RTFA. There is a sticker on the CD that its copy protected.
Does the label bother to mention that it isn't actually a CD, or are they merely relying on consumer ignorance, such as that you display in your post in calling it such?
Are the stores stocking it in their normal manner for CDs, instead of in a seperate section as they should? Not doing so could well be considered consumer fraud by the retailers, it might not be out of line to drop a line to sundry Attorney's General if such is the case.
It's called a "marine battery." You ditch the internal power supply and feed DC from an external battery (through a voltage regulator) directly to the motherboard. I essence you've now turned your desktop into a descrete componant laptop (for sufficiently large values of "lap"). It's really not that hard.
Now, since you're never running on anything but battery power, you don't need most of the functionality of the common UPS. Your computer's own power managment takes care of all that.
And the beauty of it is exactly where you say it is, you can now draw your energy from any source that can produce electricity. That could be a battery charger plugged into your wall socket, or it could be a solar panel sitting on your cabin top, a small wind turbine sitting on your taffrail, a water turbine being dragged behind, a hand cranked/pedal powered generator, or even, yes, hamsters.
It's completely source agnostic upstream from the battery.
Your case is also smaller and cooler, but your "UPS" is no bigger or heavier if you already use an "enterprise class" (warp overclocking Mr. Sulu!) UPS.
Frankly, so far as I can tell, the only reason we do it the way we typically do it (if you're not a boater or RVer) is because we've always done it that way. We've declined to reinvent the wheel when such might actually be appropriate, chosing instead to add wheels to the existing wheels in extending chains of Rube Goldbergesque functionality.
Tell me, did you mean the original AoE or the second one?
The second one. Quite frankly I just put it down to another example of the sort of thing they did to DR-DOS, although it could just be a side effect of something else.
I hadn't played the original AoE in years, but was feeling a bit classical the other day, what with posting about Plato while I happened to be wearing a chlamys, so I installed it again to do a bit of pitting Greeks against Persians. I must say I didn't really remember what it looked like and was a bit shocked.:)
But yeah, if you really made the buildings full scale you wouldn't have an RTS, you'd have "The Sims: Getting Medieval; Meet hot chicks from foreign and exotic lands -- and kill them."
Damn, now I have the hankering for a bit of Thief. It really is the games that keeps a Windows partition on one of my machines.
As a dual boot user, the tendency is to stay in the currently booted environment until you want something in the other environment enough to close everything and reboot.
Yeah, but just because I was playing a game a few minutes ago and that's why I'm posting from Windows doesn't mean. ..ummmmmmmm, so, what about those Mets?
Yep, all it saves you is the boot to the head, er, Windows. It isn't emulation. It's running two, two, two OSs at once. Double your pleasure, double your fun, with Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint. . . Oh, sorry. Flashback.
Hell, it even allows you to run Outlook and IE while you're about it so if you're having trouble weening yourself from your familiar Windows apps it just lets you get to them easily without leaving Linux.
OK, I'll bite. How is binary compatibility different from API compatibility?
Strictly speaking binary compatability is a machine issue. Will this set of machine instructions run on this particular machine. Note that in the SimCity bug there was no flaw in the program logic and no conflict with an API. Physical memory barfed on what the machine instructions told it to do. The only reason it didn't barf under DOS was because DOS wasn't asking the machine to do much of anything, whereas Windows does.
When you write a program as a single executable and compile it you then have two things, a binary which is an actual "thing" which interacts with the physical machine, and the logic of the program, which is a pure mathmatical abstraction. The binary and the machine don't know about that abstraction, they just know to put this here, move that there, increment that, etc.
An API is the next level of abstraction up. While there are exceptions it is software that talks to other software, not the machine, and while it may be implimented in binary form (which must, obviously, run on the machine) it is the logical structure of the communications between the software that is actually the API, not the binaries themselves. Just as your code logic is distinct from the compiled binary.
So you can type "make me a window" instead of the actual code to draw a window, and the code of the API sends a signal to the OS to run the window drawing code, which is in the OS itself, not compiled into your own code.
So API compatability means sending the right signals at the right time. The binary may run fine, and yet the program may fail due to API incompatibility.
You type "make me a window," which sends a "39 Hike!" to the OS, but it wants a "1" to draw a window. "39 Hike!" tells the OS to send all your personal data to Bill. Everything runs flawlessly, but the result is not what you intended. Binary compatible. API incompatible.
Are you talking about the difference between a new OS that supports older binaries with binary interfaces but which no longer provides an SDK to use the deprecated API? If so then I guess binary compatibility would be a subset of API compatibility - in C, binary compatibility would just mean that the linker would need to be able to do its thing, but API compatibility would mean that header files would also be needed.
. ..if they had documentation from another source (yard sale, eBay, etc.) they could still compile against the implementation files since those have the required interface info embedded in them.
In the case of Linux and WINE I'm talking about an OS that is distinct from the Windows OS and which does not share its APIs. Things are simplified by the fact that they both share a hardware architechture, Intel, and that's why no real emulation is necessary. They both work to the same machine instruction set. For that matter they're both written in the same language, C (at least 98 is).
Now, if you want to run Windows programs under Linux you can do it the eBay way. Buy a license for Windows. Then you can run Windows itself under Linux in a virtual machine, the VMware way. This isn't actually emulation. It's running two OSs simultaneously. Ok, so it eats up system overhead like an emulator, so from the end user point of view it may amount to the same thing performance wise, but it still isn't actually emulation. It's identity. An Intel OS running on Intel hardware.
But let's you don't want to support that overhead, or say that you're running Linux in the first place because you don't want a Windows license ( crazy, I know, but just suppose), but you're compeled to run MS Office anyway, or you want to run a Windows only game. The essential thing standing between you and doing that is the Windows API.
You send the main executable to the cpu, which starts to run it, which sends out a signal to. ..Windows -- and the whole thing barfs instantly. You're AP
In fact any Linux guru looking for a job? Munich sounds like a good bet...
My German sucks. I can get through the pleases and thank yous and inquire into the location of the bathroom and that's about it. I wouldn't mind improving it though.
And I wouldn't call myself a guru by any means, but when I once said something to my sweety about not being a power user she gave me her most disdainful of looks, let out a "Pfffffft, yeah, right", and walked away. Since she once single handedly recoded an entire small division of General Electric I guess the jury is in that I'm at least a power user.
So if they can deal with an English speaking power user who'll do his best to meet them half way linguistically I'd be positively delighted to spend the next year or four explaining to the secretaries, et al, that "See, In MS Word if you want to make something bold you highlight it and then click on this big B button right here, whereas in Open Office to do the same thing you have to highlight it and then click on this big B button right here. I know that's a shock, but just hold my hand and we'll get through this thing together."
The fact of the matter is that they don't really need all that much retraining at the desktop level. What they need is a bit of "counseling," a friendly face, and a cheery voice, to help them deal with the impression that they're making some sort of big change in their life.
At the next level of abstraction down they'll, which I'd guess would only effect 500 or so of those 16,000 workers they might need to shown how some things are done in Linux to accomplish the same thing that they use to accomplish in Windows, but those people are already power users. They'll cope. I'll bet not a few of them are already looking forward to it and buying O'Reilly books.
Below that level of abstraction they'll need a few real gurus to get the system up and running smoothly and with a fairly seamless transition. They've got all that lock in technology to work around.
But I'd hazzard a guess that Germany might well have an engineer or two up her sleeve.
A friend of mine who knows my fondness for 1950s and 60s Italian racing cars recently showed up at my door bearing gifts, two Hot Wheels cars, a 1961 Ferrari 156 F1 and a 1967 Ferrari P4, that he just happened to see while grocery shopping and thought I'd like them.
"Kewl!", says I, and start to open them.
"What are you doing!?", says he.
"Ummmmmmm, I'm opening them?", I respond.
"What for?", he asks with a slightly incredulous look on his face.
"So I can spend the next hour or two pushing them around my desk while making 'Vroom, vroom' noises with a big smile on my face. Thank you. You made today worth living."
Clearly you missed the "Yes, I know I should be storing that third drive at a friend's house..." part.
Which was followed by an excuse as to why he didn't do it, making the whole exercise 98% pointless.
By backing up the drive on a seperate system as he suggests (as opposed to just making a copy of the drive and putting it on a shelf somewhere) one uses a network connection between the two machines, eliminating the sneaker netting.
This isn't even close to the same business model...
Yes it is. A lot of pointless duplication of effort and expense, but only the winner gets payed. There is no way to tell in advance if you will ever collect dime one from your captial investment, which is likely to be quite substantial.
an (stupid) audience and advertising sponsors are assumed in the racing model.
No they aren't. Sponsorship wasn't even allowed in Grand Prix racing until 1968.
Slashdot Mirror
While they're at it, they should have the shift key declared a circumvention device too.
I'd start practicing bouncing on your caps lock key if I were you, or a few years from now you might find yourself constrained to lower case.
KFG
RTFA. There is a sticker on the CD that its copy protected.
Does the label bother to mention that it isn't actually a CD, or are they merely relying on consumer ignorance, such as that you display in your post in calling it such?
Are the stores stocking it in their normal manner for CDs, instead of in a seperate section as they should? Not doing so could well be considered consumer fraud by the retailers, it might not be out of line to drop a line to sundry Attorney's General if such is the case.
KFG
. . .they might "try" to make this protection scheme to work on the Mac
Nah. Easier to just have the Mac legally declared a "circumvention device."
KFG
. . .www pages are more akin to broadcast media. . .
No, they are akin to print media. One might even argue they share identity. Some courts certainly have.
KFG
It's called a "marine battery." You ditch the internal power supply and feed DC from an external battery (through a voltage regulator) directly to the motherboard. I essence you've now turned your desktop into a descrete componant laptop (for sufficiently large values of "lap"). It's really not that hard.
Now, since you're never running on anything but battery power, you don't need most of the functionality of the common UPS. Your computer's own power managment takes care of all that.
And the beauty of it is exactly where you say it is, you can now draw your energy from any source that can produce electricity. That could be a battery charger plugged into your wall socket, or it could be a solar panel sitting on your cabin top, a small wind turbine sitting on your taffrail, a water turbine being dragged behind, a hand cranked/pedal powered generator, or even, yes, hamsters.
It's completely source agnostic upstream from the battery.
Your case is also smaller and cooler, but your "UPS" is no bigger or heavier if you already use an "enterprise class" (warp overclocking Mr. Sulu!) UPS.
Frankly, so far as I can tell, the only reason we do it the way we typically do it (if you're not a boater or RVer) is because we've always done it that way. We've declined to reinvent the wheel when such might actually be appropriate, chosing instead to add wheels to the existing wheels in extending chains of Rube Goldbergesque functionality.
KFG
Tell me, did you mean the original AoE or the second one?
:)
The second one. Quite frankly I just put it down to another example of the sort of thing they did to DR-DOS, although it could just be a side effect of something else.
I hadn't played the original AoE in years, but was feeling a bit classical the other day, what with posting about Plato while I happened to be wearing a chlamys, so I installed it again to do a bit of pitting Greeks against Persians. I must say I didn't really remember what it looked like and was a bit shocked.
But yeah, if you really made the buildings full scale you wouldn't have an RTS, you'd have "The Sims: Getting Medieval; Meet hot chicks from foreign and exotic lands -- and kill them."
Damn, now I have the hankering for a bit of Thief. It really is the games that keeps a Windows partition on one of my machines.
KFG
Next headline on Slashdot:
"What hath God wrought?"
To be quickly followed by an article on how to transmit such digital singals without wires.
KFG
You ever try to run AoE under WINE? It calls you a bad boy for trying to run a decompiler against it and shuts right down.
Interesting, no?
KFG
As a dual boot user, the tendency is to stay in the currently booted environment until you want something in the other environment enough to close everything and reboot.
.ummmmmmmm, so, what about those Mets?
Yeah, but just because I was playing a game a few minutes ago and that's why I'm posting from Windows doesn't mean. .
KFG
Yep, all it saves you is the boot to the head, er, Windows. It isn't emulation. It's running two, two, two OSs at once. Double your pleasure, double your fun, with Doublemint, Doublemint, Doublemint. . . Oh, sorry. Flashback.
Hell, it even allows you to run Outlook and IE while you're about it so if you're having trouble weening yourself from your familiar Windows apps it just lets you get to them easily without leaving Linux.
Hot Puppies!
KFG
Don't knock it, there's probably still people out there looking for the "any key"
I can install one of those for them, although that service fee is extra.
KFG
They still look better on vinyl.
Nothing beats lacquer cylinders for 3D.
KFG
Brilliant!
KFG
OK, I'll bite. How is binary compatibility different from API compatibility?
.if they had documentation from another source (yard sale, eBay, etc.) they could still compile against the implementation files since those have the required interface info embedded in them.
.Windows -- and the whole thing barfs instantly. You're AP
Strictly speaking binary compatability is a machine issue. Will this set of machine instructions run on this particular machine. Note that in the SimCity bug there was no flaw in the program logic and no conflict with an API. Physical memory barfed on what the machine instructions told it to do. The only reason it didn't barf under DOS was because DOS wasn't asking the machine to do much of anything, whereas Windows does.
When you write a program as a single executable and compile it you then have two things, a binary which is an actual "thing" which interacts with the physical machine, and the logic of the program, which is a pure mathmatical abstraction. The binary and the machine don't know about that abstraction, they just know to put this here, move that there, increment that, etc.
An API is the next level of abstraction up. While there are exceptions it is software that talks to other software, not the machine, and while it may be implimented in binary form (which must, obviously, run on the machine) it is the logical structure of the communications between the software that is actually the API, not the binaries themselves. Just as your code logic is distinct from the compiled binary.
So you can type "make me a window" instead of the actual code to draw a window, and the code of the API sends a signal to the OS to run the window drawing code, which is in the OS itself, not compiled into your own code.
So API compatability means sending the right signals at the right time. The binary may run fine, and yet the program may fail due to API incompatibility.
You type "make me a window," which sends a "39 Hike!" to the OS, but it wants a "1" to draw a window. "39 Hike!" tells the OS to send all your personal data to Bill. Everything runs flawlessly, but the result is not what you intended. Binary compatible. API incompatible.
Are you talking about the difference between a new OS that supports older binaries with binary interfaces but which no longer provides an SDK to use the deprecated API? If so then I guess binary compatibility would be a subset of API compatibility - in C, binary compatibility would just mean that the linker would need to be able to do its thing, but API compatibility would mean that header files would also be needed.
. .
In the case of Linux and WINE I'm talking about an OS that is distinct from the Windows OS and which does not share its APIs. Things are simplified by the fact that they both share a hardware architechture, Intel, and that's why no real emulation is necessary. They both work to the same machine instruction set. For that matter they're both written in the same language, C (at least 98 is).
Now, if you want to run Windows programs under Linux you can do it the eBay way. Buy a license for Windows. Then you can run Windows itself under Linux in a virtual machine, the VMware way. This isn't actually emulation. It's running two OSs simultaneously. Ok, so it eats up system overhead like an emulator, so from the end user point of view it may amount to the same thing performance wise, but it still isn't actually emulation. It's identity. An Intel OS running on Intel hardware.
But let's you don't want to support that overhead, or say that you're running Linux in the first place because you don't want a Windows license ( crazy, I know, but just suppose), but you're compeled to run MS Office anyway, or you want to run a Windows only game. The essential thing standing between you and doing that is the Windows API.
You send the main executable to the cpu, which starts to run it, which sends out a signal to. .
In fact any Linux guru looking for a job? Munich sounds like a good bet...
My German sucks. I can get through the pleases and thank yous and inquire into the location of the bathroom and that's about it. I wouldn't mind improving it though.
And I wouldn't call myself a guru by any means, but when I once said something to my sweety about not being a power user she gave me her most disdainful of looks, let out a "Pfffffft, yeah, right", and walked away. Since she once single handedly recoded an entire small division of General Electric I guess the jury is in that I'm at least a power user.
So if they can deal with an English speaking power user who'll do his best to meet them half way linguistically I'd be positively delighted to spend the next year or four explaining to the secretaries, et al, that "See, In MS Word if you want to make something bold you highlight it and then click on this big B button right here, whereas in Open Office to do the same thing you have to highlight it and then click on this big B button right here. I know that's a shock, but just hold my hand and we'll get through this thing together."
The fact of the matter is that they don't really need all that much retraining at the desktop level. What they need is a bit of "counseling," a friendly face, and a cheery voice, to help them deal with the impression that they're making some sort of big change in their life.
At the next level of abstraction down they'll, which I'd guess would only effect 500 or so of those 16,000 workers they might need to shown how some things are done in Linux to accomplish the same thing that they use to accomplish in Windows, but those people are already power users. They'll cope. I'll bet not a few of them are already looking forward to it and buying O'Reilly books.
Below that level of abstraction they'll need a few real gurus to get the system up and running smoothly and with a fairly seamless transition. They've got all that lock in technology to work around.
But I'd hazzard a guess that Germany might well have an engineer or two up her sleeve.
KFG
Sure buying 22,000 miles of Cat5 cable was a bit expensive. . .
The intermediate solution. It beats hell out of paying for a few hundred million light years of the stuff, never mind running it.
KFG
Joel confuses binary compatibility with API compatibility.
Anybody who has tried to explain to someone why WINE is not an emulator has probably had to confront this confusion face to face.
I recently got lectured that WINE would always have emulation overhead by a guy who was sitting there writting Win32 binaries . . . on his Linux box.
He still didn't get it when I asked him if he weren't concered about the emulation overhead when he ran those Linux binaries under Windows.
Some people have troubles with the abstraction layer between the physical machine and the logical machine.
KFG
A friend of mine who knows my fondness for 1950s and 60s Italian racing cars recently showed up at my door bearing gifts, two Hot Wheels cars, a 1961 Ferrari 156 F1 and a 1967 Ferrari P4, that he just happened to see while grocery shopping and thought I'd like them.
"Kewl!", says I, and start to open them.
"What are you doing!?", says he.
"Ummmmmmm, I'm opening them?", I respond.
"What for?", he asks with a slightly incredulous look on his face.
"So I can spend the next hour or two pushing them around my desk while making 'Vroom, vroom' noises with a big smile on my face. Thank you. You made today worth living."
I'm still not sure he gets it.
KFG
"A man who has a million dollars is as well off as if he were rich." -John Jacob Astor, circa 1825
Please adjust for inflation.
I'm not sure you apprehend the true meaning of the word "rich."
KFG
I don't share pr0n. I don't want anyone to know how much of a pervert I am.
You just haven't woken up to the many inherent benefits of the "many eyes" model of, ummmm, "open source" pr0n distribution.
I wouldn't worry about people thinking you're a pervert, they don't also call it the "Bizarre" Model for nothing.
KFG
>>> The really best way is RAID 1 + a third drive for backups, on another system.
>> At a different site.
>In a galaxy far, far away..
I suggest a wireless satellite ( as opposed to the wired kind) solution for this. Latency is going to suck anyway.
KFG
Clearly you missed the "Yes, I know I should be storing that third drive at a friend's house..." part.
Which was followed by an excuse as to why he didn't do it, making the whole exercise 98% pointless.
By backing up the drive on a seperate system as he suggests (as opposed to just making a copy of the drive and putting it on a shelf somewhere) one uses a network connection between the two machines, eliminating the sneaker netting.
I'll RAID yours if you RAID mine.
It's a good way to share pr0n too.
KFG
Personal observation tells me that:
Oh, you meant sponsorships from tobacco and alcohol companies will appear to pay for the coders who don't get the bounty?
A)You are ignorant of the history of auto racing, particularly at the dawn of the 20th century, and:
Wow, kfg can get modded up for anything.
So can anyone else.
KFG
This isn't even close to the same business model...
Yes it is. A lot of pointless duplication of effort and expense, but only the winner gets payed. There is no way to tell in advance if you will ever collect dime one from your captial investment, which is likely to be quite substantial.
an (stupid) audience and advertising sponsors are assumed in the racing model.
No they aren't. Sponsorship wasn't even allowed in Grand Prix racing until 1968.
KFG
I suggest looking at getting reliable drives before looking at a RAID solution.
And then RAID them.
KFG