All nice and fine, but I guess we can agree that Google has a dominant market position in search engines, much like MS has/had in operating systems. Them deciding to delist a company means that a sizable portion of traffic to them is lost.
That's exactly the point.
The judge actually made a ruling that can not be complied with as long as the company name shows up while other users do searches on that name plus the word 'crook'. The fact the judge does not understand how Google works is beside the point. His ruling, and all the unintended side effects of that ruling, still stand.
You were aware that the autocomplete terms come from past search queries right?
What if a bunch of people, due possibly to this very story, start searching for "Lyonnaise de Garantie litigious assholes"? Then another offensive term will move up in the autocomplete list, again totally out of Googles control. At that point Google just violated a court order, which is much much worse of a crime (Well, in a judges eyes anyway)
The only way they can avoid the penalties of violating a court order, is to you know, follow it. They must assure no offensive terms show up, specifically they must assure none of their users search on "Lyonnaise de Garantie" along with offensive words. The only way to do that, is to remove all references to the companies websites, as then no matter WHAT offensive terms users search for in connection to the company, they are guaranteed not to show in the autocomplete.
I don't know about France, but in a lot of other countries, violating a court order can result in jail time. No one can blame them for not wanting to go to jail.
Lyonnaise de Garantie has no right to complain simply because the judge ordered Google to do something that will result in lost traffic to their website. Perhaps they should have considered the courts outcome would not be in their favor before they pressed charges.
Ghost was a decent product. I stopped using it years ago in favor of Clonezilla.
Seconded. Clonezilla is an excellent Ghost replacement, and I even started getting the windows-only admins I work with turned on to it!
If anyone is looking for an open source "corporate back-end Ghost", check out the FOG project. I've just begun deploying the infrastructure needed for it, but lets one backup and reimage a computer remotely using an awesome network boot method.
They both take a little bit to get used to, but it's no worse then getting used to or working around the problems and quirks of Ghost (Like restoring a C: drive image to a secondary HD, and having it retain the D: or E: letter, and thus windows refusing to boot)
Plugins are the only thing keeping me on Firefox 3.6 still.' Very few of the plugins I rely on work on Firefox 4 or newer.
Now that Mozilla is purposely breaking plugins every few weeks with their major number changes, the path ahead is pretty clear: Either stay with firefox and spend a day every month finding close-but-not-quite replacement plugins for the rest of time, or simply do this once during my switch to Chrome.
I also tried spending some time getting Firefox 4 deployed on the domain at work, only for them to release 5 a month later and once again break every last plugin I had installed except AdBlock. We quickly yanked that package back out and are currently recommending Chrome as an alternate to IE (Which is unfortunately still needed for Intranet use) I've just been delaying that switch personally, since FF 3.6 actually works for my needs and I have been happy with it.
It was bad enough when Mozilla was simply PUSHING me away, but now they plan to yank the floor out from under me as well.
Screw you mozilla. Say hi to Netscape in hell once you finish sending your own browser there.
You spend hours typing in a multi-page program, with hundreds upon hundreds of DATA commands and mind numbing random looking values, to finally run it and get a 3-foot banner of an Alfred E Neuman face on your dot matrix printer.
Or spending days typing in a program, getting errors, double and eventually triple checking every line on the page with the LIST, continue getting errors, seriously considering retyping it from scratch to find the bug, only to discover in the next months issue that they swapped around some line numbers in a bunch of IF statements and it wasn't your poor typing after all!
Or spending an evening completely zoned out typing in a listing from a magazine, and only 5 lines from the end, the power goes out for a split second and wipes most of your RAM. The screen comes back up with garbled text, flashing squares, characters from all up and down ascii, with a few lines of your program showing just to taunt you.
Anyone remember SoftStrip scanners, and what looked like 1"x10" long QR codes?
I still have my full collection of Nibble Magazine somewhere in the attic too.
No, he really asked what everyone else would use it for.
Absolutely no one but himself (or herself) can answer the question of what he personally would use it for. There is no point to stating the question out loud for others to read, knowing no one could give them their own answer.
By asking that question in public in a form where replies are expected, the only possible interpretation that would make any sense is asking what possible uses could it have. And thus why all of the replies are exactly that.
Additionally, by taking the effort to ask the question, while at the same time taking the effort to not look into what the software is, it is obvious the only correct answer is "Nothing at all". He knows that, and we know that, and you should know that too.
And yes, by reading over the summary where links are provided to answer the question "What _could_ it do?", and reaching for the "Post" button, it is safe to say he put effort into not looking into the matter.
Re:(Free)DOS can still be relevant ...
on
FreeDOS 1.1 Released
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· Score: 3, Interesting
"- Turn-key and embedded hardware often use DOS
All of these are better served by using a hand rolled linux. You can roll a linux kernel, FS and busybox that is smaller and far more capable.
So wait, you mean my CNC machine, which uses a DOS program to talk to an ISA controller card to run the machine, would be better served on Linux somehow?
How would you manage that exactly? Seriously, I would love to know. I spent a good 4 days researching this very subject. My very first thoughts were "How can I get this to run under Linux?"
First, Linux won't even run DOS executable. Fail. Second, userspace apps such as DosBox can not modify system memory to communicate to ISA cards. Fail.
Yes, this is a specific DOS program. Of course it shouldn't be expected to work anywhere else. But you did say ALL cases would be served better by Linux, so that includes the cases where you need to run a DOS exe that flips bits in memory to talk to hardware, and access to the exe source is not an option.
When searching for a replacement computer for the failing Pentium 90 that controls the CNC, I spent quite some time attempting to find a way to run this on something more modern, IE something that could be easily and cheaply purchased.
The best solution I was able to come up with for a modern computer (~2-3 years old now, but a year old at the time), was to run Linux with an ISA-to-USB converter chassis, connected to a virtual box session running FreeDOS. No matter how you want to twist that mess around, DOS is still the required component to which everything else there exists to support.
There would be much less overhead to just put MSDOS directly on the newer machine, but of course that isn't really doable since none of the newer hardware is supported, and legally speaking one can't get a new license for MSDOS, which could cause problems if I was to prepare the same setup for similar machines at work. Especially so for work, I have to think about what might happen after I am gone (Be it move to greener pastures, or get hit by the proverbial bus) I can't stick them with a pirated MSDOS copy, and would prefer an easy source for replacement pieces.
FreeDOS is the answer. It does support new hardware, and still runs the old executables.
It's also worth noting that even for the second item on GPs list:
Retro-computing: Some of us like dragging out our old hardware to play with it
Not all games work under DosBox. Sure, a whole lot do, and no doubt they would want to add support for those non-working games. But for the games it does not support, you need DOS in some form. This also assumes that games are the only "retro" computer use you can think up, as dosbox is not good for much outside of that scope.
I'll grant that learning to program closer to the metal would be better served elsewhere. Linux if using modern* hardware with more than "I just wanna" as a goal, or to teach fundamentals I would go with an 8 bit CPU that one human mind can fully understand all of. Personally I would choose the 6502 for that task, but there's nothing wrong with any of the older simple micros.
I run IT at an electronics manufacturing plant, and we have quite a lot of such devices as you refer to in our testing department; many different chip programmers, in place circuit testers, various test fixtures from our clients who don't know programming much at all - and most of those are USB or serial.
Not to mention most of the CNC machines, pick and place machines, wave solder machines, automated optical inspection machines, etc etc etc all require custom PCI or even ISA controller boards to sit between a computer and the real hardware.
Vista is the point they added in a hardware abstraction layer that does not allow any user-land software to touch the hardware directly. The reason such drivers are not available past XP is because no Microsoft OS since XP would allow such a driver to even work. You MUST go through their code, instead of tweeking registers in a memory location. You can't even talk to a serial port directly anymore, and are forced to go through the abstraction layer. This means bit banging out a LPT port is not an option. Any action other than serial data at a pre-defined speed will work, directly twiddling the hardware control lines is not an option.
I can still purchase 5-slot ISA to USB enclosures to avoid having to use an old Pentium 166, but if the OS won't let me change a byte of memory in RAM, well, you simply can't talk to an ISA card at all in Vista/7.
Other than the desk workstations, this pretty much describes 2/3rds of the hardware I have to support. Mixed in with our XP 32bit only compatible ERP client on the workstations, and Win 7 will not work for any use cases in the entire company. (I already bitched plenty about this last issue up here if interested)
I have a pretty complex subnetting layout using vlans to help keep some computers away from other computers, everything away from the 'machine computers', and again keep the workstations separate (As well as guest segments and wifi)
Hell, I can't even touch the computer controlling a pick and place machine without voiding all of our support contracts. I can not make the choice of OS in most cases, all I can do is try and protect them as best as possible while still allowing work to get done.
Where I work and manage IT, we are still waiting on our ERP app vendor to finish the next major version, adding in Vista/7 and 64 bit support.
Unfortunately this crap was already in place when I got there, so a major switch to another ERP app would cost us too much money and down time for the cut-over to recover from right at the moment. It would literally mean bankruptcy.
The current ERP version officially does not work on anything above XP SP2, 32 bit. That's right, it even complains on install to XP SP3 that the OS is not compatible! It does of course work there, but this is the type of poor coding I am having to work around here.
I've done extensive testing under windows 7 both 32 and 64 bit versions, and can not for the life of me get the client running at all. I also discovered during this that it has hooks into the MS-Access 2000 run-time. It will not work with any newer versions, even 2003 that supposedly has the same API support. MS Access 2000 also will not at all run under 64 bit OSs (Even XP) Of course the client will not work with a full version of Access either, so upgrading to full Office 2007 Pro (or newer) isn't a valid option.
The only way currently to get things to work before the vendor releases the next ERP version, is to load Win 7 on the workstation, and put XP in a virtual machine, and ERP on that. Which is Completely missing the point of ditching XP in the first place, as well as ruining any and all standard windows network management tools and making a total mess of active directory. Why should I pay for Win 7 plus Win XP, when I can do what I am doing and only pay for XP?
The next version is now in beta, but will not be released until June 2012 (And I do not expect that to be on time either, given their history) The ETA has been June 2012 ever since the beginning of 2010 when I was first asked why we are still on XP...
But if supporting the one and almost only app that literally runs every aspect of our business is not a good reason, then nothing is.
They should first read some history about the very first computer virus, written by Robert Morris (Jr) in 1988. If for no other reason than to realize they are so very late to this ideas party...
He had the same idea and only wanted to make a program that can spread itself around, but not actually do anything (aka payload), however due to a single incorrect counter value in an otherwise harmless virus, the very act of spreading itself so aggressively is what ended up taking down the entire Internet (Or at least all 6000 sendmail servers, which was basically all of it at the time.)
They seemingly are calling it the Morris Worm now: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm Or just Google on "Robert Tappan Morris" (To not be confused with his father, whom was also at MIT and also had some involvement with the initial Internet)
In either case, this is an especially poor *name* for what they are doing.
Either A) It infects machines they do not own (aka a Virus), which is a crime, and a very very bad/stupid thing to do, or B) They run it on their own machines only, where they have permission and authority to do so, in which case this is not a virus but is instead is called "Pushing an app to my network"
Remember that handful of pennies you gave away to a stranger that one day? That was me. You discontinued your service against my will, and by your own words that makes you an evil person.
I demand you behave as you expect from others. You must continue this service you once did, until I have tens of thousands of your dollars in hand. Only then will you raise above evil and it be possible to be both a good person and to stop being a hypocrite.
She should have just waited a couple months for SOPA to get secret-voted in.
Then instead of chiming in with the communications decency act, she could just accuse them of copyright infringement of her own posting, and poor RippoffReport would lose their domain name.
I expect her to try again later and win. It wouldn't be double jeopardy since it will be a completely different crime.
It is really humorous to see folks in the "modern" world taking this end of the world thing far more seriously than the Mayan groups I work with.
These are the same people who said their OWN calendar "ran out" after December 31st 1999, and that very Friday would be the end of the world.
Just as they couldn't comprehend adding 1 to that number to get the year 2000, they certainly can't comprehend that same simple arithmetic on any other calendar.
What to us is a simple carry bit operation, is cause for apocalypse cries from the ignorant, so you can't really expect any other facts to be heard.
Besides, some of those peoples lives are so miserable that they desperately want the world to end so they have an easy way out. You simply can't have any reasonable discussion with a person who ignores facts over that kind of ignorance, faith, and desire.
And this is why I "pirate" apps. But before you judge, I can make two statements with total honesty: 1) I have ZERO pirated apps on any of my devices. ALL paid apps I have, have been purchased paid for. 2) Every last app on my mobile devices has been "pirated" for 5-10 minutes. Every last one (Excluding built-in and free apps of course)
My purchasing process goes like this:
1) Is there a free version? If so, get that and try it, then jump to step 5 2) No free trial/demo? Then I fire up installious and find the app in question. 3) App not in warez form yet? Then stop - This app is no longer an option. 4) Try warez version for 5-10 minutes or so, hitting 'deny all for session' in firewall, and then delete the app.
5a) Did I like the app? If so, I return to the app store and purchase it. 5b) Did I hate the app? It's already long deleted, so we are basically done here.
The developers that DO provide a demo/trial version, you guys rock. Makes it very easy to decide if your app is for me and buy it, with 2/5ths the steps and much less time involved.
The developers that don't, well, deal with it. If I can't demo it somehow, you are guaranteed to have lost a sale, and if I happen to have placed your company name in my memory, you have potentially lost all sales to me.
I've easily spent over $500 on the apple store, and $200 on the Cydia store, in apps alone over both of my devices. It isn't worth it to me to fuck around with managing pirated apps in the long term, and have no interest in that.
The first app I was ripped off from was a silly $1 game. It literally would not run on either of my devices. I was pissed but since it was only a dollar I let it slide. The second app however was a $10 development tool that was literally NOTHING like the description.
BTW, the scam app was: App Designer HD, v1.2, Seller: Nate Chiger I see he lowered it from $10 to $1, no doubt trying to rip off even more people than before. If you read the description, that is not anything close to what the app really does. You get ONE of each GUI widget type, and can move the icon around on the screen like they were cutout on paper. Want two buttons or two switches on your screen? Too bad. In fact it would be easier and have MORE features to just use pen and paper instead of this piece of crap app.
The developer nor Apple would refund the price. Ever since that day I won't even consider an app I can't try first, one way or the other.
I ended up trying two different apps that filled this roll. iMockups (Also $10 but AWESOME) for doing GUI layout and design, and Codea ($8) for rapid prototyping (In Lua no less.) Both "pirated" for 10ish minutes each, and immediately purchased after deleting the warez copy.
I have no problems paying for software. I do have problems getting ripped off.
We're very close to the point that from a materials and energy cost standpoint for it to be cheaper to install a 40-something inch TV in portrait mode and a webcam sideways outdoors and call it a "iWindow" or something like that.
I recently did something almost identical to that earlier this year.
At work we were looking to replace the crappy conference room projectors (Max 1024x768, but too blurry to read text at standard sizes), and at the time a 50" HDTV that could do 1920x1080 was cheaper than a new projector that still maxed out below that res.
The main purpose is to be a computer display, using the VGA input. I also connected the component input up to the jacks built into the conference table for visitors.
The main annoyance that led to the iWindow, was on power up the TV defaulted to input #1, coax. You need to select input 2 or 3 to get to PC or video inputs respectively.
So I ended up buying a cheap RF modulator to connect to the coax input, and let me feed it a component video signal. This is connected to a cheap webcam in an outdoor enclosure with glass front, pretty much located right behind the TV, only mounted on the outside of the building behind that wall.
Now on power up, the TV defaults to being a window looking out to the front pond area.
There is a window on that wall a ways to the left too, normally with the blinds pulled to prevent glare, but it's pretty trippy to see a goose take off flying past the window, then through the TV.
Since I had the webcam and made the enclosure, it basically cost me $25 for the modulator and a couple hours on a weekend to get everything mounted and wired.
It's a shame that Apple has run so far away from its roots that it discourages true native development on their mobile devices. The iPad would be ideal for a hypercard app of some sort for kids and novices to actually be creative with their devices... It's very sad that Apple still claims to be an educational/creative company that encourages users to "Think different", when there is one glaring omission--creating something for your Apple device.
Agreed, sadly. I used to be a huge Apple fan, way back in the Apple// day. I don't speak out in their favor much anymore. Lately they are not a company to be too proud of, and most of their new products are much less appealing to me.
As for your iPad/Hypercard comment, I recently just found an iPad app called Codea (Previously Codify) which does exactly this. It was marked down to $1 for a Christmas special, so I went ahead and bought it to take a peek (Normally $8.) It's pretty sweet so far.
It uses the Lua language, and provides an IDE that takes advantage of the touch interface for auto-complete and parameter fill-in's. There's a video on the front page to showcase some of the IDE features.
As an example, if you type out the function as: background() It will add a bubble between the () that when touched gives you a color picker. You select your color and it inserts the RGBa values.
It doesn't appear to 'compile' down to any distributable form, so others would also need to buy Codea to run any app you might make, however that was also true of the Basic interpreter for iPhone I posted up above.
The state of scripting languages in Cydia for us jailbroken users is still sad. All that is included are: Perl, Python, and Ruby (And Bash/CSH) I've attempted to compile TCL nativity but had a great number of problems. I wasn't even about to attempt porting TK however, which is TCLs main advantage.
How long can he keep it up and what about long-term compatibility with GNOME 3 apps? Eventually I'm sure their "lineage" will drift far enough apart that you're either pulling in multiple families of libraries that do the same thing or you get GNOME 4 apps that don't work on Cinnamon 4 and vice-versa.
Considering the underlying libraries will be identical, since it will be Gnome 3 installed, I don't see why you would blame Mint if the Gnome project decided to break their own libraries. Seems a pretty silly situation to claim will happen.
It's like installing Midnight Commander on Windows and then wondering when win32 apps will stop running under win32.
You can always apt-get the original Gnome file shell to replace this new Cinnamon if you feel that would help. But if the Gnome group does as you say and breaks compatibility with all Gnome software, I would venture a guess that the native gnome shell will stop working too, since it uses the same libs that Cinnamon will use.
Oh, and you're confusing Star Trek with Total Recall or HHTGT; I don't remember ever seeing the triple breasted whore of erotica in Star Trek, but she was a Martian in Total Recall, but a Martian decended from humans who had three tits because she was a mutant.
The actor from Total Recall that you are thinking of is Lycia Naff, who really does have three breasts.
She was also in Star Trek 5, in the scene dancing on the bar when they first go down to the planet at the beginning.
On the flip side of that argument, if you always encrypt your worthless emails that no one wants to steal, then no one will notice the one day that you do happen to have something worth stealing to protect.
If you never encrypt, then suddenly start to with just one person, then that would look quite suspicious to anyone who was looking for it.
One could assume that if you have something important that needs to remain secret, and is actually worth encrypting, then it might be possible that others are interested in it and thus watching for such things as sudden use of encryption.
For the record however, I stopped encrypting my email a long time ago.
If you keep on electing the same morons who push controls on the internet for big corporate friend donors, then the only person you can blame is yourself.
Choice A - Man on right - Will sell out our rights to corporations.
Choice B - Man on left - Will sell out our rights to corporations.
Choice C - Man you can't see - Statistically has no chance of winning - However he too will sell out our rights to corporations.
Now, you choose A B or C, and reply. Then explain how the government selling out our rights to corporations is now personally your fault as you claim.
I've got the iPhone, how do I crib smother this Carrier IQ parasite?
Open Settings, go to General, then About, then Diagnostics & Usage See where it reads "Help Apple improve its products and services by automatically sending daily diagnostic and usage data, including location information." ?
It will have "Don't Send" with a check mark. Simply never click "Automatically Send", as that option will enable CarrierIQ.
There is also a button below to display the raw data it will send, and the word "Never" which is presumably the time it last sent data out.
If you've upgraded to iOS5, this screen will be missing because they removed the software already.
You are correct in that Adderall is basically speed (it is amphetamine with a tweek, very similar to methamphetamine)
Cocaine has other effects however, which should be completely missing.
The parent post to my comment had a quoted line that they added bold to, specifically "Support for reading accelerators", and then mentioned cocaine. I made the assumption it was the speed qualities desired, since that would be more helpful in staying awake longer than usual to read and study with (Putting aside all the other reasons which make this a bad idea.)
My main point was to compare the illegal vs legal methods to obtain basically the same drug, but paying a premium for the legal version, and all the other benefits that come with that method.
You can go over to the bad side of town and pickup some cocaine for a price, and have to deal with things like the wait time for it to be available, questionable purity. and of course the risk involved with it being illegal.
Or, you can go pay a premium to a doctor, to have him/her write on a piece of paper such that grants you permission to pay a premium at the pharmacy to pickup some Adderall.
Slashdot Mirror
All nice and fine, but I guess we can agree that Google has a dominant market position in search engines, much like MS has/had in operating systems. Them deciding to delist a company means that a sizable portion of traffic to them is lost.
That's exactly the point.
The judge actually made a ruling that can not be complied with as long as the company name shows up while other users do searches on that name plus the word 'crook'.
The fact the judge does not understand how Google works is beside the point. His ruling, and all the unintended side effects of that ruling, still stand.
You were aware that the autocomplete terms come from past search queries right?
What if a bunch of people, due possibly to this very story, start searching for "Lyonnaise de Garantie litigious assholes"?
Then another offensive term will move up in the autocomplete list, again totally out of Googles control.
At that point Google just violated a court order, which is much much worse of a crime (Well, in a judges eyes anyway)
The only way they can avoid the penalties of violating a court order, is to you know, follow it. They must assure no offensive terms show up, specifically they must assure none of their users search on "Lyonnaise de Garantie" along with offensive words.
The only way to do that, is to remove all references to the companies websites, as then no matter WHAT offensive terms users search for in connection to the company, they are guaranteed not to show in the autocomplete.
I don't know about France, but in a lot of other countries, violating a court order can result in jail time. No one can blame them for not wanting to go to jail.
Lyonnaise de Garantie has no right to complain simply because the judge ordered Google to do something that will result in lost traffic to their website.
Perhaps they should have considered the courts outcome would not be in their favor before they pressed charges.
Ghost was a decent product. I stopped using it years ago in favor of Clonezilla.
Seconded. Clonezilla is an excellent Ghost replacement, and I even started getting the windows-only admins I work with turned on to it!
If anyone is looking for an open source "corporate back-end Ghost", check out the FOG project. I've just begun deploying the infrastructure needed for it, but lets one backup and reimage a computer remotely using an awesome network boot method.
They both take a little bit to get used to, but it's no worse then getting used to or working around the problems and quirks of Ghost (Like restoring a C: drive image to a secondary HD, and having it retain the D: or E: letter, and thus windows refusing to boot)
Plugins are the only thing keeping me on Firefox 3.6 still.'
Very few of the plugins I rely on work on Firefox 4 or newer.
Now that Mozilla is purposely breaking plugins every few weeks with their major number changes, the path ahead is pretty clear:
Either stay with firefox and spend a day every month finding close-but-not-quite replacement plugins for the rest of time, or simply do this once during my switch to Chrome.
I also tried spending some time getting Firefox 4 deployed on the domain at work, only for them to release 5 a month later and once again break every last plugin I had installed except AdBlock.
We quickly yanked that package back out and are currently recommending Chrome as an alternate to IE (Which is unfortunately still needed for Intranet use)
I've just been delaying that switch personally, since FF 3.6 actually works for my needs and I have been happy with it.
It was bad enough when Mozilla was simply PUSHING me away, but now they plan to yank the floor out from under me as well.
Screw you mozilla. Say hi to Netscape in hell once you finish sending your own browser there.
Now those were the days!
You spend hours typing in a multi-page program, with hundreds upon hundreds of DATA commands and mind numbing random looking values, to finally run it and get a 3-foot banner of an Alfred E Neuman face on your dot matrix printer.
Or spending days typing in a program, getting errors, double and eventually triple checking every line on the page with the LIST, continue getting errors, seriously considering retyping it from scratch to find the bug, only to discover in the next months issue that they swapped around some line numbers in a bunch of IF statements and it wasn't your poor typing after all!
Or spending an evening completely zoned out typing in a listing from a magazine, and only 5 lines from the end, the power goes out for a split second and wipes most of your RAM.
The screen comes back up with garbled text, flashing squares, characters from all up and down ascii, with a few lines of your program showing just to taunt you.
Anyone remember SoftStrip scanners, and what looked like 1"x10" long QR codes?
I still have my full collection of Nibble Magazine somewhere in the attic too.
He asked what *HE* would use it for...
No, he really asked what everyone else would use it for.
Absolutely no one but himself (or herself) can answer the question of what he personally would use it for. There is no point to stating the question out loud for others to read, knowing no one could give them their own answer.
By asking that question in public in a form where replies are expected, the only possible interpretation that would make any sense is asking what possible uses could it have. And thus why all of the replies are exactly that.
Additionally, by taking the effort to ask the question, while at the same time taking the effort to not look into what the software is, it is obvious the only correct answer is "Nothing at all". He knows that, and we know that, and you should know that too.
And yes, by reading over the summary where links are provided to answer the question "What _could_ it do?", and reaching for the "Post" button, it is safe to say he put effort into not looking into the matter.
"- Turn-key and embedded hardware often use DOS
All of these are better served by using a hand rolled linux. You can roll a linux kernel, FS and busybox that is smaller and far more capable.
So wait, you mean my CNC machine, which uses a DOS program to talk to an ISA controller card to run the machine, would be better served on Linux somehow?
How would you manage that exactly?
Seriously, I would love to know. I spent a good 4 days researching this very subject. My very first thoughts were "How can I get this to run under Linux?"
First, Linux won't even run DOS executable. Fail.
Second, userspace apps such as DosBox can not modify system memory to communicate to ISA cards. Fail.
Yes, this is a specific DOS program. Of course it shouldn't be expected to work anywhere else.
But you did say ALL cases would be served better by Linux, so that includes the cases where you need to run a DOS exe that flips bits in memory to talk to hardware, and access to the exe source is not an option.
When searching for a replacement computer for the failing Pentium 90 that controls the CNC, I spent quite some time attempting to find a way to run this on something more modern, IE something that could be easily and cheaply purchased.
The best solution I was able to come up with for a modern computer (~2-3 years old now, but a year old at the time), was to run Linux with an ISA-to-USB converter chassis, connected to a virtual box session running FreeDOS.
No matter how you want to twist that mess around, DOS is still the required component to which everything else there exists to support.
There would be much less overhead to just put MSDOS directly on the newer machine, but of course that isn't really doable since none of the newer hardware is supported, and legally speaking one can't get a new license for MSDOS, which could cause problems if I was to prepare the same setup for similar machines at work.
Especially so for work, I have to think about what might happen after I am gone (Be it move to greener pastures, or get hit by the proverbial bus)
I can't stick them with a pirated MSDOS copy, and would prefer an easy source for replacement pieces.
FreeDOS is the answer. It does support new hardware, and still runs the old executables.
It's also worth noting that even for the second item on GPs list:
Retro-computing: Some of us like dragging out our old hardware to play with it
Not all games work under DosBox. Sure, a whole lot do, and no doubt they would want to add support for those non-working games. But for the games it does not support, you need DOS in some form.
This also assumes that games are the only "retro" computer use you can think up, as dosbox is not good for much outside of that scope.
I'll grant that learning to program closer to the metal would be better served elsewhere.
Linux if using modern* hardware with more than "I just wanna" as a goal, or to teach fundamentals I would go with an 8 bit CPU that one human mind can fully understand all of.
Personally I would choose the 6502 for that task, but there's nothing wrong with any of the older simple micros.
* Modern meaning 15 years old or newer
It's the same now as it was then.
I run IT at an electronics manufacturing plant, and we have quite a lot of such devices as you refer to in our testing department; many different chip programmers, in place circuit testers, various test fixtures from our clients who don't know programming much at all - and most of those are USB or serial.
Not to mention most of the CNC machines, pick and place machines, wave solder machines, automated optical inspection machines, etc etc etc all require custom PCI or even ISA controller boards to sit between a computer and the real hardware.
Vista is the point they added in a hardware abstraction layer that does not allow any user-land software to touch the hardware directly.
The reason such drivers are not available past XP is because no Microsoft OS since XP would allow such a driver to even work. You MUST go through their code, instead of tweeking registers in a memory location.
You can't even talk to a serial port directly anymore, and are forced to go through the abstraction layer. This means bit banging out a LPT port is not an option. Any action other than serial data at a pre-defined speed will work, directly twiddling the hardware control lines is not an option.
I can still purchase 5-slot ISA to USB enclosures to avoid having to use an old Pentium 166, but if the OS won't let me change a byte of memory in RAM, well, you simply can't talk to an ISA card at all in Vista/7.
Other than the desk workstations, this pretty much describes 2/3rds of the hardware I have to support. Mixed in with our XP 32bit only compatible ERP client on the workstations, and Win 7 will not work for any use cases in the entire company.
(I already bitched plenty about this last issue up here if interested)
I have a pretty complex subnetting layout using vlans to help keep some computers away from other computers, everything away from the 'machine computers', and again keep the workstations separate (As well as guest segments and wifi)
Hell, I can't even touch the computer controlling a pick and place machine without voiding all of our support contracts.
I can not make the choice of OS in most cases, all I can do is try and protect them as best as possible while still allowing work to get done.
Where I work and manage IT, we are still waiting on our ERP app vendor to finish the next major version, adding in Vista/7 and 64 bit support.
Unfortunately this crap was already in place when I got there, so a major switch to another ERP app would cost us too much money and down time for the cut-over to recover from right at the moment. It would literally mean bankruptcy.
The current ERP version officially does not work on anything above XP SP2, 32 bit.
That's right, it even complains on install to XP SP3 that the OS is not compatible! It does of course work there, but this is the type of poor coding I am having to work around here.
I've done extensive testing under windows 7 both 32 and 64 bit versions, and can not for the life of me get the client running at all.
I also discovered during this that it has hooks into the MS-Access 2000 run-time.
It will not work with any newer versions, even 2003 that supposedly has the same API support. MS Access 2000 also will not at all run under 64 bit OSs (Even XP)
Of course the client will not work with a full version of Access either, so upgrading to full Office 2007 Pro (or newer) isn't a valid option.
The only way currently to get things to work before the vendor releases the next ERP version, is to load Win 7 on the workstation, and put XP in a virtual machine, and ERP on that.
Which is Completely missing the point of ditching XP in the first place, as well as ruining any and all standard windows network management tools and making a total mess of active directory.
Why should I pay for Win 7 plus Win XP, when I can do what I am doing and only pay for XP?
The next version is now in beta, but will not be released until June 2012 (And I do not expect that to be on time either, given their history)
The ETA has been June 2012 ever since the beginning of 2010 when I was first asked why we are still on XP...
But if supporting the one and almost only app that literally runs every aspect of our business is not a good reason, then nothing is.
They should first read some history about the very first computer virus, written by Robert Morris (Jr) in 1988. If for no other reason than to realize they are so very late to this ideas party...
He had the same idea and only wanted to make a program that can spread itself around, but not actually do anything (aka payload), however due to a single incorrect counter value in an otherwise harmless virus, the very act of spreading itself so aggressively is what ended up taking down the entire Internet (Or at least all 6000 sendmail servers, which was basically all of it at the time.)
They seemingly are calling it the Morris Worm now:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morris_worm
Or just Google on "Robert Tappan Morris" (To not be confused with his father, whom was also at MIT and also had some involvement with the initial Internet)
In either case, this is an especially poor *name* for what they are doing.
Either A) It infects machines they do not own (aka a Virus), which is a crime, and a very very bad/stupid thing to do,
or B) They run it on their own machines only, where they have permission and authority to do so, in which case this is not a virus but is instead is called "Pushing an app to my network"
No, you're evil.
Remember that handful of pennies you gave away to a stranger that one day?
That was me. You discontinued your service against my will, and by your own words that makes you an evil person.
I demand you behave as you expect from others. You must continue this service you once did, until I have tens of thousands of your dollars in hand. Only then will you raise above evil and it be possible to be both a good person and to stop being a hypocrite.
Obvious troll, but for anyone else: yes it will work just fine on tmobile g3, as mine was for the first year before switching to at&t.
PS if you are not willing to pay for a phone, you won't be able to get an android for $0 or less either.
She should have just waited a couple months for SOPA to get secret-voted in.
Then instead of chiming in with the communications decency act, she could just accuse them of copyright infringement of her own posting, and poor RippoffReport would lose their domain name.
I expect her to try again later and win. It wouldn't be double jeopardy since it will be a completely different crime.
It is really humorous to see folks in the "modern" world taking this end of the world thing far more seriously than the Mayan groups I work with.
These are the same people who said their OWN calendar "ran out" after December 31st 1999, and that very Friday would be the end of the world.
Just as they couldn't comprehend adding 1 to that number to get the year 2000, they certainly can't comprehend that same simple arithmetic on any other calendar.
What to us is a simple carry bit operation, is cause for apocalypse cries from the ignorant, so you can't really expect any other facts to be heard.
Besides, some of those peoples lives are so miserable that they desperately want the world to end so they have an easy way out. You simply can't have any reasonable discussion with a person who ignores facts over that kind of ignorance, faith, and desire.
This is spot on!
And this is why I "pirate" apps. But before you judge, I can make two statements with total honesty:
1) I have ZERO pirated apps on any of my devices. ALL paid apps I have, have been purchased paid for.
2) Every last app on my mobile devices has been "pirated" for 5-10 minutes.
Every last one (Excluding built-in and free apps of course)
My purchasing process goes like this:
1) Is there a free version? If so, get that and try it, then jump to step 5
2) No free trial/demo? Then I fire up installious and find the app in question.
3) App not in warez form yet? Then stop - This app is no longer an option.
4) Try warez version for 5-10 minutes or so, hitting 'deny all for session' in firewall, and then delete the app.
5a) Did I like the app? If so, I return to the app store and purchase it.
5b) Did I hate the app? It's already long deleted, so we are basically done here.
The developers that DO provide a demo/trial version, you guys rock. Makes it very easy to decide if your app is for me and buy it, with 2/5ths the steps and much less time involved.
The developers that don't, well, deal with it. If I can't demo it somehow, you are guaranteed to have lost a sale, and if I happen to have placed your company name in my memory, you have potentially lost all sales to me.
I've easily spent over $500 on the apple store, and $200 on the Cydia store, in apps alone over both of my devices. It isn't worth it to me to fuck around with managing pirated apps in the long term, and have no interest in that.
The first app I was ripped off from was a silly $1 game. It literally would not run on either of my devices. I was pissed but since it was only a dollar I let it slide.
The second app however was a $10 development tool that was literally NOTHING like the description.
BTW, the scam app was: App Designer HD, v1.2, Seller: Nate Chiger
I see he lowered it from $10 to $1, no doubt trying to rip off even more people than before.
If you read the description, that is not anything close to what the app really does.
You get ONE of each GUI widget type, and can move the icon around on the screen like they were cutout on paper.
Want two buttons or two switches on your screen? Too bad.
In fact it would be easier and have MORE features to just use pen and paper instead of this piece of crap app.
The developer nor Apple would refund the price. Ever since that day I won't even consider an app I can't try first, one way or the other.
I ended up trying two different apps that filled this roll.
iMockups (Also $10 but AWESOME) for doing GUI layout and design,
and Codea ($8) for rapid prototyping (In Lua no less.)
Both "pirated" for 10ish minutes each, and immediately purchased after deleting the warez copy.
I have no problems paying for software. I do have problems getting ripped off.
We're very close to the point that from a materials and energy cost standpoint for it to be cheaper to install a 40-something inch TV in portrait mode and a webcam sideways outdoors and call it a "iWindow" or something like that.
I recently did something almost identical to that earlier this year.
At work we were looking to replace the crappy conference room projectors (Max 1024x768, but too blurry to read text at standard sizes), and at the time a 50" HDTV that could do 1920x1080 was cheaper than a new projector that still maxed out below that res.
The main purpose is to be a computer display, using the VGA input.
I also connected the component input up to the jacks built into the conference table for visitors.
The main annoyance that led to the iWindow, was on power up the TV defaulted to input #1, coax. You need to select input 2 or 3 to get to PC or video inputs respectively.
So I ended up buying a cheap RF modulator to connect to the coax input, and let me feed it a component video signal.
This is connected to a cheap webcam in an outdoor enclosure with glass front, pretty much located right behind the TV, only mounted on the outside of the building behind that wall.
Now on power up, the TV defaults to being a window looking out to the front pond area.
There is a window on that wall a ways to the left too, normally with the blinds pulled to prevent glare, but it's pretty trippy to see a goose take off flying past the window, then through the TV.
Since I had the webcam and made the enclosure, it basically cost me $25 for the modulator and a couple hours on a weekend to get everything mounted and wired.
It's a shame that Apple has run so far away from its roots that it discourages true native development on their mobile devices. The iPad would be ideal for a hypercard app of some sort for kids and novices to actually be creative with their devices... It's very sad that Apple still claims to be an educational/creative company that encourages users to "Think different", when there is one glaring omission--creating something for your Apple device.
Agreed, sadly.
I used to be a huge Apple fan, way back in the Apple// day. I don't speak out in their favor much anymore.
Lately they are not a company to be too proud of, and most of their new products are much less appealing to me.
As for your iPad/Hypercard comment, I recently just found an iPad app called Codea (Previously Codify) which does exactly this.
It was marked down to $1 for a Christmas special, so I went ahead and bought it to take a peek (Normally $8.) It's pretty sweet so far.
http://twolivesleft.com/Codea/
It uses the Lua language, and provides an IDE that takes advantage of the touch interface for auto-complete and parameter fill-in's.
There's a video on the front page to showcase some of the IDE features.
As an example, if you type out the function as: background()
It will add a bubble between the () that when touched gives you a color picker. You select your color and it inserts the RGBa values.
It doesn't appear to 'compile' down to any distributable form, so others would also need to buy Codea to run any app you might make, however that was also true of the Basic interpreter for iPhone I posted up above.
The state of scripting languages in Cydia for us jailbroken users is still sad.
All that is included are: Perl, Python, and Ruby (And Bash/CSH)
I've attempted to compile TCL nativity but had a great number of problems. I wasn't even about to attempt porting TK however, which is TCLs main advantage.
I guess I'll chip in with Basic for iPhone/iPad/iPod
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/basic/id362411238?mt=8
http://www.misoft.com/
How long can he keep it up and what about long-term compatibility with GNOME 3 apps? Eventually I'm sure their "lineage" will drift far enough apart that you're either pulling in multiple families of libraries that do the same thing or you get GNOME 4 apps that don't work on Cinnamon 4 and vice-versa.
Considering the underlying libraries will be identical, since it will be Gnome 3 installed, I don't see why you would blame Mint if the Gnome project decided to break their own libraries. Seems a pretty silly situation to claim will happen.
It's like installing Midnight Commander on Windows and then wondering when win32 apps will stop running under win32.
You can always apt-get the original Gnome file shell to replace this new Cinnamon if you feel that would help. But if the Gnome group does as you say and breaks compatibility with all Gnome software, I would venture a guess that the native gnome shell will stop working too, since it uses the same libs that Cinnamon will use.
The actor from Total Recall that you are thinking of is Lycia Naff, who really does have three breasts.
That came out very wrong after re-reading it...
That wasn't to say the actor in real life has three breasts, it was supposed to say her characters always have three breasts
Apologies to any and all fantasies that just ruined :P
Oh, and you're confusing Star Trek with Total Recall or HHTGT; I don't remember ever seeing the triple breasted whore of erotica in Star Trek, but she was a Martian in Total Recall, but a Martian decended from humans who had three tits because she was a mutant.
The actor from Total Recall that you are thinking of is Lycia Naff, who really does have three breasts.
She was also in Star Trek 5, in the scene dancing on the bar when they first go down to the planet at the beginning.
This is a SFW(Clothed) picture of her in the star trek movie: http://images.wikia.com/memoryalpha/en/images/f/f1/Catwoman.jpg
Do a Google Image search on her name with safe-search off to see her in real life.
</nerd>
On the flip side of that argument, if you always encrypt your worthless emails that no one wants to steal, then no one will notice the one day that you do happen to have something worth stealing to protect.
If you never encrypt, then suddenly start to with just one person, then that would look quite suspicious to anyone who was looking for it.
One could assume that if you have something important that needs to remain secret, and is actually worth encrypting, then it might be possible that others are interested in it and thus watching for such things as sudden use of encryption.
For the record however, I stopped encrypting my email a long time ago.
If you keep on electing the same morons who push controls on the internet for big corporate friend donors, then the only person you can blame is yourself.
Choice A - Man on right - Will sell out our rights to corporations.
Choice B - Man on left - Will sell out our rights to corporations.
Choice C - Man you can't see - Statistically has no chance of winning - However he too will sell out our rights to corporations.
Now, you choose A B or C, and reply.
Then explain how the government selling out our rights to corporations is now personally your fault as you claim.
I've got the iPhone, how do I crib smother this Carrier IQ parasite?
Open Settings, go to General, then About, then Diagnostics & Usage
See where it reads "Help Apple improve its products and services by automatically sending daily diagnostic and usage data, including location information." ?
It will have "Don't Send" with a check mark. Simply never click "Automatically Send", as that option will enable CarrierIQ.
There is also a button below to display the raw data it will send, and the word "Never" which is presumably the time it last sent data out.
If you've upgraded to iOS5, this screen will be missing because they removed the software already.
You are correct in that Adderall is basically speed (it is amphetamine with a tweek, very similar to methamphetamine)
Cocaine has other effects however, which should be completely missing.
The parent post to my comment had a quoted line that they added bold to, specifically "Support for reading accelerators", and then mentioned cocaine.
I made the assumption it was the speed qualities desired, since that would be more helpful in staying awake longer than usual to read and study with (Putting aside all the other reasons which make this a bad idea.)
My main point was to compare the illegal vs legal methods to obtain basically the same drug, but paying a premium for the legal version, and all the other benefits that come with that method.
You mean cocaine? I'd pay a premium for that.
That's another good example.
You can go over to the bad side of town and pickup some cocaine for a price, and have to deal with things like the wait time for it to be available, questionable purity. and of course the risk involved with it being illegal.
Or, you can go pay a premium to a doctor, to have him/her write on a piece of paper such that grants you permission to pay a premium at the pharmacy to pickup some Adderall.