Fast forward 5 years later, Compaq gets bought out by HP. Corrupting the hardware never gives you the advantage over your competitors.
Yes, but not before acquiring DEC and taking the first steps towards killing the Alpha. Compaq outlasted just about every other player in the "crappy PC with flaky proprietary hardware" niche: remember HeadStart? Leading Edge? Packard Bell?
Also, have you ever used an HP Pavilion? To a first approximation, it's a Compaq Presario. The HPaq merger is just a consolidation of the two surviving players in that niche.
I do not recall ever needing a mouse to configure a PC BIOS. Keyboard and video, yes; mouse, no. Perhaps you are using some new-fangled BIOS that I'm not yet aware of?
Of course 64-bit time_t's will theoretically fix all that... that is, until we design computing systems intended to survive the death and hypothetical rebirth of our universe...
A running joke with a colleague of mine is that if this "engineering thing" doesn't work out, we'll become professional nay-sayers. Predict doom, gloom, and failure, and when something we predict happens (statistically speaking, we have a 50/50 shot)we can say "I told ya so!"
Isn't that how lots of tech analysts make their money? Rob Enderle comes out and says something like, "Linux will continue to grow in niche markets, but will never displace Microsoft in the enterprise." Then five years later we're still struggling for Linux on the desktop and Rob goes, "Told ya so! If you want my further advice for your organization, my rates are as follows..."
I think you have Frederick Taylor to thank for a lot of this. You know, the guy who said "Leave your brain outside and bring your body indoors"? At installations like MIT, the computing facilities were maintained by hackers -- programmers who knew the system inside and out and so could serve as competent administrators. They made sure the system was working as it should for the real users -- and in their spare time played games or wrote music programs.
A lot of Unix administrators were the same way, especially at educational institutions.
These days we erect an artificial boundary between the concepts of "administrator" and "developer". This has the unintended effect of pitting the two at odds with each other. The administrators, bereft of useful and interesting things to do with the time they're not spending keeping the system up and running (which, though nontrivial, should not take up that much time on any decently engineered system), decide that the thing to do is to make more rules for people, because that is their job description and that's what they know how to do best. Because administrators are now considered separate from programmers, they lose touch with the kind of work that programmers need to do, and in their process of generating more rules the way Doozers build bridges, interfere with the programmers' work instead of making it easier.
Politics works the same way. The entire point of representative delegation was to get people who had a vested interest in a community to come together and negotiate just laws for that community, so they could go back to farming, shoemaking, medicine or whatever it is that they do. These days we raise and groom people for politics, making it so that making rules is the only thing they really know how to do. Then we end up with things like the DMCA.
If people with little money end up not buying TVs and going without, the end result would be a lot of smart poor folks. The resultant proletariat uprising would either set us all free or doom us to communism; I'm not sure which.
The Tandy Sensation was, I believe, a Tandy 1000 with souped up sound and CD-ROM hardware to capitalize on the "multimedia" craze that hit the x86 world about half a decade too late.
I remember seeing ads for these things but I can't for the life of me recall a review or even a blurb in PC Mag. It was a pretty insignificant machine overall, and doesn't even fit into the class of obscure and unsung, but wonderful, Tandy boxen (the Model 16 and the 2000 being examples).
The Model 3 and 4 were weaklings compared to the Model 16, a 68000-based behemoth that ran Microsoft XENIX. A Unix workstation on your desktop that you could buy from Radio Shack! Of course, it cost almost as much as a car, but still...
The Model 16 had a hybrid 68000/Z80 based architecture. You could boot your old Model II TRSDOS disks with it, but the real fun lay in XENIX. Unless you wanted to do graphics. The extra memory XENIX demanded (I think you could go up to half a meg) meant no room for the graphics video card.
The Model 16 was great nonetheless. I learned to program ASM in TRSDOS and C in XENIX on one of those things.
ESR once wrote a blog piece about how bad he felt for not getting included in the Arabic crackers' attempts to DDoS pro-American blogs. So being left out of something like this must really torque him off. He's like the Scrappy-Doo of the internet, waving his fists, going, "Lemme at 'em! Lemme at 'em!"
Microsoft has something to gain by being late to the game: They could have learned from all the mistakes made out there in Unix-land, and delivered a product with good security early in its life cycle.
They chose not to. They chose to forgot security in favor of "ease of use". That was their conscious decision to make.
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
In otherwords, because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, we cannot infringe on the people's right. The preservation of that right is a precondition for the existence of the well-regulated militia.
If you don't have a people's right to keep and bear arms, you don't have a well-regulated militia. You have a standing army. The National Guard is military. They're not even pretending to be otherwise anymore; these days you hear about the "Army National Guard" and such.
The U.S. constitution is a document which specifies the powers of the government, and the limitations in the applications of said powers. There is only one entity which can be guilty of violating the constitution: the federal government[1].
RMS and the FSF are private individuals. They are free to release their works under whatever terms they wish, including no copyright at all, without violating the Constitution. Statute law is another thing; however, it's doubtful that a statute would be passed mandating SCO's version of copyright in the near future, since that would run counter to established copyright principles that have been in place for two centuries.
[1]I am not a constitutional lawyer, but I believe it's also a law or at least a convention that state governments abide by the principles set forth in the US constitution. It could be merely the laws of competition, however: if Massachusetts were suddenly to become a communist dictatorship, states like Connecticut, Vermont and Maine can expect a sudden population jump.:)
Plumbing and car maintenance are things that require a certain special expertise in order to do at all.
Any schlub can learn how to type. If you let someone stumble around a keyboard for a while, over time they'll probably learn to type faster and with less risk of repetitive stress injury than someone who was trained using the classical "home row" method. Even at beginner levels, typing is faster, more efficient, and not as complex for your brain to grasp when compared to writing with a pen. Push the button, the letter comes up. What could be simpler?
I defy you to examine the signature of any executive whom you defend as righteously too lazy to type. I bet they just have a couple of vague loops for their initials and a squiggly line for the rest of their name -- something that's enormously difficult for a human to interpret, let alone a computer.
Do I pay less for a laptop with a keyboard or more for a Windows-only machine whose input method is more cumbersome, expensive to implement, and error-prone than a keyboard? Hmmmmm, hard decision....
The article mentioned this presentation took place at Full Sail. Full Sail, the alma mater of Imari Stevenson, a school which also received accolades from the Romero, is also hosting a Phantom promo? Ever notice how everything sucky about the game industry seems to cluster together?
I used to imagine Full Sail as the kind of place that would ask you essay questions like "The President has been kidnapped by ninjas! Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the President?" on its application forms. Then I went here and found out they don't have essays at all.
Enderle is only a couple of active insults away from being Scott McCollum, perhaps the king of FUD. A few years ago Scott wrote a screed about how the open source movement is ideologically equivalent to Al-Qaeda. A bit like the Scientologists asserting that their critics are ideologically equivalent to child molesters. These guys exist, I think, to whip up the fears of conservative IT managers with their ties on too tight, and thus generate page views. Linux is a new and largely unknown phenomenon to business people, and once the hype has passed, a sinister conspiracy of Linux zealots bent on bombing the Pentagon, the Statue of Liberty, and Microsoft HQ makes for much more exciting news than the hum-drum stuff like "another Microsoft security flaw".
People generally won't rebel unless they perceive an immediate threat to their supply of essentials like food, shelter, and safety. The wise government is the one which knows how to contain this rebellious instinct (e.g., through careful deception and appeal to the citizens' emotions, like the draconian laws passed "for the children").
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but not before acquiring DEC and taking the first steps towards killing the Alpha. Compaq outlasted just about every other player in the "crappy PC with flaky proprietary hardware" niche: remember HeadStart? Leading Edge? Packard Bell?
Also, have you ever used an HP Pavilion? To a first approximation, it's a Compaq Presario. The HPaq merger is just a consolidation of the two surviving players in that niche.
I do not recall ever needing a mouse to configure a PC BIOS. Keyboard and video, yes; mouse, no. Perhaps you are using some new-fangled BIOS that I'm not yet aware of?
Of course 64-bit time_t's will theoretically fix all that... that is, until we design computing systems intended to survive the death and hypothetical rebirth of our universe...
Isn't that how lots of tech analysts make their money? Rob Enderle comes out and says something like, "Linux will continue to grow in niche markets, but will never displace Microsoft in the enterprise." Then five years later we're still struggling for Linux on the desktop and Rob goes, "Told ya so! If you want my further advice for your organization, my rates are as follows..."
I beg to differ. The Americans all want to be chiefs, and so they bring the Indians in to do all the work!
I think you have Frederick Taylor to thank for a lot of this. You know, the guy who said "Leave your brain outside and bring your body indoors"? At installations like MIT, the computing facilities were maintained by hackers -- programmers who knew the system inside and out and so could serve as competent administrators. They made sure the system was working as it should for the real users -- and in their spare time played games or wrote music programs.
A lot of Unix administrators were the same way, especially at educational institutions.
These days we erect an artificial boundary between the concepts of "administrator" and "developer". This has the unintended effect of pitting the two at odds with each other. The administrators, bereft of useful and interesting things to do with the time they're not spending keeping the system up and running (which, though nontrivial, should not take up that much time on any decently engineered system), decide that the thing to do is to make more rules for people, because that is their job description and that's what they know how to do best. Because administrators are now considered separate from programmers, they lose touch with the kind of work that programmers need to do, and in their process of generating more rules the way Doozers build bridges, interfere with the programmers' work instead of making it easier.
Politics works the same way. The entire point of representative delegation was to get people who had a vested interest in a community to come together and negotiate just laws for that community, so they could go back to farming, shoemaking, medicine or whatever it is that they do. These days we raise and groom people for politics, making it so that making rules is the only thing they really know how to do. Then we end up with things like the DMCA.
Atari is really Atari the way SCO is really SCO.
And don't think you're fooling anyone by using the old-skewl font, neither.
If people with little money end up not buying TVs and going without, the end result would be a lot of smart poor folks. The resultant proletariat uprising would either set us all free or doom us to communism; I'm not sure which.
Reminds me of when Doc Brown put Einstein into the front seat of the DeLorean and drove it around with a radio controller.
The Tandy Sensation was, I believe, a Tandy 1000 with souped up sound and CD-ROM hardware to capitalize on the "multimedia" craze that hit the x86 world about half a decade too late.
I remember seeing ads for these things but I can't for the life of me recall a review or even a blurb in PC Mag. It was a pretty insignificant machine overall, and doesn't even fit into the class of obscure and unsung, but wonderful, Tandy boxen (the
Model 16 and the 2000 being examples).
The Model 3 and 4 were weaklings compared to the Model 16, a 68000-based behemoth that ran Microsoft XENIX. A Unix workstation on your desktop that you could buy from Radio Shack! Of course, it cost almost as much as a car, but still...
The Model 16 had a hybrid 68000/Z80 based architecture. You could boot your old Model II TRSDOS disks with it, but the real fun lay in XENIX. Unless you wanted to do graphics. The extra memory XENIX demanded (I think you could go up to half a meg) meant no room for the graphics video card.
The Model 16 was great nonetheless. I learned to program ASM in TRSDOS and C in XENIX on one of those things.
ESR once wrote a blog piece about how bad he felt for not getting included in the Arabic crackers' attempts to DDoS pro-American blogs. So being left out of something like this must really torque him off. He's like the Scrappy-Doo of the internet, waving his fists, going, "Lemme at 'em! Lemme at 'em!"
Microsoft has something to gain by being late to the game: They could have learned from all the mistakes made out there in Unix-land, and delivered a product with good security early in its life cycle.
They chose not to. They chose to forgot security in favor of "ease of use". That was their conscious decision to make.
BAM.
"Is that you Chief? ... You're where? ... I'll be right there!" *heads on over to the wastebasket or toilet, where Chief Quimby was conveniently hiding*
Except we Americans don't send our typical loudmouth cops to punks with firearms either. That's what SWAT teams are for.
"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."
In otherwords, because a well-regulated militia is necessary to the security of a free state, we cannot infringe on the people's right. The preservation of that right is a precondition for the existence of the well-regulated militia.
If you don't have a people's right to keep and bear arms, you don't have a well-regulated militia. You have a standing army. The National Guard is military. They're not even pretending to be otherwise anymore; these days you hear about the "Army National Guard" and such.
The U.S. constitution is a document which specifies the powers of the government, and the limitations in the applications of said powers. There is only one entity which can be guilty of violating the constitution: the federal government[1].
:)
RMS and the FSF are private individuals. They are free to release their works under whatever terms they wish, including no copyright at all, without violating the Constitution. Statute law is another thing; however, it's doubtful that a statute would be passed mandating SCO's version of copyright in the near future, since that would run counter to established copyright principles that have been in place for two centuries.
[1]I am not a constitutional lawyer, but I believe it's also a law or at least a convention that state governments abide by the principles set forth in the US constitution. It could be merely the laws of competition, however: if Massachusetts were suddenly to become a communist dictatorship, states like Connecticut, Vermont and Maine can expect a sudden population jump.
Plumbing and car maintenance are things that require a certain special expertise in order to do at all.
Any schlub can learn how to type. If you let someone stumble around a keyboard for a while, over time they'll probably learn to type faster and with less risk of repetitive stress injury than someone who was trained using the classical "home row" method. Even at beginner levels, typing is faster, more efficient, and not as complex for your brain to grasp when compared to writing with a pen. Push the button, the letter comes up. What could be simpler?
I defy you to examine the signature of any executive whom you defend as righteously too lazy to type. I bet they just have a couple of vague loops for their initials and a squiggly line for the rest of their name -- something that's enormously difficult for a human to interpret, let alone a computer.
Do I pay less for a laptop with a keyboard or more for a Windows-only machine whose input method is more cumbersome, expensive to implement, and error-prone than a keyboard? Hmmmmm, hard decision....
The article mentioned this presentation took place at Full Sail. Full Sail, the alma mater of Imari Stevenson, a school which also received accolades from the Romero, is also hosting a Phantom promo? Ever notice how everything sucky about the game industry seems to cluster together?
I used to imagine Full Sail as the kind of place that would ask you essay questions like "The President has been kidnapped by ninjas! Are you a bad enough dude to rescue the President?" on its application forms. Then I went here and found out they don't have essays at all.
"Remote" is an adjective (or sometimes a noun, if you're referring to the TV variety).
It is not a verb.
Enderle is only a couple of active insults away from being Scott McCollum, perhaps the king of FUD. A few years ago Scott wrote a screed about how the open source movement is ideologically equivalent to Al-Qaeda. A bit like the Scientologists asserting that their critics are ideologically equivalent to child molesters.
These guys exist, I think, to whip up the fears of conservative IT managers with their ties on too tight, and thus generate page views. Linux is a new and largely unknown phenomenon to business people, and once the hype has passed, a sinister conspiracy of Linux zealots bent on bombing the Pentagon, the Statue of Liberty, and Microsoft HQ makes for much more exciting news than the hum-drum stuff like "another Microsoft security flaw".
I wrote some fake FUD on this very issue. Enjoy!
People generally won't rebel unless they perceive an immediate threat to their supply of essentials like food, shelter, and safety. The wise government is the one which knows how to contain this rebellious instinct (e.g., through careful deception and appeal to the citizens' emotions, like the draconian laws passed "for the children").