A 6-year-old Mac will usually run a word processor about as well as a current mid-grade PC running Windows.
Mysteriously, however, a 6-year-old PC running Windows can barely boot these days -- even though it ran just fine 6 years ago.
Makes ya wonder, huh?
I used to have a 486-66 with 32 MB of RAM, ATI Mach 64 PCI card, on-board Symbios SCSI adaptor (ASUS PV-something-or-other motherboard). Loaded up Windows '95 just fine, I could even play that weezer video while dragging around the window it was playing in (with full-window-move turned on via Win95 Plus Pack).
Oddly enough, you can't even INSTALL a current version of Windows on a box like that anymore, but a current Linux distro would probably perform as well now as a current one would have then.
For that matter, I am typing this on a Pentium-166 running Windows 98 which is DEFINATELY slower than that old 486 was (in terms of user experience). And it has 64 MB more RAM, for God's sake!
Then I could just say whatever crossed my mind, and somehow expect everybody to believe me no matter how stupid I was.
> > The words college and university are to some extent regionalisms.
> Actually, they're not. There are national standards boards in the > U.S. and Canada that determine what constitutes a college > and what constitutes a university. Universities offer graduate > programs (masters, PhD, law); colleges do not.
Actually, in Canada, colleges grant diplomas and universities grant degrees. You go to a college to learn how to program, how to fix motorcycles, how to dye hair, and how to maintain an assembly line. You go to a university to learn about designing software systems, engineering motorcycles, synthesizing hair dye, and designing the robots on an assembly line.
And of course, the other posters are right on the money, the original poster was talking about regional colloquialisms, nothing else.
Solaris x86 probably wouldn't count, because they were talking about early Intel CPUs.
Since Linux doesn't run on pre-386 (did it ever? I don't think so..) I think the 386 is a good test case.
In April 1988, Sun Microsystems was selling the Sun386i 150 and 250 workstations, which used the 80386 CPU. These ran SunOS, which is BSD 4.2 UNIX derived.
Before somebody starts hopping on the "original UNIX vendor" clause, BSD *is* a real UNIX -- particular version 4.2 which contained AT&T source code and required a UNIX license!
Also, I'm curious as to what SCO thinks of 386BSD -- the original non-AT&T-licensed release of BSD UNIX by William Jolitz.
I wonder of UNISYS was ever a UNIX license holder (for QNX). I remember usign 80186-based QNX Workstations back in the mid-eighties.
Let's see. Somebody replying to the other article said they're worth 16 million bucks.
They probably pay a nickel per minute for their 888 number.
That means that we can bankrupt them by making 320 million minutes worth of useless calls, navigating their stupid voice menus! If we can each make 100 minutes worth of calls, we only need 3.2 million slashdotters to participate!
Looks like it's time for an offensive slashdotting, old school!
if app 1 MUST have version 4.3.5.1.34 of FOO.DLL, and app 2 MUST have version 4.3.5.1.35b, then you can write a simple XML file for each one, that controls exactly which version they get.
And how is this different from setting the LD_PRELOAD environment variable (or tinkering with LD_LIBRARY_PATH) in a shell wrapper for a binary? (Aside from the fact that more people know shell than XML;)
Unless they have a magic way to pick which functions from which DSOs you use at link time (or dlopen time), I can't see what's better about it than the normal (UNIX) way of doing things.
Now, it's the video card makers slagging the benchmark makers.
Anybody remember the early 90s (93?) when Hercules got itself into hot water by hard-coding a super-fast result for the PC Magazine video benchmark? Whoo hoo, that made for some good press. Got their awards pulled and everything.
At one in point in Canada, when Bell was rolling out ADSL, they were told to lease other ISPs ADSL at the same rate it was leasing to its own ISP (Bell Sympatico). So what did they do? Sympatico leased lines for $260/month, charged consumers $40, and wrote off $220/month/sub to the parent company -- who leased them lines in the first place! Obviously, no ISP could compete.
Fortunately, that didn't last long -- eight or ten months, I'd guess -- before ADSL on PPPoe was available from third parties.
It's not hard to get fiber run to your door, assuming you are willing to pay what it costs to do so, up front -- and also lease right-of-way between yourself and your ISP.
The reason people don't do this is because it's jesus expensive, especially if you live in butt-fuck nowhere where cable has be to buried across five miles of farm land.
Hell, most people would be upset at just having to cover the cost of the horse food.
> The people who don't "get" xor ax, ax at first > glance are primarily those whose first assembly > language experience was on an architecture such > as 6502 that can't do operations between > registers and registers, only registers and > memory.
Then what do TAX, TYA, and brethern do?
Of course, "transfer" isn't much of an operation, but it is one.:)
Very insightful point, howerver. The first time I saw "xor ax,ax" was in 1987, after programming 6502/6510 for a few years. I took me almost ten minutes to figure out what the hell was going on.
Of course, that was also the first day I'd seen 80x86 assembly, and it was literally the first instruction in the program I was reading.
The key definition for whether something is a virus or not is whether it is self-replicating in such a manner that it renders an infected host capable of infecting other hosts.
This piece of crap is not a virus, but it's certainly some kind of disease. It is more akin to a hot dog vendor purposely injecting his hot dogs with staphilococus bacteria than it is to catching HIV from a malicious hooker.
However, if you purposely give someone a fatal disease, you are still guilty of manslaughter and can go to jail. I think similar penalties should apply here.
You don't need no stinkin' headers!
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 1
Well, sometimes you don't.
This one line will run on many unices:
void main() { printf("hello, world\n"); }
Of course, the compiler will whine. Well, depending on what warnings you have enabled.;)
TEST before your POST
on
Immortal Code
·
· Score: 2, Informative
On most machines of that era, you would overrun I long before the loop completed!
Sheesh!
Not to mention the fact that the program won't finish the first loop, as "** GREG WAS HERE **" is not a legal key word in BASIC!
What I'd like to see is the ability buy a BIG box of these babies. Like a shoe-box full. All exactly alike in taste, look, feel, smell, etc. Except 25% of them have 100% tobacco, 25% are at 58%, 25% are at 17%, and 25% are at 0.
That would work well for me.
Maybe they could even sell shoeboxes full with different proportions.
He's probably thinking that Adlib was the "Gold Standard" because of the release of the amazingly expensive piece of crap, the "Adlib Gold" card. This came out around the same time as the Sound Blaster Pro.
Your memory is correct. FWIW, the UART on those cards was the Roland MPU-401. The FM synthesis, IIRC, was Yamaha OPL2 chips on the Adlib/SB and Yamaha OPL3 on the later products.
The SB Pro also added one excellent feature -- a CD-ROM controller for Panasonic single and double speed drives (remember the CR-562?).
Shortly after the SB Pro came out, ATI came out of with a nice card, it had a Mitsumi single speed controller, MPU 401 UART, game port, and Yamaha OPL3 chips. I can't for the life of me remember what it was called, though.. ATI AudioPro or something?
Later cards, like the SB-16 (1994?), included various CD-ROM controllers, depending on which bundle you bought (and when). The best one, IMHO, was the SB16-CD, which had *unamplified* out (better quality) as well as the regular output, plus three CD-ROM controllers; Mitsumi single speed, Panasonic single/double speed, and Sony single speed (34-pin.. for the CDU-34, I think).
Even later, the SB16 Value Edition had an onboard IDE controller, which could be configured as the tertiary or quaternary IDE controller in a modern system.
One card you missed was the SB WaveBlaster -- wave table synthesizer. An SB16 + a Wave Blaster was basically as good as the early AWE32, and connected to an SB16 via the 28-pin expansion connector on the card. In stock form, it played pretty good MIDI samples, but you could add up to 8MB of RAM (2x4MB 30-pin SIMMs) which would let you download samples into it. It still didn't sound as good a Gravis UltraSound, but support for it was much more prevalent in games, since it could be controlled by software the same as a General MIDI device plugged into the SB16s MPU 401.
Wow, that was a long time ago. Don't ask me about anything modern, though -- the last time I was a serious gamer, DOOM was fresh and the Diamond Viper was the card to have.
You're thinking of the "Disney Sound System". It was basically a DAC connected to the output lines of your serial port -- DAC301 was the model of the chip, IIRC.
I build one of these in 1992 for playing.MOD files out of a bunch of resistors [poor man's DAC!]. Worked fantastically well.
Re:Slight error in your notes
on
The 1991 "X-Box"
·
· Score: 2, Informative
SX2/DX2 = 486 SX/DX with internal clock doubling. The DX4 was not an Intel product, AMD only. If memory serves me correctly, it could run as a clock-quadrupled 25MHz product or clock-tripled 33MHz product.
So, the DX-50 was 50MHz internal and 50MHz external; the DX2-66 was 33MHz external and 66 MHz internal. In certain applications, the DX2-50 would outperform DX2-66 based systems, because of the difference in I/O throughput. The DX-50 was problematic with VESA Local Bus systems, however -- VLB was never meant to run faster than 33 MHz, so you would wind up overclocking the I/O and video cards.
A good compromise was the AMD DX2-80 chip; with a 40 MHz external bus I/O boards tended to be more reliable (esp QD6580 chipset based boards). In almost all circumstances, DX2-80 systems would outperform DX-50 systems.
Oh, it was fun building and upgrading systems back in those days. You really had to know your parts, since the VLB and CPU clock speeds were tied together. For that matter, upgrading the CPUs often meant having to get faster cache chips (many 486SX-25s shipped with 25ns cache -- too slow for 40+ MHz FSB!). Hell, Packard Smell systems from those days shipped without *any* L2 cache, and some of them had a really hard to dig up dirty tag chip; you'd need 8x 61256 chips, a 6164, and something else that was tough to source in small quantities..
The 486 SLC was made by Cyrix, and it plugged into a 386SX socket -- or was surface-mounted at the mobo plant for cheapie '486' boards. So, 16-bit FSB. There was also a 486 DLC, which had a 32-bit front-side bus. I don't think that was available as an SMT part (certainly never saw any), but I had one in my old 386 DX motherboard, running at 40MHz. Hotter than hell; but Norton Sysinfo benched it as 42% faster than with the AMD 386-40 in that slot.
Cyrix also made a "clip on" product of some kind that was meant to clip on to SMT 386s, not sure how that worked, I never bought one (just saw 'em in mags).
I don't think they ever made a pin-for-pin replacement for the 286, it would have been entertaining trying to wedge a 386 into a 40-pin DIP. But it's possible.
I was thinking that a great way to deliver this sort of weapon would be with a giant owl.
Well, not really an owl, but a gigantic owl-shaped robot. It flies in attached to an unmanned drone, and spreads its wings once it is dropped. It then starts to glide, accelerating as needed using a hydrogen-powered rocket which fires from the robotic owl's rear.
Eventually, it finds a big electrical tower (you know, the kind that use four bare wires to channel the electrons), and lands on it. It releases the remaining hydrogen gas, allowing room for the compressed gel packs stored inside it to expand; perhaps absorbing moisture from the atmosphere to turn powder into gel. These gel packs would actually be giant electrolitic capacitors.
The capacitors charge from the power lines, and the owl opens its mouth, broadcasting EMP or microwaves at the surrounding technology. A really realistic owl might even hoot at the same time.
This is why it's really important that the delivery system be a robotic owl. Owls can rotate their heads all the way around, unlike those silly drone airplanes. By rotating their heads while hooting, they will achieve excellent coverage and cause significant disruption to surrounding communications systems, etc.
When the power serving the owl is turned off, it realizes its mission is accomplished, and self destructs by letting go of the electrical wires. Maybe it even has some C4 in its head, so it can blow up the tower. Or maybe the electrolytic gel can be explosive, too.
So now we know why Hans Blix can't find anything -- he's ignoring all the robotic owls.
Slashdot Mirror
A 6-year-old Mac will usually run a word processor about as well as a current mid-grade PC running Windows.
Mysteriously, however, a 6-year-old PC running Windows can barely boot these days -- even though it ran just fine 6 years ago.
Makes ya wonder, huh?
I used to have a 486-66 with 32 MB of RAM, ATI Mach 64 PCI card, on-board Symbios SCSI adaptor (ASUS PV-something-or-other motherboard). Loaded up Windows '95 just fine, I could even play that weezer video while dragging around the window it was playing in (with full-window-move turned on via Win95 Plus Pack).
Oddly enough, you can't even INSTALL a current version of Windows on a box like that anymore, but a current Linux distro would probably perform as well now as a current one would have then.
For that matter, I am typing this on a Pentium-166 running Windows 98 which is DEFINATELY slower than that old 486 was (in terms of user experience). And it has 64 MB more RAM, for God's sake!
Then I could just say whatever crossed my mind, and somehow expect everybody to believe me no matter how stupid I was.
> > The words college and university are to some extent regionalisms.
> Actually, they're not. There are national standards boards in the
> U.S. and Canada that determine what constitutes a college
> and what constitutes a university. Universities offer graduate
> programs (masters, PhD, law); colleges do not.
Actually, in Canada, colleges grant diplomas and universities grant degrees. You go to a college to learn how to program, how to fix motorcycles, how to dye hair, and how to maintain an assembly line. You go to a university to learn about designing software systems, engineering motorcycles, synthesizing hair dye, and designing the robots on an assembly line.
And of course, the other posters are right on the money, the original poster was talking about regional colloquialisms, nothing else.
You need to install a traffic-shaping router. You can probably build one out of iptables-1.2.7a with the fuzzy logic patch.
You just need a big, fat, red magic marker. Make a circle-with-slash (e.g. No SCO!) logo out of it.
Then it will be truly 1337.
Solaris x86 probably wouldn't count, because they were talking about early Intel CPUs.
Since Linux doesn't run on pre-386 (did it ever? I don't think so..) I think the 386 is a good test case.
In April 1988, Sun Microsystems was selling the Sun386i 150 and 250 workstations, which used the 80386 CPU. These ran SunOS, which is BSD 4.2 UNIX derived.
Before somebody starts hopping on the "original UNIX vendor" clause, BSD *is* a real UNIX -- particular version 4.2 which contained AT&T source code and required a UNIX license!
Also, I'm curious as to what SCO thinks of 386BSD -- the original non-AT&T-licensed release of BSD UNIX by William Jolitz.
I wonder of UNISYS was ever a UNIX license holder (for QNX). I remember usign 80186-based QNX Workstations back in the mid-eighties.
Let's see. Somebody replying to the other article said they're worth 16 million bucks.
They probably pay a nickel per minute for their 888 number.
That means that we can bankrupt them by making 320 million minutes worth of useless calls, navigating their stupid voice menus! If we can each make 100 minutes worth of calls, we only need 3.2 million slashdotters to participate!
Looks like it's time for an offensive slashdotting, old school!
Actually, it probably has a lot more to do with the 18 gauge steel case, and the shock isolators around the HDD cage.
What the AC misses is that Doom was shareware! Millions of people bought the *shareware* copy!
Only episodes 2 and 3 were pay-for-play. Sheesh.
(and what the hell is wrong with slashdot today???
Now, it's the video card makers slagging the benchmark makers.
Anybody remember the early 90s (93?) when Hercules got itself into hot water by hard-coding a super-fast result for the PC Magazine video benchmark? Whoo hoo, that made for some good press. Got their awards pulled and everything.
At one in point in Canada, when Bell was rolling out ADSL, they were told to lease other ISPs ADSL at the same rate it was leasing to its own ISP (Bell Sympatico). So what did they do? Sympatico leased lines for $260/month, charged consumers $40, and wrote off $220/month/sub to the parent company -- who leased them lines in the first place! Obviously, no ISP could compete.
Fortunately, that didn't last long -- eight or ten months, I'd guess -- before ADSL on PPPoe was available from third parties.
It's not hard to get fiber run to your door, assuming you are willing to pay what it costs to do so, up front -- and also lease right-of-way between yourself and your ISP.
The reason people don't do this is because it's jesus expensive, especially if you live in butt-fuck nowhere where cable has be to buried across five miles of farm land.
Hell, most people would be upset at just having to cover the cost of the horse food.
It's not HTTP's fault that Microshit can't implement a browser that correctly interprets the "Content-Disposition" MIME header.
If you're sending PDF recipes to housewives, DO use FTP. Ever seen what Acrobat does to Apache?
Finally, I can reuse my Challenger jokes!
> The people who don't "get" xor ax, ax at first
:)
> glance are primarily those whose first assembly
> language experience was on an architecture such
> as 6502 that can't do operations between
> registers and registers, only registers and
> memory.
Then what do TAX, TYA, and brethern do?
Of course, "transfer" isn't much of an operation, but it is one.
Very insightful point, howerver. The first time I saw "xor ax,ax" was in 1987, after programming 6502/6510 for a few years. I took me almost ten minutes to figure out what the hell was going on.
Of course, that was also the first day I'd seen 80x86 assembly, and it was literally the first instruction in the program I was reading.
The key definition for whether something is a virus or not is whether it is self-replicating in such a manner that it renders an infected host capable of infecting other hosts.
This piece of crap is not a virus, but it's certainly some kind of disease. It is more akin to a hot dog vendor purposely injecting his hot dogs with staphilococus bacteria than it is to catching HIV from a malicious hooker.
However, if you purposely give someone a fatal disease, you are still guilty of manslaughter and can go to jail. I think similar penalties should apply here.
Well, sometimes you don't.
;)
This one line will run on many unices:
void main() { printf("hello, world\n"); }
Of course, the compiler will whine. Well, depending on what warnings you have enabled.
On most machines of that era, you would overrun I long before the loop completed!
Sheesh!
Not to mention the fact that the program won't finish the first loop, as "** GREG WAS HERE **" is not a legal key word in BASIC!
(Hint - look at the semi colon)
What I'd like to see is the ability buy a BIG box of these babies. Like a shoe-box full. All exactly alike in taste, look, feel, smell, etc. Except 25% of them have 100% tobacco, 25% are at 58%, 25% are at 17%, and 25% are at 0.
That would work well for me.
Maybe they could even sell shoeboxes full with different proportions.
He's probably thinking that Adlib was the "Gold Standard" because of the release of the amazingly expensive piece of crap, the "Adlib Gold" card. This came out around the same time as the Sound Blaster Pro.
Your memory is correct. FWIW, the UART on those cards was the Roland MPU-401. The FM synthesis, IIRC, was Yamaha OPL2 chips on the Adlib/SB and Yamaha OPL3 on the later products.
The SB Pro also added one excellent feature -- a CD-ROM controller for Panasonic single and double speed drives (remember the CR-562?).
Shortly after the SB Pro came out, ATI came out of with a nice card, it had a Mitsumi single speed controller, MPU 401 UART, game port, and Yamaha OPL3 chips. I can't for the life of me remember what it was called, though.. ATI AudioPro or something?
Later cards, like the SB-16 (1994?), included various CD-ROM controllers, depending on which bundle you bought (and when). The best one, IMHO, was the SB16-CD, which had *unamplified* out (better quality) as well as the regular output, plus three CD-ROM controllers; Mitsumi single speed, Panasonic single/double speed, and Sony single speed (34-pin.. for the CDU-34, I think).
Even later, the SB16 Value Edition had an onboard IDE controller, which could be configured as the tertiary or quaternary IDE controller in a modern system.
One card you missed was the SB WaveBlaster -- wave table synthesizer. An SB16 + a Wave Blaster was basically as good as the early AWE32, and connected to an SB16 via the 28-pin expansion connector on the card. In stock form, it played pretty good MIDI samples, but you could add up to 8MB of RAM (2x4MB 30-pin SIMMs) which would let you download samples into it. It still didn't sound as good a Gravis UltraSound, but support for it was much more prevalent in games, since it could be controlled by software the same as a General MIDI device plugged into the SB16s MPU 401.
Wow, that was a long time ago. Don't ask me about anything modern, though -- the last time I was a serious gamer, DOOM was fresh and the Diamond Viper was the card to have.
You're thinking of the "Disney Sound System". It was basically a DAC connected to the output lines of your serial port -- DAC301 was the model of the chip, IIRC.
.MOD files out of a bunch of resistors [poor man's DAC!]. Worked fantastically well.
I build one of these in 1992 for playing
SX2/DX2 = 486 SX/DX with internal clock doubling. The DX4 was not an Intel product, AMD only. If memory serves me correctly, it could run as a clock-quadrupled 25MHz product or clock-tripled 33MHz product.
So, the DX-50 was 50MHz internal and 50MHz external; the DX2-66 was 33MHz external and 66 MHz internal. In certain applications, the DX2-50 would outperform DX2-66 based systems, because of the difference in I/O throughput. The DX-50 was problematic with VESA Local Bus systems, however -- VLB was never meant to run faster than 33 MHz, so you would wind up overclocking the I/O and video cards.
A good compromise was the AMD DX2-80 chip; with a 40 MHz external bus I/O boards tended to be more reliable (esp QD6580 chipset based boards). In almost all circumstances, DX2-80 systems would outperform DX-50 systems.
Oh, it was fun building and upgrading systems back in those days. You really had to know your parts, since the VLB and CPU clock speeds were tied together. For that matter, upgrading the CPUs often meant having to get faster cache chips (many 486SX-25s shipped with 25ns cache -- too slow for 40+ MHz FSB!). Hell, Packard Smell systems from those days shipped without *any* L2 cache, and some of them had a really hard to dig up dirty tag chip; you'd need 8x 61256 chips, a 6164, and something else that was tough to source in small quantities..
The 486 SLC was made by Cyrix, and it plugged into a 386SX socket -- or was surface-mounted at the mobo plant for cheapie '486' boards. So, 16-bit FSB. There was also a 486 DLC, which had a 32-bit front-side bus. I don't think that was available as an SMT part (certainly never saw any), but I had one in my old 386 DX motherboard, running at 40MHz. Hotter than hell; but Norton Sysinfo benched it as 42% faster than with the AMD 386-40 in that slot.
Cyrix also made a "clip on" product of some kind that was meant to clip on to SMT 386s, not sure how that worked, I never bought one (just saw 'em in mags).
I don't think they ever made a pin-for-pin replacement for the 286, it would have been entertaining trying to wedge a 386 into a 40-pin DIP. But it's possible.
I was thinking that a great way to deliver this sort of weapon would be with a giant owl.
Well, not really an owl, but a gigantic owl-shaped robot. It flies in attached to an unmanned drone, and spreads its wings once it is dropped. It then starts to glide, accelerating as needed using a hydrogen-powered rocket which fires from the robotic owl's rear.
Eventually, it finds a big electrical tower (you know, the kind that use four bare wires to channel the electrons), and lands on it. It releases the remaining hydrogen gas, allowing room for the compressed gel packs stored inside it to expand; perhaps absorbing moisture from the atmosphere to turn powder into gel. These gel packs would actually be giant electrolitic capacitors.
The capacitors charge from the power lines, and the owl opens its mouth, broadcasting EMP or microwaves at the surrounding technology. A really realistic owl might even hoot at the same time.
This is why it's really important that the delivery system be a robotic owl. Owls can rotate their heads all the way around, unlike those silly drone airplanes. By rotating their heads while hooting, they will achieve excellent coverage and cause significant disruption to surrounding communications systems, etc.
When the power serving the owl is turned off, it realizes its mission is accomplished, and self destructs by letting go of the electrical wires. Maybe it even has some C4 in its head, so it can blow up the tower. Or maybe the electrolytic gel can be explosive, too.
So now we know why Hans Blix can't find anything -- he's ignoring all the robotic owls.