Most of the lights in the Atlanta metro seem to use cameras and not inductive sensors, which I guess is good for motorcyclists and such, but cameras can sometimes be unreliable as well.
In this economy, who can afford to? Heck, I can get five or six Nokia 770's on eBay for the cost of a bottom-end iPad.
I realize wifi isn't good enough for some... my wife got her Samsung Rogue with a GPS, web browser, e-mail, unlimited data plan, etc. for $65/month and no cost at all for the phone. What could an iPad offer her that she doesn't already have?
Don't remember the model number of the little Sony boombox or the two Black discman players which play MP3 discs, but I would guess they're both around 4-5 years old. Neither of my little MP3 cubes plays AAC, either, I don't think the older DVD player I have does (the new one might), and I also don't think my Sony CD changer does on the main stereo.
I didn't say I personally USED those devices anymore, but I'm sure others do. My own preference is my Rockboxed Toshiba Gigabeat MEG-F40S. It rocks. And I'm sure it'll play AAC files:
I personally have a dozen devices (many of them older) that'll play those 128k MP3 files as is, and NONE of them can process an AAC file.
While the sound quality of the AAC file is miles better, 128k VBR MP3 is good enough for many portables, and I can certainly understand folks being grumpy about now having to perform a format conversion before being able to listen to their purchased music files...
The case has shown how someone with money can play the US court system... on several levels... for multiple years with effectively NO case, draining the funds from corporations and taking up the time of large numbers of lawyers the entire time.
If the defendants go out of business or die of old age before due process is complete, is justice really served?
IBM released OS/2 Warp 4 in 1996, just two years before the release of BeOS R3 for Intel, and OS/2 likely had a larger market share than BeOS for the majority of BeOS' lifespan.
Both are unlikely candidates for reawakening, in my opinion, but of the two products, only OS/2 was able to give Windows a realistic run for its money.
BeOS is nice technology, but it had neither the user base nor the application mix to make a serious dent in Windows. OS/2 had both, as well as the added advantage of being able to run a fairly large subset of DOS and Windows programs at the time it was released...
That doesn't make it right, or make them immune from potential legal action. Not that I'm like to sue Slashdot for something like that, but in the US I certainly could.
I would love to see the whole subject of EULAs and the various legal overstatements (in my layman's view) contained therein addressed directly by the US Supreme Court. Maybe someday...
OS/2 was actually very good at running DOS games that used EMS, XMS, or DPMI memory management... it was older games that used things like VCPI that were an issue.
Games like Quake, Descent, etc. worked very well under OS/2 and were cutting edge DOS games at the time.
Also, it was possible to install OS/2 on a primary partition with a FAT filesystem and create what was called a Dual Boot OS/2 installation. Such an installation could be used to swap back and forth between a real MS-DOS/DR-DOS/PC-DOS installation and OS/2 by rewriting the boot sector on the fly, and that enabled OS/2 to run DOS applications with the same level of high compatibility that Windows 95 did (and for the same reasons).
Of course, you couldn't multitask the DOS programs run in this manner on an OS/2 box, but you couldn't multitask Windows apps alongside Win95 in that mode of operation, either. It was a tie.
The advantage OS/2 had was the ability to juggle multiple VDMs (Virtual DOS Machines) at the same time, each of them with their own AUTOEXEC.BAT, and each using virtualized mouse and sound drivers and such. You could run Quake and Descent at the same time.:-)
Win32s has been supported in OS/2 through at least 1.25a, and I thought through something like 1.25c, but it's been a while since I've dabbled with it.
Or were you talking specifically about eCS's WinOS2 subsystem?
Yeah, the way Microsoft jerked developers around with the OS/2 1.0 SDK is often cited as one of the reasons why a lot of software developers viewed IBM's 2.0 and later versions with suspicion. They were burned once, albeit by a different company, and possibly didn't appreciate the fact that OS/2 2.0 was a VERY different platform from the one that Microsoft dangled in front of their faces before the Windows bait-and-switch.
IBM was also not Microsoft, and the anti-trust scrutiny of the 80's actually made IBM a better company in many ways, I think. It was still a decentralized multi-headed hydra, tho, with PSP (Personal Software Products, the group that did OS/2) and PCCO (the IBM PC Company) always butting heads.:-(
The PC/GEOS environment was a good one, and Geoworks Ensemble still exists today as Breadbox Ensemble. Look it up on Google.:-)
I've never understood why PC/GEOS' use of long filenames on a FAT16 filesystem was never held up as a counterexample against Microsoft's supposed patent of the techniques used in VFAT. Maybe I don't really understand what was being patented, but it isn't *that* hard to figure out how to map longer filenames to a FAT filesystem.
One might even call it an obvious hack.
Re:Not many OS/2 Apps that people are wanting
on
Is OS/2 Coming Back?
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· Score: 1
Some popular products like StarOffice (basis for OpenOffice) and Partition Magic had their start in the OS/2 world.
I find it very telling that many of the people that have commented on this story have low UIDs, lol
I suspect that some of us were using Linux on multiboot systems before many/. users were born.;-) In my case, since I grabbed a copy of SLS 0.99 as ZIP files from a local BBS sometime in late 92 or maybe early 93 and used rawrite to create 'em. A-series, B-series, X-series... Whee! Uh... "ls" means directory? What?:-)
I had a quad-Boot system in 1996: DOS+Windows, OS/2, another OS/2, and Linux thanks to IBM's Boot Manager. That by itself was almost worth the $50 OS/2 2.0 "upgrade" fee for Windows users that IBM was offering back in 1992.
OS/2 worked quite well on "business-class" hardware... 3Com and Intel NICs were almost always support, Matrox was well known for its quality OS/2 drivers, Creative Labs soundcards were well-supported through the AWE64 until they completely changed the chipset and stopped writing drivers for OS/2, etc.
With a little research, it wasn't difficult at all to get a PC to run with OS/2, but sometimes that meant replacing a component. OS/2 had the same issue that Linux did at the time... most hardware manufacturers tended to provide drivers for Windows only, so you were somewhat limited in what you could use. But sometimes the hardware switch was well worth it... the original Matrox MGA Millenium was one of the fastest cards around on all platforms for a while, for example, and its OS/2 drivers were second to none.
OS/2 also had EXCELLENT SCSI support, and that plus SCSI's performance advantages over IDE drives of the early/mid 90's made Adaptec controllers the priimary choice for many of the OS/2 folks I knew. Linux had good support for those SCSI cards, too.
OS/2 was as popular as the Mac once...
on
Is OS/2 Coming Back?
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· Score: 2, Interesting
According to IDC, IBM shipped a total of 4.5 million units of desktop OS/2 (with another 275,000 as servers) in 1995.
To put that in perspective, note that Apple shipped 4.8 million Macintoshes in 1995, all running System 7.5, plus another 800,000-900,000 System 7.5 upgrades.
It was almost as popular as the Mac in 1995, and the Mac was #2 to Windows at that time.
For those who don't know, a Workgroup Folder allowed one to put a group of programs and/or documents in a single folder and then open/close those elements as a single logical unit. Open the folder, and all of your programs and associated documents popped open. Close the folder, and everything closed as a unit. It was very slick...
Not sure that's a good analogy as OS/2 was heavily OO and had an arguably larger feature set than its mainstream rivals. A case could maybe be made for OS/2 1.0, tho.
If DOS is BASIC and Windows is C#, OS/2 was more like a C++ environment which also had some sort of virtual BASIC tossed in as well as some fancy object libraries which were very useful but which took a certain mindset to use effectively.
The document-centric paradigm the WPS presented was not the traditional "launch program first, then open document" approach that most Windows or UNIX users are used to, and some of the more powerful features (e.g., WorkGroup Folders) were never really understood by most users, and to my knowledge have never been duplicated elsewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Psst... This is with a computer. That makes it TOTALLY new.
C-like syntax sucks. Give me obscure mainframe macro languages anytime. :-)
loop while true do; print 'FUCK'; enddo;
Most of the lights in the Atlanta metro seem to use cameras and not inductive sensors, which I guess is good for motorcyclists and such, but cameras can sometimes be unreliable as well.
Well, for one we have the SOURCE for the mainframe operating system we run. And no, it isn't open source.
In this economy, who can afford to? Heck, I can get five or six Nokia 770's on eBay for the cost of a bottom-end iPad.
I realize wifi isn't good enough for some ... my wife got her Samsung Rogue with a GPS, web browser, e-mail, unlimited data plan, etc. for $65/month and no cost at all for the phone. What could an iPad offer her that she doesn't already have?
That a WYSIGYG thingie?
Don't remember the model number of the little Sony boombox or the two Black discman players which play MP3 discs, but I would guess they're both around 4-5 years old. Neither of my little MP3 cubes plays AAC, either, I don't think the older DVD player I have does (the new one might), and I also don't think my Sony CD changer does on the main stereo.
I didn't say I personally USED those devices anymore, but I'm sure others do. My own preference is my Rockboxed Toshiba Gigabeat MEG-F40S. It rocks. And I'm sure it'll play AAC files:
http://www.rockbox.org/wiki/SoundCodecs#Current_status :-)
No, but nntp access to Slashdot is something that has been asked about for quite some time. :-)
I personally have a dozen devices (many of them older) that'll play those 128k MP3 files as is, and NONE of them can process an AAC file.
While the sound quality of the AAC file is miles better, 128k VBR MP3 is good enough for many portables, and I can certainly understand folks being grumpy about now having to perform a format conversion before being able to listen to their purchased music files...
I hate to admit it, but ... some lawyers are good people.
No, really. :-)
The case has shown how someone with money can play the US court system ... on several levels ... for multiple years with effectively NO case, draining the funds from corporations and taking up the time of large numbers of lawyers the entire time.
If the defendants go out of business or die of old age before due process is complete, is justice really served?
IBM released OS/2 Warp 4 in 1996, just two years before the release of BeOS R3 for Intel, and OS/2 likely had a larger market share than BeOS for the majority of BeOS' lifespan.
Both are unlikely candidates for reawakening, in my opinion, but of the two products, only OS/2 was able to give Windows a realistic run for its money.
BeOS is nice technology, but it had neither the user base nor the application mix to make a serious dent in Windows. OS/2 had both, as well as the added advantage of being able to run a fairly large subset of DOS and Windows programs at the time it was released...
That doesn't make it right, or make them immune from potential legal action. Not that I'm like to sue Slashdot for something like that, but in the US I certainly could.
I would love to see the whole subject of EULAs and the various legal overstatements (in my layman's view) contained therein addressed directly by the US Supreme Court. Maybe someday...
OS/2 was actually very good at running DOS games that used EMS, XMS, or DPMI memory management ... it was older games that used things like VCPI that were an issue.
Games like Quake, Descent, etc. worked very well under OS/2 and were cutting edge DOS games at the time.
Also, it was possible to install OS/2 on a primary partition with a FAT filesystem and create what was called a Dual Boot OS/2 installation. Such an installation could be used to swap back and forth between a real MS-DOS/DR-DOS/PC-DOS installation and OS/2 by rewriting the boot sector on the fly, and that enabled OS/2 to run DOS applications with the same level of high compatibility that Windows 95 did (and for the same reasons).
Of course, you couldn't multitask the DOS programs run in this manner on an OS/2 box, but you couldn't multitask Windows apps alongside Win95 in that mode of operation, either. It was a tie.
The advantage OS/2 had was the ability to juggle multiple VDMs (Virtual DOS Machines) at the same time, each of them with their own AUTOEXEC.BAT, and each using virtualized mouse and sound drivers and such. You could run Quake and Descent at the same time. :-)
Win32s has been supported in OS/2 through at least 1.25a, and I thought through something like 1.25c, but it's been a while since I've dabbled with it.
Or were you talking specifically about eCS's WinOS2 subsystem?
Yeah, the way Microsoft jerked developers around with the OS/2 1.0 SDK is often cited as one of the reasons why a lot of software developers viewed IBM's 2.0 and later versions with suspicion. They were burned once, albeit by a different company, and possibly didn't appreciate the fact that OS/2 2.0 was a VERY different platform from the one that Microsoft dangled in front of their faces before the Windows bait-and-switch.
IBM was also not Microsoft, and the anti-trust scrutiny of the 80's actually made IBM a better company in many ways, I think. It was still a decentralized multi-headed hydra, tho, with PSP (Personal Software Products, the group that did OS/2) and PCCO (the IBM PC Company) always butting heads. :-(
The PC/GEOS environment was a good one, and Geoworks Ensemble still exists today as Breadbox Ensemble. Look it up on Google. :-)
I've never understood why PC/GEOS' use of long filenames on a FAT16 filesystem was never held up as a counterexample against Microsoft's supposed patent of the techniques used in VFAT. Maybe I don't really understand what was being patented, but it isn't *that* hard to figure out how to map longer filenames to a FAT filesystem.
One might even call it an obvious hack.
Some popular products like StarOffice (basis for OpenOffice) and Partition Magic had their start in the OS/2 world.
I suspect that some of us were using Linux on multiboot systems before many /. users were born. ;-) In my case, since I grabbed a copy of SLS 0.99 as ZIP files from a local BBS sometime in late 92 or maybe early 93 and used rawrite to create 'em. A-series, B-series, X-series... Whee! Uh... "ls" means directory? What? :-)
I had a quad-Boot system in 1996: DOS+Windows, OS/2, another OS/2, and Linux thanks to IBM's Boot Manager. That by itself was almost worth the $50 OS/2 2.0 "upgrade" fee for Windows users that IBM was offering back in 1992.
Those were the days... :-)
Those both sound like symptoms originating from a substandard video driver.
OS/2 worked quite well on "business-class" hardware ... 3Com and Intel NICs were almost always support, Matrox was well known for its quality OS/2 drivers, Creative Labs soundcards were well-supported through the AWE64 until they completely changed the chipset and stopped writing drivers for OS/2, etc.
With a little research, it wasn't difficult at all to get a PC to run with OS/2, but sometimes that meant replacing a component. OS/2 had the same issue that Linux did at the time ... most hardware manufacturers tended to provide drivers for Windows only, so you were somewhat limited in what you could use. But sometimes the hardware switch was well worth it ... the original Matrox MGA Millenium was one of the fastest cards around on all platforms for a while, for example, and its OS/2 drivers were second to none.
OS/2 also had EXCELLENT SCSI support, and that plus SCSI's performance advantages over IDE drives of the early/mid 90's made Adaptec controllers the priimary choice for many of the OS/2 folks I knew. Linux had good support for those SCSI cards, too.
According to IDC, IBM shipped a total of 4.5 million units of desktop OS/2 (with another 275,000 as servers) in 1995.
To put that in perspective, note that Apple shipped 4.8 million Macintoshes in 1995, all running System 7.5, plus another 800,000-900,000 System 7.5 upgrades.
It was almost as popular as the Mac in 1995, and the Mac was #2 to Windows at that time.
For those who don't know, a Workgroup Folder allowed one to put a group of programs and/or documents in a single folder and then open/close those elements as a single logical unit. Open the folder, and all of your programs and associated documents popped open. Close the folder, and everything closed as a unit. It was very slick...
Not sure that's a good analogy as OS/2 was heavily OO and had an arguably larger feature set than its mainstream rivals. A case could maybe be made for OS/2 1.0, tho.
If DOS is BASIC and Windows is C#, OS/2 was more like a C++ environment which also had some sort of virtual BASIC tossed in as well as some fancy object libraries which were very useful but which took a certain mindset to use effectively.
The document-centric paradigm the WPS presented was not the traditional "launch program first, then open document" approach that most Windows or UNIX users are used to, and some of the more powerful features (e.g., WorkGroup Folders) were never really understood by most users, and to my knowledge have never been duplicated elsewhere.
I should also add that the Solaris 10 systems I work on also do not permit that sort of simple change.
Don't ask me why ... I'm just a simple applications guy. I can't be root. :-)