That looks like Espionage Island from Artic Computing. It was released initially for the ZX81, then ported to the larger memory ZX Spectrum with no changes - same limited text descriptions in upper case text, limited vocabulary, white text on a black background and so on. Their whole series of games were fairly limited plot-wise, and extremely linear - i.e. just one puzzle to solve at a time for most of the game. So if you got stuck on one puzzle there was no point exploring the rest of the game.
The only advantage that Artic's games had is that they were quick, having been coded entirely in assembly language. Many other games of that era were written in BASIC, and therefore suffered from having slow parsers and logic engines, with some games taking almost a minute to respond to commands. One software publisher went half-way - they coded the vocabulary parser in assembly, but still had the logic in BASIC.
Here in the UK there were a good number of such games published during the 8-bit micro boom of the early 1980s.
The first game to really start things going was Melbourne House's The Hobbit which, on some platforms, included crude graphics for some of the locations. The parser for this game was quite complex, allowing the player to pass instructions on to other characters. The other characters in the game also had some form of artificial intelligence, granting them the ability to wader around at random and move things around. Consequentially no two games were ever the same.
Another significant developer was Level 9 who created huge games using text compression. These were sold for a huge range of platforms.
Another major development was when Gilsoft developed The Quill, a an adventure game construction kit. This allowed virtually anyone to create a game based around a standard runtime environment. Many games were then released to the market, some so cleverly constructed that major software publishers could pass them on at full price. Later add-ons were created that allowed in-game graphics, basic sound effects and other features. Text compression was eventually added, too.
Only a few weeks ago I was given a URL by a recruitment agency for an on-line skills test which needed to be completed as part of a job application.
That particular site was coded to reject all login attempts if the user agent wasn't IE. Furthermore there were severe rendering problems if I used anything other than IE6, making the test impossible to complete. As I don't run Windows here by choice this was fairly annoying.
I ended up having to install a copy of XP under a VM just to complete the test.
I found an identical model at work about 15 yeas ago when clearing up. It came supplied with MS-DOS 2.x, a bus mouse, and some strange GUI software called Epson Taxi. If I recall correctly the floppy drives uses non-standard connectors, so it wasn't possible to fit anything of a larger capacity. I'm also certain that the second floppy drive wasn't working.
It was possible to get the thing onto our LAN using a boot floppy and an ARCNET card, but even that was tricky as it took some effort getting both DOS and the LAN software onto a 360K floppy.
Eventually I located a suitable 8-bit ISA hard disk controller and hard drive from elsewhere in the building.
Most of these flaws probably can be applied to the PCs and CP/M word-processors of Amstrad, a UK consumer electronics company who started to make PCs in the mid 1980s after having some success with their own 8-bit machines before then. Most problems were due to saving costs.
Early PCs featured the power supply built into the monitor, which, coupled with non-standard monitor ports, made replacement difficult. The power-supply wasn't rated high enough to drive many expansion cards. The units themselves, being maninly plastic, had terrible shielding problems causing severe interference. They keyboard and mouse also used a non standard interface; not only was the connector different, but the different keyboard drivers made the supplied version of MS-DOS mandatory.
Later models had better PC compatibility, but some suffered reliability issues due to Amstrad's proprietary hard disk controller. These were so bad that later units were retro-fitted with an standard off-the shelf controller, taking up one of the three expansion slots.
The CP/M word-processors originally shipped with 3" floppy disk drives, which were almost exclusively used by Amstrad. These units also had no on-board ROM; the printer ASIC supplied the process with the minimum instructions to boot off a floppy. The majority of the printer electronics were in the base unit, which meant that the printer itself used a non-standard interface and couldn't be replaced with purchasing a third-party serial interface. Although these machines were supplied with 256 or 512 MB RAM, the majority of the memory could only be used as a ramdisk.
Amstrad also produced a couple of portable machines. They did have a full-sized keyboard, but unfortunately came with a tiny LCD screen. They were also floppy only without third-party expansion units.
In the US the major network affiliates generally broadcast on VHF frequencies, for which these rabbit ears are sufficient. In the UK we use UHF, which doesn't perform as well without a dedicated external or loft aerial.
The UK used to use VHF for television, back in the days of the 405-line black & white service. BBC1 was broadcast on VHF Band I, whilst ITV was on VHF Band III. You can still see some of these aerials on the tops of some buildings; they were needed as the UK transmitters were often many miles away, although it was possible to pick up some services on an indoor aerial. These transmitters were eventually switched off in 1985.
The Scottish Parliament election of 2007 resulted in around 7% of the total ballots cast being rejected due to them being filled in incorrectly. This used a paper system. There were two separate ballots taking place on that day, one for the Scottish Parliament and another for local councils. Both used flawed ballot designs.
The Scottish Parliamentary ballot was split into two sections, one listing local candidates for the current ward, and another containing a 'top-up' list of parties arranged on a regional basis. Electors were told to make two votes, one per list, but many made two votes in one section. The confusion was added to by many of the parties in the regional list containing the name of the party leader, causing them to resemble the normal candidates.
The local election ballot was done on a single-transferrable vote system, where voters had to indicate their choice of candidate(s) in numerical order. This system was new to most voters, and caused further confusion.
I think I've done the very same test once. The interview was with a fairly local company, working on a small team supporting a network of Solaris systems. The interview itself was only with the HR representative, who couldn't tell me anything technical about the position that wasn't already in the job description, and the company couldn't be bothered to get another member of the team to sit in on the interview for even 10 minutes. After this brief interview I was handed about 4 or 5 pages of questions (about 100 in total) on Solaris and generic UNIX, and given 90 minutes to write down the answers. These would be then faxed to the technical manager of the company, who resided in another country, for marking. None of the questions were multiple choice, they all needed written answers.
Apart from a few simple questions at the start of the test, the questions were terrible. There were a lot of questions on little-used options, as above, but usally on the more obscure commands. One question asked to list 6 or 8 options that one command understood, when typically no-one uses more than two of these options in normal use. Many more were on obsolete file-systems or services (who still used Netscape Suitespot in 2007?). There were even questions on configuration files of software I'd never even heard of, and which wasn't in the job description. Most of these questions could probably have been answered via the man pages in a few seconds, but without any resources to hand most could only answer 10%. I walked out of the test way before I was due to finish, and I told the HR woman that I'd never come across an interview procedure as shambolic as this one. The position was still being advertised 3 months after this interview, which says it all.
I had to install several of these types of cards a few years back. Each one had a liquid crystal thermometer attached, as they had a tendency to get very hot. If they were fitted in a chassis with inadequate ventilation they could exceed the maximum operating temperature, so the thermometer was a must.
In this case the resin covered both sides of the PCB, encasing everything bar the ports and switches on the blanking plate.
There was at least one Lenslock game which had the incorrect lens shipped in some boxes, causing endless fun for the unfortunate customer.
Parallel port dongles were another matter. I spent a lot of time in the 1990s supporting Banyan VINES. Banyan used parallel port dongles on each server; the dongle not only served as a copy protection mechanism as it had to be present at boot time, but also was used to generate each server's unique network address. Hence it wasn't possible to boot up a server from one dongle and then switch the dongle to another one.
Banyan's dongles also could themselves be upgraded. If you purchased an extra software option (for example WAN server to server, or SMTP mail gateway), you needed to transfer the option from the option dongle to the server dongle. You did this by shutting down the server software, and then waiting a few minutes for the option to copy across. You could also then transfer options between servers by means of an empty dongle if needed.
This option copying mechanism often broke, resulting in servers that couldn't boot due to an incorrect checksum. Eventually Banyan relented and moved to paper based activation keys instead.
I attended a 5 day course near London back in 1989 on CA Unicenter.
The course was intended to teach the various aspects of CA's systems management software. However it didn't cover anything you really needed to know, as that would deprive revenue from their appallingly bad consulting arm. So it mostly taught aspects of bundled co-components that no-one in their right mind would use.
About half of the course covered something that was little more than a GUI version of cron which offered no real practical use in a live environment. The whole thing could have easily been covered in 5 minutes. Another day was spent on another equally useless component.
When we did get to the juicy part, a log file parser, the course stated that you could use regular expressions to do pattern matching. Unfortunately they didn't give any indication as to the syntax of these regular expressions, and the solitary example in the course work offered no real clues as to how the syntax worked, and didn't even explain what it was trying to match.
The whole course was a waste of time. I lost my coursework bag somewhere on the journey home. I pity the poor soul who found it, as it was of no use.
I used to work as a contractor at a major financial institution with some really embarrassing share trading software. I only saw the test/QA network, which was a mirror of the production system, comprising of several large Sun boxes running I believe Solaris 7, but the production system was virtually the same, only with even more servers. The software on each server comprised of hundreds of processes, all compiled STATICALLY against the same huge CORBA library. Whoops!
There's certainly not many reliable ones out there.
I purchased a Sagem one around 2 years ago. The firmware as shipped was hopelessly unreliable; the most major fault being a nasty habit breaking a recording into multiple files with 8 minute pauses in between.
The user interface was awful. The EPG screen listed channels in a column on the left hand side of the screen, with the picture from the watched channel in the top left corner. A listing for the selected channel would take up the rest of the screen. However when you changed the channel whose listing you wanted to view, the picture in the top left would change to that channel too. Not only that but the EPG listing would revert to the current time, and not whatever you were viewing before. Scrolling through the 7 days of the EPG was awful, too, as you could either jump through a programme at a time, or just to the beginning of the next day. So if you wanted to set a schedule across multiple channels a few days in advance it became quite a chore, particularly a there was no warning if you inadvertantly scheduled two recordings at the same time.
There were several software updates broadcast over the air, which fixed some of the functionality, but the EPG never got any better. In fact it got slightly worse, as one of the updates changed the font and colour scheme to something somewhat harder to read. In the end I gave the thing away.
Other PVRs are not better. Mine got its EPG from data broadcast continually on all 6 multiplexes, but only covering the next 7 days. Other competing models use EPGs from a couple of private suppliers, which cover 14 days instead. These only broadcast at a set time overnight, which can cause problems if recording or watching a channel on another frequency at that time. These EPGs also can't reflect late schedule changes, and one of them is broadcast on the multiplex broadcast at the weakest power on many transmitters - consequentially some users can't receive it at all.
Electrical recording and reproduction appeared around 1925, but otherwise using the same size and speed records as before. Speeds had been standardised to 78 rpm by then. It wasn't until the late 1940s that vinyl microgroove records, with their associated playing speeds, appeared.
Victor introduced these licenses on their records and record players in March 1902 as a measure against price scalping. If the goods were sold at a lower price this would lead to lower patent royalties, something that Victor didn't want. Therefore this license message appeared to enforce this licensing system. The licensing applied to record players also allowed Victor to repossess them if the license was violated.
There are several instances of Victor revoking licenses from dealers for pricing violations, but none of Victor repossessing players.
The license system was ended in 1917. Immediately afterwards Macy's sued Victor (the original reason for the suit was being unable to sell shop-worn records at a discount) under Anti-Trust laws, and were eventually rewarded damages.
Likewise, in the UK from 1964 EMI added the wording 'Sold in the UK subject to resale price conditions, see price lists' to the labels of all of their records. The phrase was removed in 1969.
Sorry, but Microsoft have been warning about this for months. SP2 itself has been out for around 2 years, and new machines will be pre-installed with it by default.
If your management are not prepared for this then they are quite frankly incompetant fools and deserve to be dismissed on the spot for gross negligence.
No, UMSDOS is case sensitive. When low on disk space and needing to run both Linux and Windows a few years ago I ran a system on UMSDOS. It stored the files in FAT in 8.3 format, but used extra files to store the proper long filenames which appeared when the filesystem was mounted as UMSDOS.
Does this filesystem still exist? It got severely broken during the either the 2.1 or 2.3 kernel tree (I can't remember which - too long ago), and for at least a year wasn't working at all in the development kernel.
Some years ago I worked on a roll-out of some systems management software at a large company. This software was based on CORBA.
It was hoped that by installing this software on every server and workstation in every branch nationwide (typically only around 3 to 6 machines per branch, although there would eventually be over 2000 branches netweorked), it would be possible to determine that all servers were working properly.
However the memory and CPU footprint used by the monitoring tools was immense. More than half of the RAM in the servers was taken up just by the monitoring software CORBA services, and the CPU load was also huge.
We also had serious problems with firewalls. Far too many open ports for anyone's liking.
Re:Great, how about stable firewire support someda
on
Linux 2.6.17 Released
·
· Score: 1
Mac OS 9 applications written with the Carbon API will work fine under Mac OS X without any need for the Classic environment, and will also run on Intel Macs. I'm running a Carbon application on my Intel Macbook Pro now which I previously ran under Mac OS 9 on an old iBook. It is only applications that pre-date Carbon that will have problems.
There are, however, many applications written using the Carbon API that are only usable on Mac OS X, such as iTunes and Microsoft Office v.X.
Slashdot Mirror
That looks like Espionage Island from Artic Computing. It was released initially for the ZX81, then ported to the larger memory ZX Spectrum with no changes - same limited text descriptions in upper case text, limited vocabulary, white text on a black background and so on. Their whole series of games were fairly limited plot-wise, and extremely linear - i.e. just one puzzle to solve at a time for most of the game. So if you got stuck on one puzzle there was no point exploring the rest of the game.
The only advantage that Artic's games had is that they were quick, having been coded entirely in assembly language. Many other games of that era were written in BASIC, and therefore suffered from having slow parsers and logic engines, with some games taking almost a minute to respond to commands. One software publisher went half-way - they coded the vocabulary parser in assembly, but still had the logic in BASIC.
Here in the UK there were a good number of such games published during the 8-bit micro boom of the early 1980s.
The first game to really start things going was Melbourne House's The Hobbit which, on some platforms, included crude graphics for some of the locations. The parser for this game was quite complex, allowing the player to pass instructions on to other characters. The other characters in the game also had some form of artificial intelligence, granting them the ability to wader around at random and move things around. Consequentially no two games were ever the same.
Another significant developer was Level 9 who created huge games using text compression. These were sold for a huge range of platforms.
Another major development was when Gilsoft developed The Quill, a an adventure game construction kit. This allowed virtually anyone to create a game based around a standard runtime environment. Many games were then released to the market, some so cleverly constructed that major software publishers could pass them on at full price. Later add-ons were created that allowed in-game graphics, basic sound effects and other features. Text compression was eventually added, too.
Only a few weeks ago I was given a URL by a recruitment agency for an on-line skills test which needed to be completed as part of a job application.
That particular site was coded to reject all login attempts if the user agent wasn't IE. Furthermore there were severe rendering problems if I used anything other than IE6, making the test impossible to complete. As I don't run Windows here by choice this was fairly annoying.
I ended up having to install a copy of XP under a VM just to complete the test.
I found an identical model at work about 15 yeas ago when clearing up. It came supplied with MS-DOS 2.x, a bus mouse, and some strange GUI software called Epson Taxi. If I recall correctly the floppy drives uses non-standard connectors, so it wasn't possible to fit anything of a larger capacity. I'm also certain that the second floppy drive wasn't working.
It was possible to get the thing onto our LAN using a boot floppy and an ARCNET card, but even that was tricky as it took some effort getting both DOS and the LAN software onto a 360K floppy.
Eventually I located a suitable 8-bit ISA hard disk controller and hard drive from elsewhere in the building.
Most of these flaws probably can be applied to the PCs and CP/M word-processors of Amstrad, a UK consumer electronics company who started to make PCs in the mid 1980s after having some success with their own 8-bit machines before then. Most problems were due to saving costs.
Early PCs featured the power supply built into the monitor, which, coupled with non-standard monitor ports, made replacement difficult. The power-supply wasn't rated high enough to drive many expansion cards. The units themselves, being maninly plastic, had terrible shielding problems causing severe interference. They keyboard and mouse also used a non standard interface; not only was the connector different, but the different keyboard drivers made the supplied version of MS-DOS mandatory.
Later models had better PC compatibility, but some suffered reliability issues due to Amstrad's proprietary hard disk controller. These were so bad that later units were retro-fitted with an standard off-the shelf controller, taking up one of the three expansion slots.
The CP/M word-processors originally shipped with 3" floppy disk drives, which were almost exclusively used by Amstrad. These units also had no on-board ROM; the printer ASIC supplied the process with the minimum instructions to boot off a floppy. The majority of the printer electronics were in the base unit, which meant that the printer itself used a non-standard interface and couldn't be replaced with purchasing a third-party serial interface. Although these machines were supplied with 256 or 512 MB RAM, the majority of the memory could only be used as a ramdisk.
Amstrad also produced a couple of portable machines. They did have a full-sized keyboard, but unfortunately came with a tiny LCD screen. They were also floppy only without third-party expansion units.
In the US the major network affiliates generally broadcast on VHF frequencies, for which these rabbit ears are sufficient. In the UK we use UHF, which doesn't perform as well without a dedicated external or loft aerial.
The UK used to use VHF for television, back in the days of the 405-line black & white service. BBC1 was broadcast on VHF Band I, whilst ITV was on VHF Band III. You can still see some of these aerials on the tops of some buildings; they were needed as the UK transmitters were often many miles away, although it was possible to pick up some services on an indoor aerial. These transmitters were eventually switched off in 1985.
Setup screen? That's just the standard Sinclair ZX Spectrum tape loading mechanism.
The Scottish Parliament election of 2007 resulted in around 7% of the total ballots cast being rejected due to them being filled in incorrectly. This used a paper system. There were two separate ballots taking place on that day, one for the Scottish Parliament and another for local councils. Both used flawed ballot designs.
The Scottish Parliamentary ballot was split into two sections, one listing local candidates for the current ward, and another containing a 'top-up' list of parties arranged on a regional basis. Electors were told to make two votes, one per list, but many made two votes in one section. The confusion was added to by many of the parties in the regional list containing the name of the party leader, causing them to resemble the normal candidates.
The local election ballot was done on a single-transferrable vote system, where voters had to indicate their choice of candidate(s) in numerical order. This system was new to most voters, and caused further confusion.
I think I've done the very same test once. The interview was with a fairly local company, working on a small team supporting a network of Solaris systems. The interview itself was only with the HR representative, who couldn't tell me anything technical about the position that wasn't already in the job description, and the company couldn't be bothered to get another member of the team to sit in on the interview for even 10 minutes. After this brief interview I was handed about 4 or 5 pages of questions (about 100 in total) on Solaris and generic UNIX, and given 90 minutes to write down the answers. These would be then faxed to the technical manager of the company, who resided in another country, for marking. None of the questions were multiple choice, they all needed written answers.
Apart from a few simple questions at the start of the test, the questions were terrible. There were a lot of questions on little-used options, as above, but usally on the more obscure commands. One question asked to list 6 or 8 options that one command understood, when typically no-one uses more than two of these options in normal use. Many more were on obsolete file-systems or services (who still used Netscape Suitespot in 2007?). There were even questions on configuration files of software I'd never even heard of, and which wasn't in the job description. Most of these questions could probably have been answered via the man pages in a few seconds, but without any resources to hand most could only answer 10%. I walked out of the test way before I was due to finish, and I told the HR woman that I'd never come across an interview procedure as shambolic as this one. The position was still being advertised 3 months after this interview, which says it all.
I had to install several of these types of cards a few years back. Each one had a liquid crystal thermometer attached, as they had a tendency to get very hot. If they were fitted in a chassis with inadequate ventilation they could exceed the maximum operating temperature, so the thermometer was a must.
In this case the resin covered both sides of the PCB, encasing everything bar the ports and switches on the blanking plate.
Because this dreadful front-page topic is quite frankly the last straw with this place. Goodbye....
There was at least one Lenslock game which had the incorrect lens shipped in some boxes, causing endless fun for the unfortunate customer.
Parallel port dongles were another matter. I spent a lot of time in the 1990s supporting Banyan VINES. Banyan used parallel port dongles on each server; the dongle not only served as a copy protection mechanism as it had to be present at boot time, but also was used to generate each server's unique network address. Hence it wasn't possible to boot up a server from one dongle and then switch the dongle to another one.
Banyan's dongles also could themselves be upgraded. If you purchased an extra software option (for example WAN server to server, or SMTP mail gateway), you needed to transfer the option from the option dongle to the server dongle. You did this by shutting down the server software, and then waiting a few minutes for the option to copy across. You could also then transfer options between servers by means of an empty dongle if needed.
This option copying mechanism often broke, resulting in servers that couldn't boot due to an incorrect checksum. Eventually Banyan relented and moved to paper based activation keys instead.
...but only because I only watch channels without ads in the first place.
I attended a 5 day course near London back in 1989 on CA Unicenter.
The course was intended to teach the various aspects of CA's systems management software. However it didn't cover anything you really needed to know, as that would deprive revenue from their appallingly bad consulting arm. So it mostly taught aspects of bundled co-components that no-one in their right mind would use.
About half of the course covered something that was little more than a GUI version of cron which offered no real practical use in a live environment. The whole thing could have easily been covered in 5 minutes. Another day was spent on another equally useless component.
When we did get to the juicy part, a log file parser, the course stated that you could use regular expressions to do pattern matching. Unfortunately they didn't give any indication as to the syntax of these regular expressions, and the solitary example in the course work offered no real clues as to how the syntax worked, and didn't even explain what it was trying to match.
The whole course was a waste of time. I lost my coursework bag somewhere on the journey home. I pity the poor soul who found it, as it was of no use.
I used to work as a contractor at a major financial institution with some really embarrassing share trading software. I only saw the test/QA network, which was a mirror of the production system, comprising of several large Sun boxes running I believe Solaris 7, but the production system was virtually the same, only with even more servers. The software on each server comprised of hundreds of processes, all compiled STATICALLY against the same huge CORBA library. Whoops!
There's certainly not many reliable ones out there.
I purchased a Sagem one around 2 years ago. The firmware as shipped was hopelessly unreliable; the most major fault being a nasty habit breaking a recording into multiple files with 8 minute pauses in between.
The user interface was awful. The EPG screen listed channels in a column on the left hand side of the screen, with the picture from the watched channel in the top left corner. A listing for the selected channel would take up the rest of the screen. However when you changed the channel whose listing you wanted to view, the picture in the top left would change to that channel too. Not only that but the EPG listing would revert to the current time, and not whatever you were viewing before. Scrolling through the 7 days of the EPG was awful, too, as you could either jump through a programme at a time, or just to the beginning of the next day. So if you wanted to set a schedule across multiple channels a few days in advance it became quite a chore, particularly a there was no warning if you inadvertantly scheduled two recordings at the same time.
There were several software updates broadcast over the air, which fixed some of the functionality, but the EPG never got any better. In fact it got slightly worse, as one of the updates changed the font and colour scheme to something somewhat harder to read. In the end I gave the thing away.
Other PVRs are not better. Mine got its EPG from data broadcast continually on all 6 multiplexes, but only covering the next 7 days. Other competing models use EPGs from a couple of private suppliers, which cover 14 days instead. These only broadcast at a set time overnight, which can cause problems if recording or watching a channel on another frequency at that time. These EPGs also can't reflect late schedule changes, and one of them is broadcast on the multiplex broadcast at the weakest power on many transmitters - consequentially some users can't receive it at all.
Electrical recording and reproduction appeared around 1925, but otherwise using the same size and speed records as before. Speeds had been standardised to 78 rpm by then. It wasn't until the late 1940s that vinyl microgroove records, with their associated playing speeds, appeared.
Victor introduced these licenses on their records and record players in March 1902 as a measure against price scalping. If the goods were sold at a lower price this would lead to lower patent royalties, something that Victor didn't want. Therefore this license message appeared to enforce this licensing system. The licensing applied to record players also allowed Victor to repossess them if the license was violated.
There are several instances of Victor revoking licenses from dealers for pricing violations, but none of Victor repossessing players.
The license system was ended in 1917. Immediately afterwards Macy's sued Victor (the original reason for the suit was being unable to sell shop-worn records at a discount) under Anti-Trust laws, and were eventually rewarded damages.
Likewise, in the UK from 1964 EMI added the wording 'Sold in the UK subject to resale price conditions, see price lists' to the labels of all of their records. The phrase was removed in 1969.
Sorry, but Microsoft have been warning about this for months. SP2 itself has been out for around 2 years, and new machines will be pre-installed with it by default.
If your management are not prepared for this then they are quite frankly incompetant fools and deserve to be dismissed on the spot for gross negligence.
No, UMSDOS is case sensitive. When low on disk space and needing to run both Linux and Windows a few years ago I ran a system on UMSDOS. It stored the files in FAT in 8.3 format, but used extra files to store the proper long filenames which appeared when the filesystem was mounted as UMSDOS.
Does this filesystem still exist? It got severely broken during the either the 2.1 or 2.3 kernel tree (I can't remember which - too long ago), and for at least a year wasn't working at all in the development kernel.
Some years ago I worked on a roll-out of some systems management software at a large company.
This software was based on CORBA.
It was hoped that by installing this software on every server and workstation in every branch nationwide (typically only around 3 to 6 machines per branch, although there would eventually be over 2000 branches netweorked), it would be possible to determine that all servers were working properly.
However the memory and CPU footprint used by the monitoring tools was immense. More than half of the RAM in the servers was taken up just by the monitoring software CORBA services, and the CPU load was also huge.
We also had serious problems with firewalls. Far too many open ports for anyone's liking.
Utter rubbish!
It's Slashdot - EVERY analogy is a bad analogy!
Mac OS 9 applications written with the Carbon API will work fine under Mac OS X without any need for the Classic environment, and will also run on Intel Macs. I'm running a Carbon application on my Intel Macbook Pro now which I previously ran under Mac OS 9 on an old iBook. It is only applications that pre-date Carbon that will have problems.
There are, however, many applications written using the Carbon API that are only usable on Mac OS X, such as iTunes and Microsoft Office v.X.