Reminds me of a store room at work a good number of years ago. Absolutly full of hardware that was obsolete even then, kept just in case it ever came in handy. 4Mbit Token ring cards (we didn't even use Token Ring!), 10MB Bernoulli drives and disks, a graphics co-processor card with neither documentation or software, EMS expansion boards, weird bus mice and other odd things. No-onw knew if any of this stuff worked. Eventually it was thrown away, with the odd bit salvaged. The EMS board came in handy for playing Wing Commander II on my 286 - got to see more graphics!
I've a few goodies in my cupboard going spare, anybody want them?
An EISA 486 motherboard without the ECU disk.
A 6-port Serial card with no available device drivers, except those for a non-Y2K compliant OS.
An HP-Thinkjet clone printer, requiring a special non-standard cable which I've lost.
A broken sheet-feeder for a Canon BJ-10 printer.
2 14,400 plug-and-play modems.
A few IDE hard drives, including a 40MB one, an 80MB one, and a 200MB one with a lot of bad sectors.
An ISA sound card with capacitors so large that it requires 2 card slots.
They do it all the time. Whenever I order goods from someone I deliberatly mis-spell or alter my name and/or address in some small way. This allows me to trace where the details were sold from once the company sells the details on.
We do have an opt out clause. I don't use this, instead boycott anyone who sends me junk mail.
The signal-to-noise ratio has reached an all-time low with this discussion. Intelligent conversation has been replaced with immature rantings and stale jokes.
The whole site is now hopeless. The first amendment has a lot to do with it.
The Spanish also used other Nazi sourced hardware for a long time. Their airforce was flying locally built Mescherschmitt Bf 109s (although with Rolls Royce Merlin engines) until the late 1960s.
I'm sure that there are more than 3 surviving Enigma machines. It is more likely that there are only 3 of this particular model, which IIRC has one more encoding wheel than the standard model.
Abount 15 years ago I saw an Enigma in a museum of occupation in Jersey, the Channel Islands. Left over from when the islands were liberated. I can't recall how many wheels this one had.
C9 was RET. ED B0 was LDIR. 01 was possibly LD A, x.
I havn't touched any of this for 13 or so years, and even then I used an assembler. My assembler was broken with respect to the IX and IY instructions, causing code to be assembled with the opcodes in the wrong order. By the time I'd noticed this the manufacturers of the assembler had ceased trading!
The Spectrum, running a later version of Sinclair's BASIC, also had a VAL$ expression, which evaluated a string as a string expression. I only ever saw it used once, to print various parts of a string array based upon a varying index, for a BASIC Frogger clone. A loop calculated the enormous string expression, storing it in a string. The main loop incremented the index, then used VAL$ to evaluate the string.
I also used the memory saving techniques on my Spectrum, when memory was tight. Usually this was when the location of the stack was lowered to allow machine-code instructions to be placed where the stack couldn't smash it. One method of saving memory in basic was to assign a constant used more that 3 times to any unused single-character variable. Made the code utterly unreadable, but saved a few precious bytes.
There was an undelete mechanism during the 2.1.x development system. I played with it for a few days.
When an inode was unlinked it was not really unlinked, but moved to a file whose name began with a dot. Once enough of these deleted files had accumulated in one directory, subsequent unlinks would really unlink the oldest.
Adding any journalled filesystem to the existing kernel requires significant changes at the VFS layer. Making such a change has the potential of breaking other things, particularly other file-systems. Every current filesystem will have to be rechecked - not a simple task as some don't have full-time maintainers.
The current 2.4.0-test kernel is getting very close, and Linus now appears to be only accepting bug-fixes and the odd self-contained driver. There is no way such fundamental changes could go in now.
This appears simillar to a press release I read 18-months ago, for a product I was very familliar with. This article uses some of the same language.
My past employer decided to get out of network reselling and into vertical-market software, and developed a web-publishing product. I became responsible for supporting this and liasing with customers, yet I'd not seen it until moving departments.
My software had been sold as a web-publishing intranet aid to around 4 organisations. The main selling point was that anyone could publish data, and all documents would be converted into HTML from whatever format they were currently in.
It was nothing more that a commercial web-server (Lotus Domino in this case - arrggghhh!) together with some custom code and a few 3rd party document conversion libraries.
It sucked. I hated it. It failed. I just hope that this fails as badly.
There's only one drug for me - copious amounts of cask conditioned Real Ale on an evening, with the occasional bottle if I can't find a decent pub if working away from home.
Durham anything, Oakham White Dwarf, Ash Vine Black Bess, and so on.
And a local brewery (Daleside) has started brewing a beer called Duff, legally. Bottled only AFAIK, and difficult to find. Mmmmm - Duff Beer!
Bass Ale?? If its the same Bass I'm thinking of, then Yeuch!!
In the UK, Bass are one of the big nitro-keg brewers, producing Worthington, Stones and other horrors. Horrible, but Scottish and Newcastle (John Smiths, Theakstons) is even worse.
You want real, cask conditioned, ale. I could name hundreds of small breweries.
Way back in the mid 1980s there was a simillar product launched in the UK called The Quill, from Gilsoft. Available for the Sinclair Spectrum and possibly other machines.
Many games were released, some challenging, others utterly awful. There were hundreds of games released, some from big software houses. Delta4 produced some really hillarious games. IIRC the author is now working in the anti-virus sector.
The Quill improved with time. Graphical capability was available as an add-on, and later still data compression to allow really big games.
I once got truely stuck in once game, and spent one day hacking around the data file format to find out what to type and where to get around one nasty puzzle. I then applied this to other games, but got stumped with the ones using data compression.
If you need to run some libc5 only binary, you also often require other libc5 shared libraries as well as libc5, due to these libraries also being dynamically linked against libc5. Loading the wrong library will result in segfaults. Common libraries include ncurses, the various C++ libraries, and some XFree86 libraries.
Ld.so can differentiate between libraries dynamically linked against different libc versions, loading the correct one.
What are you replying to?
I always block port access to anything unless it is explicitly required.
Is it regarding my comment of incompetant sys-admins not installing critical security updates who should basically be dismissed for gross incompetance? If so, I stand by this. A lot of security breaches are made by known open ports. Broken CGI scripts, holes in wu-ftp that a truck could be driven through, default passwords and so on.
I've seen the after effects of incompetant staff, and had to clean up after them. Yucck!
Here in Northern England we don't have cable (despite the fact that we were promised it 5 years ago - they cabled up the larger town 10 miles to the south and then stopped before moving in here), and have zero chance of getting it now that terrestial digital television has arrived.
DSL is covered by the monopolistice behomoth that is British Telecom. My exchange is not ready, not being either a major city or in the South-East of the country. If I did live in an area that could get DSL, I'd have to run their USB Windows-only system, or pay 2 1/2 times the price for the business system that did offer OS independance.
DSL is still a monopoly. BT have promised to open up the local loop, but it hasn't happened yet.
The government regulatory body in charge of communications, Oftel, havn't a clue. And our Elected Dictatorship of a government are equally as bad, if not worse.
It's not feasable to just slap in a CD-ROM and install on *ANY* system.
Just because a system is running doesn't mean it is running to full capacity. With any OS the default kernel/device drivers will get the system running, but updates need to be applied to get optimal performance. A few hours spent after installation will save hours in the long run.
It amazing how many don't do this, though! I've seen whole networks of machines running IDE in PIO mode on hardware that could run UDMA/33. I also supported an OS with statically configured communications buffers and cache sizes, most customers again left these at their conservative defaults. And others.
Basically some administrators are lazy. They can't be bothered to tweak their system, or install critical updates. If I had my way, anyone who didn't bother to install current security updates should be fired for basic incompetance and not be hired again!
Windows (well DOS which runs underneath) expects hardware to be in specific locations during the initial boot, once it has taken over from the BIOS boot loader. Parallel ports, serial ports, the floppy drive and the IDE controller are definitly in the DOS kernel.
The simple DOS kernel could be getting confused by some hardware not being at the correct location, or something else using an expected IRQ.
It is only when DOS had loaded that the Windows drivers take over.
Poke around under with/proc under Linux to see which resources are currently allocated.
You may not be aware of the recent fuel issue in the UK.
Fuel for road vehicles (petrol and diesel) is taxed over 75% tax. This makes our fuel the most expensive in Europe.
Earlier this month a protest was started by the road-haulage companies and farmers. This consisted of peaceful blockades outside fuel depots and oil refinerys, preventing fuel tankers from making deliveries.
Within a few days this blockade, coupled with panic buying, brought the country to an effective standstill. In addition essential provisions began to sell out in some stores, again caused by further panic buying.
The government steadfastly refused to make any changes to this tax policy (despite it being the root cause of inflation). The dispute stopped, temporarily, to restart 60 days later if nothing has changed.
The upshot of this is that the government has suddenly become very unpopular (the Millenium Dome farce hasn't helped), the opposition party are also unpopular for starting this tax policy, and the third party are unpopular for pledging to put taxes up further. Most people I've spoken too seem to have no idea who to vote for in the next election, which will be called soemtime within the next 18 months (how I'd love to have a fixed term).
At least DC will be getting a good number of people (the great unwashed Windows lusers) to visit their site.
The last time I was in London (around 3 months ago), there were a number of huge advertisments on the tube for a site called something like IHaveMoved.Com. I've not seen them advertised anywhere else in the country since.
The purpose of this site is to inform people and organisations that you have moved house. They seem to get their revenue from address harvesting. The companies seeking the infomation pay for it.
I read somewhere that it cost a million pounds just to start up this site, including the outlay for advertising. How the hell are they going to recoup this money, even if they do attract users to visit them and set up an account?
I had dealings with a place that wanted to install Virtual Vault.
They wanted a secure web-server, running their in-house written CGI code. The PHBs decided that as long as the underlying OS was certified as secure, they would have no security problems! Yes, people are really that naive!
Virtual Vault was eventually dropped when it was discovered that their Systems Management software (which used the extreemly insecure SNMP) wouldn't run on the proposed system, and they needed everything to report back to one central super-console.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds me of a store room at work a good number of years ago. Absolutly full of hardware that was obsolete even then, kept just in case it ever came in handy. 4Mbit Token ring cards (we didn't even use Token Ring!), 10MB Bernoulli drives and disks, a graphics co-processor card with neither documentation or software, EMS expansion boards, weird bus mice and other odd things. No-onw knew if any of this stuff worked. Eventually it was thrown away, with the odd bit salvaged. The EMS board came in handy for playing Wing Commander II on my 286 - got to see more graphics!
An EISA 486 motherboard without the ECU disk.
A 6-port Serial card with no available device drivers, except those for a non-Y2K compliant OS.
An HP-Thinkjet clone printer, requiring a special non-standard cable which I've lost.
A broken sheet-feeder for a Canon BJ-10 printer.
2 14,400 plug-and-play modems.
A few IDE hard drives, including a 40MB one, an 80MB one, and a 200MB one with a lot of bad sectors.
An ISA sound card with capacitors so large that it requires 2 card slots.
Could I find a sucker for this junk?
By that time I might have dist-upgraded completly to woody from potato - blasted British Telecom and their ADSL policy!
It wasn't funny after two posts, after 100 it just becomes annoying.
They do it all the time. Whenever I order goods from someone I deliberatly mis-spell or alter my name and/or address in some small way. This allows me to trace where the details were sold from once the company sells the details on.
We do have an opt out clause. I don't use this, instead boycott anyone who sends me junk mail.
The signal-to-noise ratio has reached an all-time low with this discussion. Intelligent conversation has been replaced with immature rantings and stale jokes.
The whole site is now hopeless. The first amendment has a lot to do with it.
The Spanish also used other Nazi sourced hardware for a long time. Their airforce was flying locally built Mescherschmitt Bf 109s (although with Rolls Royce Merlin engines) until the late 1960s.
I'm sure that there are more than 3 surviving Enigma machines. It is more likely that there are only 3 of this particular model, which IIRC has one more encoding wheel than the standard model. Abount 15 years ago I saw an Enigma in a museum of occupation in Jersey, the Channel Islands. Left over from when the islands were liberated. I can't recall how many wheels this one had.
C9 was RET. ED B0 was LDIR. 01 was possibly LD A, x.
I havn't touched any of this for 13 or so years, and even then I used an assembler. My assembler was broken with respect to the IX and IY instructions, causing code to be assembled with the opcodes in the wrong order. By the time I'd noticed this the manufacturers of the assembler had ceased trading!
I also used the memory saving techniques on my Spectrum, when memory was tight. Usually this was when the location of the stack was lowered to allow machine-code instructions to be placed where the stack couldn't smash it. One method of saving memory in basic was to assign a constant used more that 3 times to any unused single-character variable. Made the code utterly unreadable, but saved a few precious bytes.
When an inode was unlinked it was not really unlinked, but moved to a file whose name began with a dot. Once enough of these deleted files had accumulated in one directory, subsequent unlinks would really unlink the oldest.
When the d-entry code came in, this disappeared.
The current 2.4.0-test kernel is getting very close, and Linus now appears to be only accepting bug-fixes and the odd self-contained driver. There is no way such fundamental changes could go in now.
My past employer decided to get out of network reselling and into vertical-market software, and developed a web-publishing product. I became responsible for supporting this and liasing with customers, yet I'd not seen it until moving departments.
My software had been sold as a web-publishing intranet aid to around 4 organisations. The main selling point was that anyone could publish data, and all documents would be converted into HTML from whatever format they were currently in.
It was nothing more that a commercial web-server (Lotus Domino in this case - arrggghhh!) together with some custom code and a few 3rd party document conversion libraries.
It sucked. I hated it. It failed. I just hope that this fails as badly.
Daleside!
Durham anything, Oakham White Dwarf, Ash Vine Black Bess, and so on.
And a local brewery (Daleside) has started brewing a beer called Duff, legally. Bottled only AFAIK, and difficult to find. Mmmmm - Duff Beer!
In the UK, Bass are one of the big nitro-keg brewers, producing Worthington, Stones and other horrors. Horrible, but Scottish and Newcastle (John Smiths, Theakstons) is even worse.
You want real, cask conditioned, ale. I could name hundreds of small breweries.
Many games were released, some challenging, others utterly awful. There were hundreds of games released, some from big software houses. Delta4 produced some really hillarious games. IIRC the author is now working in the anti-virus sector.
The Quill improved with time. Graphical capability was available as an add-on, and later still data compression to allow really big games.
I once got truely stuck in once game, and spent one day hacking around the data file format to find out what to type and where to get around one nasty puzzle. I then applied this to other games, but got stumped with the ones using data compression.
Ld.so can differentiate between libraries dynamically linked against different libc versions, loading the correct one.
Is it regarding my comment of incompetant sys-admins not installing critical security updates who should basically be dismissed for gross incompetance? If so, I stand by this. A lot of security breaches are made by known open ports. Broken CGI scripts, holes in wu-ftp that a truck could be driven through, default passwords and so on.
I've seen the after effects of incompetant staff, and had to clean up after them. Yucck!
Here in Northern England we don't have cable (despite the fact that we were promised it 5 years ago - they cabled up the larger town 10 miles to the south and then stopped before moving in here), and have zero chance of getting it now that terrestial digital television has arrived.
DSL is covered by the monopolistice behomoth that is British Telecom. My exchange is not ready, not being either a major city or in the South-East of the country. If I did live in an area that could get DSL, I'd have to run their USB Windows-only system, or pay 2 1/2 times the price for the business system that did offer OS independance.
DSL is still a monopoly. BT have promised to open up the local loop, but it hasn't happened yet.
The government regulatory body in charge of communications, Oftel, havn't a clue. And our Elected Dictatorship of a government are equally as bad, if not worse.
Just because a system is running doesn't mean it is running to full capacity. With any OS the default kernel/device drivers will get the system running, but updates need to be applied to get optimal performance. A few hours spent after installation will save hours in the long run.
It amazing how many don't do this, though! I've seen whole networks of machines running IDE in PIO mode on hardware that could run UDMA/33. I also supported an OS with statically configured communications buffers and cache sizes, most customers again left these at their conservative defaults. And others.
Basically some administrators are lazy. They can't be bothered to tweak their system, or install critical updates. If I had my way, anyone who didn't bother to install current security updates should be fired for basic incompetance and not be hired again!
The simple DOS kernel could be getting confused by some hardware not being at the correct location, or something else using an expected IRQ.
It is only when DOS had loaded that the Windows drivers take over.
Poke around under with /proc under Linux to see which resources are currently allocated.
Fuel for road vehicles (petrol and diesel) is taxed over 75% tax. This makes our fuel the most expensive in Europe.
Earlier this month a protest was started by the road-haulage companies and farmers. This consisted of peaceful blockades outside fuel depots and oil refinerys, preventing fuel tankers from making deliveries.
Within a few days this blockade, coupled with panic buying, brought the country to an effective standstill. In addition essential provisions began to sell out in some stores, again caused by further panic buying.
The government steadfastly refused to make any changes to this tax policy (despite it being the root cause of inflation). The dispute stopped, temporarily, to restart 60 days later if nothing has changed.
The upshot of this is that the government has suddenly become very unpopular (the Millenium Dome farce hasn't helped), the opposition party are also unpopular for starting this tax policy, and the third party are unpopular for pledging to put taxes up further. Most people I've spoken too seem to have no idea who to vote for in the next election, which will be called soemtime within the next 18 months (how I'd love to have a fixed term).
The last time I was in London (around 3 months ago), there were a number of huge advertisments on the tube for a site called something like IHaveMoved.Com. I've not seen them advertised anywhere else in the country since.
The purpose of this site is to inform people and organisations that you have moved house. They seem to get their revenue from address harvesting. The companies seeking the infomation pay for it.
I read somewhere that it cost a million pounds just to start up this site, including the outlay for advertising. How the hell are they going to recoup this money, even if they do attract users to visit them and set up an account?
They wanted a secure web-server, running their in-house written CGI code. The PHBs decided that as long as the underlying OS was certified as secure, they would have no security problems! Yes, people are really that naive!
Virtual Vault was eventually dropped when it was discovered that their Systems Management software (which used the extreemly insecure SNMP) wouldn't run on the proposed system, and they needed everything to report back to one central super-console.