings around him.
You're not wrong. The Matrix is not, never was, and never will be, a movie about hackers. It's an entertaining movie, very comic-book like, and has enough special effects and action to make it one of the better sci-fi/action/fantasy films. But the sci-fi plot it's based on is as old as the hills and it doesn't have any intellectual depth. And I won't harp on some of the more ridiculous plot-based premises (human batteries!?). How the hell The Matrix made it into a list of "hacker" inspired movies is simply beyond belief.
I've been looking for schematics for a Roland Jupiter-4 (circa 1978) which has a broken fourth voice (doesn't do resonance). Haven't found free versions online: only pay-for versions which are photocopies so therefore useless (the schematics need colour to be read).
I've found some useful information before but the WWW isn't perfect. If someone sends me a URL for Roland Jupiter-4 schematics then I'll eat my words, of course!
XOR aim.exe with the libfaim library file and save the result as a data file. When AOL requests a checksum, XOR the section of the data file with the library file to calculate the checksum and send the back result to AOL. Simple.
But all you're doing is encrypting aim.exe with libfaim.so as the one-time-pad. If you send this encrypted aim.exe.xor with instructions (in code) to use libfaim.so as the pad, then this is no different to gzip'ing aim.exe and sending copies of aim.exe.gz around along with the (implied) instructions to gunzip it. You're still going to be infringing copyright if you do this.
Anyone who pays that much for dialup is a fool, when you can get unmetered cable (abliet 400kbit/sec) can get it for a mere AUS$75 p/m.
You're an ass. There is no cable in Gunghalin, Canberra until 2003. And the $75/month ADSL from Telstra *is* limited. They just claim that is an unlimited ADSL but they "warn" you for exceeding arbitrary limits (the yellow/red card system).
$42.50/month 56k modem is the best option I've got available. Just because you live in Melbourne or Sydney, where ADSL is common, doesn't mean the rest of the country is as lucky as you.
Dude, if you're advertising your homepage, at least you should make sure it has something besides just the default Apache "no web page configured" screen.
Seriously, though, who the hell is charging more than $40/month for 56k? I have a feeling you're getting ripped off.
$27.50 for the dialup and $15 for the lease on the second phone line. That's $42.50 per month to get a 56k dialup. And that is the best price I've found in Canberra, Australia. It's unlimited time and bandwidth but that's small consolation.
Admittedly it's $42.50AUD which is more like a mere $20USD, but it's still terrible value if you compare it to USA options. So you lot should stop whinging about your 384kb DSL deals. I'd kill for that! ADSL is only available in select regions of Australia and my suburb is not getting ADSL until 2003.
BTW: I don't disagree with you that it's a rip off, but you don't get any better in Australia.
... a company who has no estlablished roots to live off of like Microsoft, or who has never done a console already like Sony and Nintendo expects to survive?
Why not? The Colecovision came out of nowhere - from a company who originally built water tanks and snow mobiles - to briefly dominate the home console market. And this was despite competition from the well known and (then) hugely successful Atari.
Of course, this was back during the videogame boom and the Colecovision was clearly better than the competition. The Indrema is basically the same hardware as the Xbox only without the developer backing and without the bigname titles. I don't disagree with you: the Indrema looks like a dead duck. I'm just saying that "established roots" or prior success has little to do with it. History proves this over and over again in the videogames arena.
A major complaint brought against X is that it's "fine for remote display, but for local display the network design is a bottleneck". A number of whitepapers have touched on this, including the D11 paper by Mark Kilgard.
A few weeks back I decided to check this out. Using the DRI I implemented several X functions using direct rendering. What this meant was that after some initial setup code for the DRI the client appliation was writing directly into the video card FIFO. There was no pipe. I had direct rendering without the X server, but still using the X API.
There were about a zillion problems with my test rig. It wasn't X compliant: no guarantees of rendering order, I ignored cliplists, I didn't even attempt to care about GCs. But I got pretty definite results. For most operations in x11perf the overhead of the packing plus the unpacking was below 2% and the overhead of extra kernel time was below 5% (which I guessed was a combination of context switches and socket copies).
What this means is that by dropping the local network pipe you'd gain perhaps 7% performance at the cost of the clean X design (separation of the server/client with a well defined boundary). You also need to give every direct rendering client write access to the video hardware. This isn't an entirely unsafe operation, but it is certainly less well-tested than letting X server process do all the hardware banging.
There are exceptions: some X operations are bandwidth intensive. Extensions have been written to address these problem childs on a case by case basis (MITSHM, DRI/Mesa, etc). But for most X operations, with the current balance between GPU and CPU speeds, there is very little performance to be gained and a stable codebase to be lost.
I'm cleaning up the code, checking my results, and I'm going to perhaps release a whitepaper on this later this year. I've got thesis work for my degree to finish first and that's more important.
Currently, X will only update a window at around 60fps
XFree86 will update your window as fast as the card can draw. There is no fps limitation.
from what I've seen there no support for any full-screen modes.
There is full support for depth and resolution changing with direct graphics access to the frame buffer.
If you want to make your life easier, use SDL from www.libsdl.org. It has a simpler API than the X extensions you'd need to learn.
Re:And thank you for the knee-jerk generalization
on
Hydrogen Powered Cars
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· Score: 2
Solar is fine, but it swallows up massive quantities of land
This is a misleading statement. Solar "fields" take up more space than an equivalent coal-fired and/or oil-fired station but the argument doesn't take into account the land occupied by mines or rigs, tailing dams, fuel refineries, shipping ports, waste storage, etc. The argument also neglects to account for the land occupied by supporting industries.
Also fossil fuel plants cast pollutants into the air and waste heat into the rivers and lakes, so their actual "space usage" is actually much higher than land occupation.
You can also put solar cell/trough/mirrors on top of house-roofing: something you can't easily do with conventional fossil fuel plants. The roof space is typically unused and is a perfect point for collecting solar energy. So land requirement are even lower for solar energy than you might imagine.
Yes, I realize the irony in an American griping about using up land
Exactly. Many countries have vast tracts of unused, unusable land. Australia and the USA are perfect candidates for wholesale conversion to solar power, if they can ever get the costs down.
Hydro is a good option for areas that can employ it, and it's my favored source of energy.
The Australian Snowy Mountain Hydro-Electric Scheme is an extensive hydro power source but sadly it may have been a minor disaster. The damming of the rivers has caused significant ecological and environmental damage downstream. They will be cutting back energy production in the near future to let the land recover. It has soured my opinion of hydro: the damage to the environment is still there albeit a different (less obvious) form.
Slashdot Mirror
I do not think that word means what you think it means...
Brett was probably referring to EMM386.EXE and not MEMMAKER. QEMM was an expanded memory manager not a configurator.
And I must agree with Brett it was a shame for QuarterDeck to pass on that way. DESQView could run multiple "simulated" x86 environments on your 386. Each one was lightning quick, was windowed inside DESQView/X, and you could even have remote X11 applications displaying side by side with a DOS box. I remember the classic example was Win-3 in a window with an xterm on the same desktop.
No, the install should simply be secure by default. I would apply the same standard to Linux distributions, and they often fail the test. Microsoft isn't alone here but I don't think this makes it "right". It just makes it common.
I find it ANNOYING that more and more often I see statements like this. You saw one person say one thing, and a different person say something else, then you used the faulty logic that because they both posted on a common website that there's only one person (!) with two contradicting views.
And even if you do manage to find an individual who can't think clearly enough to make statements without contradicting themselves, this doesn't mean all "Slashdotters" think the same way.
I'm getting sick of the "Slashdot people think this" or "Slashdot people are this" stupidity. I don't want my individuality erased because you're too lazy to use your common sense.
Sure, but what direction should this merged project take? You say there are only 2 or 3 "good ones" in the email clients section of freshmeat, and I agree, but I doubt your 2 or 3 are the same as my 2 or 3.
What is best? What you like? What some author dictates? What Microsoft says we'll all have? The concept of "best" is personal. For example I use VIM and MUTT, and I think this pair is the "best" combo possible, but I don't think everyone would agree with me.
Having 100 projects gives you choice, and this can be painful, but I'd rather have 100 projects that will make 100 people happy than 1 monolithic "best" project that makes nobody happy.
Says who? Since when did you become the expert on the social strata of the "Linux crowd"?
Sheesh.
What is most important is that the designers and engineers reckon it can be fixed with only minimal modifications.
As you say, this is a new bridge design. The Bridge Building Literature had very little to say about this kind of problem, because no bridges before had ever had this kind of problem. Keep in mind the huge problems with the first suspension bridges in the early 1900s: I'm sure everybody has seen the films of the bridge swaying metres side to side before it collapses into the river.
Engineers like to build things, watch them break, and only then figure out why. I think that's why Engineers like lego so much...
If you're the kind of person who judges the speed of a computer based on the "MHz" then sure, you'll think the X-Box is better hardware.
The PS2 is a completely different design. It has 10 dma channels with multiply-accumulate on the data stream, 3 vector processors configurable at runtime, and bus bandwidth that makes last years mainframes look rather average. It's a 2560 bit bus!
PS2 is doing everything correctly from a 3d streaming point of view: huge pipes and small buckets. The PC design that the X-Box uses is a flawed design: small pipes and huge buckets.
This isn't to say the X-Box gets lackluster performance. It's actually impressive. But it's a forced design. They compensate for the bad PC design by throwing more local texture memory onto the video processor, exploiting video processor features to avoid using the system processor, and generally doing everything they can to avoid the limited PC bus.
The struggle PS2 has is (a) people like you, judging computers based on mostly irrelevant figures like MHz and (b) games for the PS2 must be written to take into consideration the unique design.
PS2/Ethernet is coming Real Soon Now.
Who said anything about keeping it to myself? The whole point of Linux is that everyone can use it, share it, enjoy it, participate.
If they choose not to participate, then it is THEIR LOSS. But that doesn't affect me. Drivers? I won't get *less* drivers if they don't want to join in. You seem to believe not having something is a loss, even though you didn't have that same thing before! That's not a loss: that's called a break-even situation.
So let the "Linux is a toy" people enjoy their brief feelings of superiority. In 12 months time half of them will probably be using Linux. In 24 months time they'll be wondering how they got by with the crap they used before.
Who cares what other people think? Linux will still be there. People who care will still write code for it. Linux will continue to get better. Anyone who doesn't use it is losing out but it's their loss, not yours.
Leave well enough alone. I want games. I don't have Windows at all, and I don't even have very modern hardware (still using a celeron 1), so I don't care if I have to play older games. In fact I prefer it. I'd rather get the cream of the crop than have to wade through the mountains of shit, like the Windows gamers have to do.
Huzzah for Loki. I've bought all your releases so far and I'm buying the next two right now.
Hahaha, so they can repeat the brilliant success of the 3DO, perhaps?
Go directly to clue.com. Do not pass go.com.
Or Nintendo's related stance with "all N64 games must be crap".
Yeah, that really annoyed me about the Mission Impossible movies. The Mission Impossible TV series (though lame) was at least always a team effort with everyones skills coming together to pulloff some brilliant result.
The movies, on the other hand, were just lame attempts to clone the James Bond concept. One massively skilled dude who does everything single handedly and ends up saving the day for all the weaklings around him.
You're not wrong. The Matrix is not, never was, and never will be, a movie about hackers. It's an entertaining movie, very comic-book like, and has enough special effects and action to make it one of the better sci-fi/action/fantasy films. But the sci-fi plot it's based on is as old as the hills and it doesn't have any intellectual depth. And I won't harp on some of the more ridiculous plot-based premises (human batteries!?). How the hell The Matrix made it into a list of "hacker" inspired movies is simply beyond belief.
I've been looking for schematics for a Roland Jupiter-4 (circa 1978) which has a broken fourth voice (doesn't do resonance). Haven't found free versions online: only pay-for versions which are photocopies so therefore useless (the schematics need colour to be read).
I've found some useful information before but the WWW isn't perfect. If someone sends me a URL for Roland Jupiter-4 schematics then I'll eat my words, of course!
But all you're doing is encrypting aim.exe with libfaim.so as the one-time-pad. If you send this encrypted aim.exe.xor with instructions (in code) to use libfaim.so as the pad, then this is no different to gzip'ing aim.exe and sending copies of aim.exe.gz around along with the (implied) instructions to gunzip it. You're still going to be infringing copyright if you do this.
You're an ass. There is no cable in Gunghalin, Canberra until 2003. And the $75/month ADSL from Telstra *is* limited. They just claim that is an unlimited ADSL but they "warn" you for exceeding arbitrary limits (the yellow/red card system).
$42.50/month 56k modem is the best option I've got available. Just because you live in Melbourne or Sydney, where ADSL is common, doesn't mean the rest of the country is as lucky as you.
No, I like the default screen.
$27.50 for the dialup and $15 for the lease on the second phone line. That's $42.50 per month to get a 56k dialup. And that is the best price I've found in Canberra, Australia. It's unlimited time and bandwidth but that's small consolation.
Admittedly it's $42.50AUD which is more like a mere $20USD, but it's still terrible value if you compare it to USA options. So you lot should stop whinging about your 384kb DSL deals. I'd kill for that! ADSL is only available in select regions of Australia and my suburb is not getting ADSL until 2003.
BTW: I don't disagree with you that it's a rip off, but you don't get any better in Australia.
I pay more than that for 56k dialup modem.
Stop whinging.
Why not? The Colecovision came out of nowhere - from a company who originally built water tanks and snow mobiles - to briefly dominate the home console market. And this was despite competition from the well known and (then) hugely successful Atari.
Of course, this was back during the videogame boom and the Colecovision was clearly better than the competition. The Indrema is basically the same hardware as the Xbox only without the developer backing and without the bigname titles. I don't disagree with you: the Indrema looks like a dead duck. I'm just saying that "established roots" or prior success has little to do with it. History proves this over and over again in the videogames arena.
A major complaint brought against X is that it's "fine for remote display, but for local display the network design is a bottleneck". A number of whitepapers have touched on this, including the D11 paper by Mark Kilgard.
A few weeks back I decided to check this out. Using the DRI I implemented several X functions using direct rendering. What this meant was that after some initial setup code for the DRI the client appliation was writing directly into the video card FIFO. There was no pipe. I had direct rendering without the X server, but still using the X API.
There were about a zillion problems with my test rig. It wasn't X compliant: no guarantees of rendering order, I ignored cliplists, I didn't even attempt to care about GCs. But I got pretty definite results. For most operations in x11perf the overhead of the packing plus the unpacking was below 2% and the overhead of extra kernel time was below 5% (which I guessed was a combination of context switches and socket copies).
What this means is that by dropping the local network pipe you'd gain perhaps 7% performance at the cost of the clean X design (separation of the server/client with a well defined boundary). You also need to give every direct rendering client write access to the video hardware. This isn't an entirely unsafe operation, but it is certainly less well-tested than letting X server process do all the hardware banging.
There are exceptions: some X operations are bandwidth intensive. Extensions have been written to address these problem childs on a case by case basis (MITSHM, DRI/Mesa, etc). But for most X operations, with the current balance between GPU and CPU speeds, there is very little performance to be gained and a stable codebase to be lost.
I'm cleaning up the code, checking my results, and I'm going to perhaps release a whitepaper on this later this year. I've got thesis work for my degree to finish first and that's more important.
XFree86 will update your window as fast as the card can draw. There is no fps limitation.
There is full support for depth and resolution changing with direct graphics access to the frame buffer.
If you want to make your life easier, use SDL from www.libsdl.org. It has a simpler API than the X extensions you'd need to learn.
This is a misleading statement. Solar "fields" take up more space than an equivalent coal-fired and/or oil-fired station but the argument doesn't take into account the land occupied by mines or rigs, tailing dams, fuel refineries, shipping ports, waste storage, etc. The argument also neglects to account for the land occupied by supporting industries.
Also fossil fuel plants cast pollutants into the air and waste heat into the rivers and lakes, so their actual "space usage" is actually much higher than land occupation.
You can also put solar cell/trough/mirrors on top of house-roofing: something you can't easily do with conventional fossil fuel plants. The roof space is typically unused and is a perfect point for collecting solar energy. So land requirement are even lower for solar energy than you might imagine.
Exactly. Many countries have vast tracts of unused, unusable land. Australia and the USA are perfect candidates for wholesale conversion to solar power, if they can ever get the costs down.
The Australian Snowy Mountain Hydro-Electric Scheme is an extensive hydro power source but sadly it may have been a minor disaster. The damming of the rivers has caused significant ecological and environmental damage downstream. They will be cutting back energy production in the near future to let the land recover. It has soured my opinion of hydro: the damage to the environment is still there albeit a different (less obvious) form.
Aye, bring on Natasha. Not only is she smart but she's sexy too!