I remember when win3.0 came out with a bunch of hype about multitasking. But it wasn't preemptible. It didn't have protected memory. It was still lowly DOS. Foolish me for thinking that they were talking about a real OS, like any of a dozen other OSes of the day.
4 or 5 years later they did NT, their first real OS since Xenix. So I took a look and saw that multiuser support was basically nonexistant; WTF? Then came the kernel video fiasco, ridiculous programs to ensure that admins are properly trained in the fine art of rebooting and an ever-changing product roadmap.
On the apps side, they made a huge deal about Word being equivalent on Macs and PCs. Then they started changing file formats and the latest Windows files woudn't play on the Mac for another 6 months, and even then it was shaky.
On the network side, their machines were clogging up LANS with netbeui. If you wanted to share files you had to buy Novell, Banyan or some half-assed solution. They told everyone to forget about TCP/IP because they would be introducing something much better. Finally Bill tries Mosaic and decides it's time to make a u-turn and jump on the Net. Enter the browser shenanigans, of course you still needed an addon IP stack. 95 came out with native IP...wahoo...except it sucked. On a P90, it could only do TCP at about 1/3 the speed of other OSes, and that's after it was tuned.
All the while veteran systems people were just shaking their heads trying to understand how this pig kept gaining market share. They were used to driving Cadillacs and suddenly there were all these Yugos getting in the way. Bill kept getting richer and the younger generation thinks that systems that preceded MS must have been even worse than Dos1.0 and that Windows is and has always been state of the art. We had a better OS on the PDP8 in high school.
Big whoop, they're looking for Osama too. But that doesn't stop them from locking the cockpit doors. The real story here isn't that MS sucks, or that there are bad people in the world. The story is that there are a whole bunch of computer illiterate morons who use Windows for critical tasks.
Windows is a Mickey Mouse toy and the sooner people acknowledge that fact, the better off we'll all be.
"It's amazing how little they seem to learn from better OS's. "
That's so true, especially in light of the fact that they hired Dave Cutler to design NT for them. Oh well, Dave was probably too busy losing auto races and Gates was too busy committing anti-trust crimes to really care about the people who use the product.
"In any case, I don't think that I would have undertaken a task like this, where a computer is on the road, using anything but a robust operating system."
I realize that MSWindows has a zillion bugs, but I never knew that its bits could shake loose from going over bumps.
Then they must not have taken the appropriate precautions. They either used weak passwords, sent them in the clear at one time or ignored a brute force attack on the server. They were careless with their customer's data. I don't know if the kid had any malicious intent, but I'm glad he brought their problem into the light.
"Of course, given the world we live in a certain amount of military spending is required"
Definitely, but excess military spending often leads to more military spending. We make bombs. They make bigger bombs. Now we need even bigger bombs.
"and as a Canadian I am very grateful that the Americans are so keen on defense spending that we can spend most of our taxes on education and health care." It's an enviable position to be in, at least until Dubya decides he wants your oil or North Korea lobs one towards Detroit and falls a bit short.
"The other nice spin off from military spending is the huge amount of R&D the military does which eventually trickles down to civilian uses."
Some of it trickles down, but Reagan's SDI ("star wars") is a prime example of what can go wrong with that kind of thinking. What did Joe and Mary and their two kids get in return for the investment of their tax dollars in that program?
I meant to respond to you directly, but got carried down the thread a bit.
Take it to one extreme and devote the entire budget to space research. Now is it a waste? On the other extreme, if nothing was ever spent on space research, we would surely be missing out on some good stuff.
"You missed something in your logic. When the missile makers built the noise makers, they built them SOMEWHERE from SOMETHING.... Money doesn't just disappear into a black hole, "
You missed the point. Money is just paper unless there's something backing it up. As I said, the dollars didn't go away, but the value they represented went up in a cloud of smoke. The labor and natural resources are just gone.
"It's fine to dislike the system because you aren't at the top of it, but killing off the rich people kills the luxury goods market, and we wouldn't HAVE home computers, VCRs, DVDs if there wasn't some idiot willing to pay thousands of dollars to have it first."
Whoa, I didn't say anything of the sort. I don't think a person is an idiot for spending $1200 on the first VCR. The fact that people bought those machines allowed manufactures to bring the price down so that everyone can afford one. But I'm not interested in subsidizing the development of cruise missiles so that I can have one in my garage. The dividends on that type of investment are way too low.
"when Isreal, England, and France buy those bombs from us (because now our bombs are better than theirs), money flows inwards." Same principle, globalized.
You should look at your yacht example more closely. Again, I'm not saying that private citizens shouldn't be able to spend their money as they wish. I'm not a communist. But when you look at the big picture, a bunch of people did a bunch of work building a big toy. The dollar value of that toy drops faster than a rock largely because the only real value it represents is making a few people smile until the thing rusts away and sinks. Like with the missiles, the resources have been squandered. The dollars are all still somewhere, but they no longer represent the same value they once did.
(Ignoring the bigger questions about war and just following the dollars here.)
Take $1B and employ a whole bunch of people to make 1000 cruise missiles. Now shoot those missiles somewhere that we don't really need to shoot them. So now the missile makers have the dollar bills, but there's no product to show for it. It does nothing for the GNP. The potential of those dollars has been wasted.
Now the missile makers bring the dollars back to the market, but there are fewer goods to buy because instead of making useful stuff themselves, they were making noisemakers. So we end up with too many dollars chasing too few goods, inflation. Not that the fatcats care, they took their bite right off the top.
"With software, that is licensed, the rules are what ever the license agreement is."
Right, it's been that way for decades and I've never understood why customers were willing to accept it.
The time to negotiate is before the sale, so next time you have to buy some equipment tell the vendor that you want transferrable rights on the sw.
Here's an idea (that's probably been done). There's a "mergers and acquisitions" exclusion in most of these licenses, so if the box is expensive enough, maybe it would make sense to set up a holding company.
As kids during the CB boom of the mid-70s, I'd stay up til the wee hours chatting with local friends. It was great, especially in the summer.
Towards the end of the craze I picked up a sidebander on the cheap and a beam antenna and did some dx'ing. I did cheat a bit on the upper end of the band, but I never had the balls to fire up the 250w amp I acquired.
A few years ago a friend of mine asked me to install some VOIP software so he could do some testing. The only mic I had on hand was my old D104. Talking into that thing after 20+ years brought back some great memories, and it was pretty cool to think about the contrasts between a HyGain radio and a networked computer.
"But I think we are talking about a small price to pay for the technology."
We'll just have to disagree about that one.
"When the technology to fix this problem is inexpensive enough" Well, how about letting them take over some of the low vhf tv channels? Access to the broadband is going to be controlled by a commercial enterprise so let them compete on merit for commercial spectrum. In other words, they should pick on someone their own size.
You make a good point about how much spectrum hams have. I don't claim to know exactly where to draw the lines.
But the licensing for hams is entirely different than the licensing for commercial spectrum usage. You used to need a license for CB too, but anyone could get one if they chose to and usage of the airwaves is first-come first-serve. Licensed or not, it's earmarked for public use. Allowing broadband over powerline at the expense of hams doesn't put that spectrum in the hands of most people. It puts it in the assets column of the line operators even though all they're really doing is polluting it.
Allocating chunks of ham spectrum for low-power public uses doesn't bother me as long as there are still frequencies available for worldwide amateur transmissions. I just think it's that important.
"The answer is to discover which frequencies this interferes with and move the hams off of those frequencies. "
In other words, take some more ground from the commons and give it to big business. No thanks.
And even if I did agree with you on that point, this case would still be different. It's a wired service. The RF bandwidth is being wasted because it's just a lousy way to send data. If they set their minds to it, they could probably come up with an economical way to string some fiber over the towers they already own. Power lines have some serious but unavoidable drawbacks as it is. Why add more problems?
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MS Empty Promises 5.0
I remember when win3.0 came out with a bunch of hype about multitasking. But it wasn't preemptible. It didn't have protected memory. It was still lowly DOS. Foolish me for thinking that they were talking about a real OS, like any of a dozen other OSes of the day.
4 or 5 years later they did NT, their first real OS since Xenix. So I took a look and saw that multiuser support was basically nonexistant; WTF? Then came the kernel video fiasco, ridiculous programs to ensure that admins are properly trained in the fine art of rebooting and an ever-changing product roadmap.
On the apps side, they made a huge deal about Word being equivalent on Macs and PCs. Then they started changing file formats and the latest Windows files woudn't play on the Mac for another 6 months, and even then it was shaky.
On the network side, their machines were clogging up LANS with netbeui. If you wanted to share files you had to buy Novell, Banyan or some half-assed solution. They told everyone to forget about TCP/IP because they would be introducing something much better. Finally Bill tries Mosaic and decides it's time to make a u-turn and jump on the Net. Enter the browser shenanigans, of course you still needed an addon IP stack. 95 came out with native IP...wahoo...except it sucked. On a P90, it could only do TCP at about 1/3 the speed of other OSes, and that's after it was tuned.
All the while veteran systems people were just shaking their heads trying to understand how this pig kept gaining market share. They were used to driving Cadillacs and suddenly there were all these Yugos getting in the way. Bill kept getting richer and the younger generation thinks that systems that preceded MS must have been even worse than Dos1.0 and that Windows is and has always been state of the art. We had a better OS on the PDP8 in high school.
"a judge may see this logic"
... What do you do with witches?
... Because they're made of wood...?
... but can you not also make bridges out of stone?
... Bread! ...Apples! ... Uh, very small rocks! Cider! Gra- Gravy! Cherries! Mud! Churches! Churches! Lead! Lead!
...
... weighs.. the same.. as a duck ... she's made of wood.
BEDEVERE: Tell me
ALL VILLAGERS: Burn them! Burn them! Burn them up!
BEDEVERE: And what do you burn apart from witches?
FIRST VILLAGER: More witches!
SECOND VILLAGER: Sh!
THIRD VILLAGER: Wood!
BEDEVERE: So why do witches burn?
FOURTH VILLAGER: [pianissimo]
BEDEVERE: Good.
[PEASANTS stir uneasily then come round to this conclusion.]
ALL VILLAGERS: Oh! Oh yeah!
BEDEVERE: So. How do we tell whether she is made of wood?
FIRST VILLAGER: Build a bridge out of her!
BEDEVERE: Ah
ALL VILLAGERS: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Uhh...
BEDEVERE: Uh, does wood sink in water?
ALL VILLAGERS: No! No! No! It floats! It floats! Throw her into the pond! The pond!
BEDEVERE: What also floats in water?
ALL VILLAGERS:
ARTHUR: A duck!
[They all turn and look at ARTHUR. BEDEVERE looks up very impressed.]
BEDEVERE: Exactly. So... logically
FIRST VILLAGER: [beginning to pick up the thread] If... she
BEDEVERE: And therefore?
ALL VILLAGERS: A witch! A witch! A witch!
"and the Feds are LOOKING for you this time"
Big whoop, they're looking for Osama too. But that doesn't stop them from locking the cockpit doors. The real story here isn't that MS sucks, or that there are bad people in the world. The story is that there are a whole bunch of computer illiterate morons who use Windows for critical tasks.
Windows is a Mickey Mouse toy and the sooner people acknowledge that fact, the better off we'll all be.
"It's amazing how little they seem to learn from better OS's. "
That's so true, especially in light of the fact that they hired Dave Cutler to design NT for them. Oh well, Dave was probably too busy losing auto races and Gates was too busy committing anti-trust crimes to really care about the people who use the product.
If everyone already knows how insecure Windows is, then what kind of assholes installed it in the first place?
and invest in Smith & Wesson. These days, laws don't mean anything even to the people who passed them.
"In any case, I don't think that I would have undertaken a task like this, where a computer is on the road, using anything but a robust operating system."
I realize that MSWindows has a zillion bugs, but I never knew that its bits could shake loose from going over bumps.
[insert Monty Python "Argument" script]
I'm submiiting a patch to replace all occurances of "bathroom" with "lavatory".
had a helicopter hovering above the ISS throughout the ceremony.
Then they must not have taken the appropriate precautions. They either used weak passwords, sent them in the clear at one time or ignored a brute force attack on the server. They were careless with their customer's data. I don't know if the kid had any malicious intent, but I'm glad he brought their problem into the light.
"Of course, given the world we live in a certain amount of military spending is required"
Definitely, but excess military spending often leads to more military spending. We make bombs. They make bigger bombs. Now we need even bigger bombs.
"and as a Canadian I am very grateful that the Americans are so keen on defense spending that we can spend most of our taxes on education and health care."
It's an enviable position to be in, at least until Dubya decides he wants your oil or North Korea lobs one towards Detroit and falls a bit short.
"The other nice spin off from military spending is the huge amount of R&D the military does which eventually trickles down to civilian uses."
Some of it trickles down, but Reagan's SDI ("star wars") is a prime example of what can go wrong with that kind of thinking. What did Joe and Mary and their two kids get in return for the investment of their tax dollars in that program?
I meant to respond to you directly, but got carried down the thread a bit. Take it to one extreme and devote the entire budget to space research. Now is it a waste? On the other extreme, if nothing was ever spent on space research, we would surely be missing out on some good stuff.
"You missed something in your logic. When the missile makers built the noise makers, they built them SOMEWHERE from SOMETHING. ...
Money doesn't just disappear into a black hole,
"
You missed the point. Money is just paper unless there's something backing it up. As I said, the dollars didn't go away, but the value they represented went up in a cloud of smoke. The labor and natural resources are just gone.
"It's fine to dislike the system because you aren't at the top of it, but killing off the rich people kills the luxury goods market, and we wouldn't HAVE home computers, VCRs, DVDs if there wasn't some idiot willing to pay thousands of dollars to have it first."
Whoa, I didn't say anything of the sort. I don't think a person is an idiot for spending $1200 on the first VCR. The fact that people bought those machines allowed manufactures to bring the price down so that everyone can afford one. But I'm not interested in subsidizing the development of cruise missiles so that I can have one in my garage. The dividends on that type of investment are way too low.
"when Isreal, England, and France buy those bombs from us (because now our bombs are better than theirs), money flows inwards."
Same principle, globalized.
You should look at your yacht example more closely. Again, I'm not saying that private citizens shouldn't be able to spend their money as they wish. I'm not a communist. But when you look at the big picture, a bunch of people did a bunch of work building a big toy. The dollar value of that toy drops faster than a rock largely because the only real value it represents is making a few people smile until the thing rusts away and sinks. Like with the missiles, the resources have been squandered. The dollars are all still somewhere, but they no longer represent the same value they once did.
There were some real dividends (new technology, national pride, respect) from our investment in space research.
(Ignoring the bigger questions about war and just following the dollars here.)
Take $1B and employ a whole bunch of people to make 1000 cruise missiles. Now shoot those missiles somewhere that we don't really need to shoot them. So now the missile makers have the dollar bills, but there's no product to show for it. It does nothing for the GNP. The potential of those dollars has been wasted.
Now the missile makers bring the dollars back to the market, but there are fewer goods to buy because instead of making useful stuff themselves, they were making noisemakers. So we end up with too many dollars chasing too few goods, inflation. Not that the fatcats care, they took their bite right off the top.
Ha-Ooooo!
"With software, that is licensed, the rules are what ever the license agreement is."
Right, it's been that way for decades and I've never understood why customers were willing to accept it.
The time to negotiate is before the sale, so next time you have to buy some equipment tell the vendor that you want transferrable rights on the sw.
Here's an idea (that's probably been done). There's a "mergers and acquisitions" exclusion in most of these licenses, so if the box is expensive enough, maybe it would make sense to set up a holding company.
Damn I hate trying to think like a lawyer.
"Better than having to wait a whole product generation for even the smallest improvement."
True, but they could at least make add a revision code to the model number.
As kids during the CB boom of the mid-70s, I'd stay up til the wee hours chatting with local friends. It was great, especially in the summer.
Towards the end of the craze I picked up a sidebander on the cheap and a beam antenna and did some dx'ing. I did cheat a bit on the upper end of the band, but I never had the balls to fire up the 250w amp I acquired.
A few years ago a friend of mine asked me to install some VOIP software so he could do some testing. The only mic I had on hand was my old D104. Talking into that thing after 20+ years brought back some great memories, and it was pretty cool to think about the contrasts between a HyGain radio and a networked computer.
Unless you're talking about Jimmy Bond in Casino Royale.
"But I think we are talking about a small price to pay for the technology."
We'll just have to disagree about that one.
"When the technology to fix this problem is inexpensive enough"
Well, how about letting them take over some of the low vhf tv channels? Access to the broadband is going to be controlled by a commercial enterprise so let them compete on merit for commercial spectrum. In other words, they should pick on someone their own size.
You make a good point about how much spectrum hams have. I don't claim to know exactly where to draw the lines.
But the licensing for hams is entirely different than the licensing for commercial spectrum usage. You used to need a license for CB too, but anyone could get one if they chose to and usage of the airwaves is first-come first-serve. Licensed or not, it's earmarked for public use. Allowing broadband over powerline at the expense of hams doesn't put that spectrum in the hands of most people. It puts it in the assets column of the line operators even though all they're really doing is polluting it.
Allocating chunks of ham spectrum for low-power public uses doesn't bother me as long as there are still frequencies available for worldwide amateur transmissions. I just think it's that important.
"The answer is to discover which frequencies this interferes with and move the hams off of those frequencies. "
In other words, take some more ground from the commons and give it to big business. No thanks.
And even if I did agree with you on that point, this case would still be different. It's a wired service. The RF bandwidth is being wasted because it's just a lousy way to send data. If they set their minds to it, they could probably come up with an economical way to string some fiber over the towers they already own. Power lines have some serious but unavoidable drawbacks as it is. Why add more problems?
Maybe I heard more than he actually said. It seemed that he was saying that the difference wasn't important. Sorry if I misunderstood.
As long as I'm posting again, I'll add that ham also has the advantage of being a broadcast medium, even if regs don't always allow it.