Most of our paperbacks and textbooks columns no more than 4" to 5" wide. That's because they're high-resolution "displays": the smaller text, at 2400+dpi, more legible than what current LCDs offer.
Actually most novels are lower resolution than that. At tops 300-600 DPI. Cheaper novels are even lower resolution.:)
The paperless office is a vision that belongs in the same category as the flying car.
That's a bad analogy. A flying car actually *was* produced in the 1960's, I believe. I saw the story of it on the History Channel. The problem was not whether it was reproducible cheaply or not, or whether it worked and was viable or anything. The problem was that *consumers* are simply not ready for cars that fly. Most people can barely drive a car that goes in *two* dimensions, let a alone a car that goes in *three*. Take a drive on a freeway in any crowded city in America and you'll see what I mean.:-)
"Okay, we can't count on being able to break the encryption on any message out there, so we're changing the focus of our efforts to X, Y, and Z. We'll continue encryption research, try to figure out the best way to crack existing schemes, but our efforts have to take into account the rising tide of encryption technology use. But for that to be successful, we'll need more money because..."
There wouldn't be much public support for it. Society has labelled the NSA as a relic of the Cold War and now they're considered the "enemy" of the American public...
I doubt that they would get much money at all, to be honest with you.
This particular quote is typically used in response to the question of gun control laws (well, and probably many other things considering it was often used saying during the Revolutionary period), but it seems somehow appropriate here too.:-)
Jeri as Seven is rumored to be making a cameo appearance in the next (and final) TNG movie, Star Trek X:Nemesis
Are you *trying* to be humourous? Final? Heh. They said the same thing about Star Trek: TMP, STII:TWOK, STIV:TVH, STV:TFF and STVI: TUC.:) There was only ever supposed to be ONE Star Trek movie. After the apparent success of that movie, Paramount, as well as the fans, asked for another one. So Harve Bennett aid, oh, ok, one more. Then when Nick Meyer had Spock die, the fans demanded that they have another one because they wanted to see what happens next... with Star Trek III, I think they knew before they were done that there would be another one, and that Leonard Nimoy would direct it. Then William Shatner decided he wanted to direct one... Star Trek VI brought back Nick Meyer for *one more* to tie it into ST:TNG, since the fans felt that there was no natural transition between TOS, the movies and ST:TNG. Then Paramount started getting crazy ideas about making money with TNG movies.
Now, I don't think either DS9 or Star Trek: Gilligan's Island (Voyager) are strong enough to base a movie series off of. I think Enterprise is Paramount's insurance that they will be able to make more Star Trek movies, because undoubtedly this is where a LOT of revenue comes from for them. Movies spawn books, collectibles, videotapes, DVD, soundtracks etc. in a way that the series don't....there is a certain amount of luster associated with the movies that the series lack, and I'm sure Paramount realizes that.
OF course, I'm sure your just a Paramount plant spreading disinformation...:)
Re:It fell flat on it's ass, but not because of M$
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 2
Ack. You all fail to see the bigger picture here.
This was IBM vs. Microsoft/Compaq. M$ was, apparently to the clone makers anyway, siding with the clone makers like Compaq. When the PS/2 came out, the Joint Development Agreement between M$ and IBM was falling apart.
M$ wanted to push people towards MS-DOS and Windows (yeah, it existed, and Gates was trying to get IBM to buy it). Compaq seemed like a good ally because they wanted to push EISA, while IBM was pushing OS/2 and MCA. (OS/2 = OS for the PS/2, get it?)
If anyone is interested in all the gory details, see this book by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews.
That's funny. I had this argument with my Systems Design prof that went something like this:
Prof: So, of these fields for the employee database, which would you use as the primary key: SSN, LAST_NAME, FIRST_NAME, or STREET_ADDRESS?
Me: None of the above.
Prof: Oh? The main requirements for a primary key is that the field be unique, and that the field not change. The SSN seems to fit that bill doesn't it?
Me: No, not everyone has a SSN.
Prof: This is an *employee* database. Of course they're all going to have SSNs.
Me: But these are not in anywway guarnteed to be unique or not change.
Prof: Oh, you're just talking silly things. Of course they're not going to change or be unique.
Me: Do YOU trust the government that much?
Prof: Stop being ridiculous.
So, you see... I *was* right!!! Heh.
Re:...so are they changing the corporate name to..
on
HP Buys Compaq
·
· Score: 2
Watch for their new handheld computer, the HPaq...seems like a step backwards, but it ain't!:)
I should also point out that the link to the "StarOffice source code" is a link to a very old verison of OpenOffice.org. Those seeking StarOffice source code should go here to get the latest build.
Meanwhile, they're dropping the price of a second IP from $10/month to $5/month - so if you had already bought one, you won't see any price change in your bill. I think they know a very large number of people are running NAT boxes & routers and want to push them away from it.
Interesting... I just signed up with RoadRunner last week because my DSL provider, Rythms, is out of business. I have received no letter as of yet...Time Waner Michigan just started with the cable modems late last year... prior to now I've had DSL service for over 2 years. Maybe their price won't change?:) IT wouldn't bother me that much because 44.95 is STILL $5 cheaper than what I was paying for SDSL. (No, that's not a typo, that's really SDSL:-) no wonder they went out of business, no?)
Anyway, I refuse to pay for a second IP. I have 5 boxes, and NAT is the only way for me to go...Linux 2.4 has a very NICE NAT implementation too... way better than in Linux 2.2, consider IPTables/Netfilter is a *stateful* firewall...:)
How does central application installation work under Windows? Is it even possible? How do they keep track of the licenses? Can you patch office once and have the changes propograte throughout the network?
There are a number of alternatives. There are third party solutions like Norton Ghost. Starting with Win2k, there is now the built-in MSI installer, which using Microsoft Scripting Host to do the installation work.
My point is that apart from the licensing fees, there's an overhead assocated with keeping track of who can run what. To protect their interests, MS has set things up in ways that make administration harder.
NO, it's not run. But there are lots of ways to automate it. At GM, they typically have everything loaded on an application server, and then control access through Tivoli, which takes care of a lot of stuff like giving access to the shares and actually downloading the registry entries, necessary files and installing the icon on the desktop, etc.
apt-get is a beautiful thing. What would an enterprise level apt-get look like?
I don't think that's even the point. The point is that Trident's chipsets are very very common and that considering that most low-end PCs use Trident video chipsets by default, this effectively shuts Linux and *BSD out of the low-end desktop market. Not that we were there in the first place, but still....:)
Good documentation. Better stability (in my experience) Good quality LVM and JFS. It's just a nicer, more complete whole than Linux with fewer rough edges. Much as the BSDs are. To me Linux often feels hacky, and almost like a toy compared to Solaris.
I'll agree with you on some of those points, like the fact that Solaris has a good LVM and JFS... I'll even add stuff and say that Solaris is more scalable than Linux...but some of the others are a bit sketchy...
Stability is not a factor that is decided exclusively by the operating system. There are a LOT of variables in terms of stability: the hardware, the application, the networking environment, machine maintenance, and so forth. You can't tell much about a given machine's stability exclusively from the operating system.
Documentation? Much of the documentation that is available for Linux is actually very good. The Solaris documentation appears to be better only from the aspect that it comes from (more or less) one source, while Linux documentation is the product of many writers with many different writing styles. The only problem with Linux documentation is that there isn't enough of it for some of the newer projects (in particular, I find the GNOME documentation to be rather lacking in some respects), but you might be running those on Solaris anyway.:)
What does Linux have that you're missing? Freedom. Freedom to have the source, to edit that source, and to distribute that source, complete with your changes. Most Linux distributions consist of mainly open source software, and one distro, Debian, consists of nothing but open source software (in their definition of that term of course). You simply can't make changes to the Solaris code and start distributing "Chegosaurus" Solaris. But you could have "Chegosaurus Linux," sure no problem, just keep it open source. You just don't have that kind of freedom with Solaris.
whether I chose to hack the Linux source or not is irrelevant, btw... It is the freedom to choose to do so if I wish that it is the issue here, not whether or not I modify said code at all...
I can't see why a company may want to deploy sourceforge on site. Maybe I never worked for a big enough company but unless you have hundreds of projects I can't really see why one might one to have sourceforge in the office. Even when I worked for my biggest ever employer they had some sixteen distinct projects and that was a company with well over a thousand employees. Where's the selling point?
Oh this is *easy*. General Motors, my employer, whom does not necessarily share my opinions and for whom I do not speak, has *easily* 50-100 different software projects going on right now.
None of of these are centralized efforts. They are scattered across different business units, even scattered across the globe. If they had could have one, centralized place to manage all of that source code, where developers could have access (or not have access, depending on setup) to different developers code, a lot of duplicated effort in the way of configuration management, and even in the realm of libraries and routine and such, could be eliminated.
In fact, I'm thinking of writing up a proposal right now and sending it in to appropriate management.:)
This proves once again, that there still isn't a good browser for Linux. So we have to decide on which one is less crappy, and not which one is better.
I dunno. Tend to think that a lot of software sucks, including web browsers and operating systems. The question actually becomes which sucks less?
Mozilla sucks because it doesn't render some pages (mostly ones designed with IE in mind) correctly, and its load time is slow. IE sucks because of its tendency to crash and its tendency to bring the rest of the operating system (even on Win2k) down with it. Konqueror sucks because it doesn't render pages with Netscape OR IE in mind.
But everything is a tradeoff. Mozilla is, bar none, the most second most stable browser on Linux, following Netscape 4.x closely. IE loads fast on Windows because, well, the code for IE is always in memory on a system with ActiveDesktop installed and is fairly stable on WinNT or Win2K. Konqueror is pretty stable, but it loads fast on KDE and isn't a memory hog like Mozilla. Opera is cool, but has a tendency to be slow and not render pages correctly. Plus it costs money.
Mozilla, Konqueror and Galeon are the three most viable open source browsers on Linux.
Everything in software is a tradeoff in terms of peformance, size, and functionality. Performance, size, functionality: pick any two.
Given all of this info, I still prefer Konqueror, but I use Mozilla sometimes. To me Konqueror sucks less, but I tend to lean towards software that is higher performance. (That's one main reason I chose Linux over FreeBSD, Windows, or other operating systems available on my hardware)
You just need to decide which set of tradeoffs is best for you.
Ummm...dumb question. The site in question is LinuxToday, being a Linux site, they would do articles on browsers available to run on Linux natively.
Similarly, there have been many articles done on Windows browsers. Such articles would likely include IE, Mozilla, Netscape 4.x, and Opera, even though everyone one of those browsers, including IE, also run on other operating systems natively.
GM hires EDS to do all their sys admin stuff. They wrote it into the contract that GM doesn't have the root password, only EDS. However, some machines that are not EDS maintained only GM has the password. There may be other machines where GM and EDS share the password.
In any case, anytime only EDS has the password, these are the machines that get maintained in the most timely manner. Machines where EDS does not have the root password, or where the root password is shared don't get as much service. So it is to GM's advantage to have most of their machines be purely EDS managed, as those are the machines where the serivce level agreements are pretty much guaranteed.
8 Track Player (with at least one tape of either Elvis or Parliment... or at least Bowie playing Major Tom)
Or "Magic Carpet Ride"
I would also want assurances that 8 track player could not play "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones. (It is rumored that a BSOD was the *actual* cause of the Challenger explosion.:)
In fact it was the reverse engineering of the IBM BIOS that let the Genie out of the bottle and let the clones out of the lab to ravage the land and the netscape, and yet this event, the KEY event in the development of the PC as we know it today, isn't even mentioned in most short histories of the development of the PC.
I respectfully disagree. They KEY event, the KEY enabler of the development of the "modern" PC as we know it today was Micros~1's success in convincing IBM to allow Micros~1 to license PC-DOS (renamed to MS-DOS) to other computer manufacturers...i.e., to allow Micros~1 to give IBM a more or less non-exclusive license.
Without that event, Rod Canion and the boys at Compaq would *never* have even bothered reverse-engineering IBM's BIOS. PC-DOS was not sold separately at that time. You had to buy an IBM PC to get PC-DOS, and making a product that revolved around pirating PC-DOS wouldn't have been a very viable business model for Compaq.
Slashdot Mirror
Most of our paperbacks and textbooks columns no more than 4" to 5" wide. That's because they're high-resolution "displays": the smaller text, at 2400+dpi, more legible than what current LCDs offer.
:)
Actually most novels are lower resolution than that. At tops 300-600 DPI. Cheaper novels are even lower resolution.
The paperless office is a vision that belongs in the same category as the flying car.
:-)
That's a bad analogy. A flying car actually *was* produced in the 1960's, I believe. I saw the story of it on the History Channel. The problem was not whether it was reproducible cheaply or not, or whether it worked and was viable or anything. The problem was that *consumers* are simply not ready for cars that fly. Most people can barely drive a car that goes in *two* dimensions, let a alone a car that goes in *three*. Take a drive on a freeway in any crowded city in America and you'll see what I mean.
"Okay, we can't count on being able to break the encryption on any message out there, so we're changing the focus of our efforts to X, Y, and Z. We'll continue encryption research, try to figure out the best way to crack existing schemes, but our efforts have to take into account the rising tide of encryption technology use. But for that to be successful, we'll need more money because..."
There wouldn't be much public support for it. Society has labelled the NSA as a relic of the Cold War and now they're considered the "enemy" of the American public...
I doubt that they would get much money at all, to be honest with you.
This particular quote is typically used in response to the question of gun control laws (well, and probably many other things considering it was often used saying during the Revolutionary period), but it seems somehow appropriate here too. :-)
Jeri as Seven is rumored to be making a cameo appearance in the next (and final) TNG movie, Star Trek X:Nemesis
:) There was only ever supposed to be ONE Star Trek movie. After the apparent success of that movie, Paramount, as well as the fans, asked for another one. So Harve Bennett aid, oh, ok, one more. Then when Nick Meyer had Spock die, the fans demanded that they have another one because they wanted to see what happens next... with Star Trek III, I think they knew before they were done that there would be another one, and that Leonard Nimoy would direct it. Then William Shatner decided he wanted to direct one... Star Trek VI brought back Nick Meyer for *one more* to tie it into ST:TNG, since the fans felt that there was no natural transition between TOS, the movies and ST:TNG. Then Paramount started getting crazy ideas about making money with TNG movies.
:)
Are you *trying* to be humourous? Final? Heh. They said the same thing about Star Trek: TMP, STII:TWOK, STIV:TVH, STV:TFF and STVI: TUC.
Now, I don't think either DS9 or Star Trek: Gilligan's Island (Voyager) are strong enough to base a movie series off of. I think Enterprise is Paramount's insurance that they will be able to make more Star Trek movies, because undoubtedly this is where a LOT of revenue comes from for them. Movies spawn books, collectibles, videotapes, DVD, soundtracks etc. in a way that the series don't....there is a certain amount of luster associated with the movies that the series lack, and I'm sure Paramount realizes that.
OF course, I'm sure your just a Paramount plant spreading disinformation...
Ack. You all fail to see the bigger picture here.
This was IBM vs. Microsoft/Compaq. M$ was, apparently to the clone makers anyway, siding with the clone makers like Compaq. When the PS/2 came out, the Joint Development Agreement between M$ and IBM was falling apart.
M$ wanted to push people towards MS-DOS and Windows (yeah, it existed, and Gates was trying to get IBM to buy it). Compaq seemed like a good ally because they wanted to push EISA, while IBM was pushing OS/2 and MCA. (OS/2 = OS for the PS/2, get it?)
If anyone is interested in all the gory details, see this book by Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews.
That's funny. I had this argument with my Systems Design prof that went something like this:
Prof: So, of these fields for the employee database, which would you use as the primary key: SSN, LAST_NAME, FIRST_NAME, or STREET_ADDRESS?
Me: None of the above.
Prof: Oh? The main requirements for a primary key is that the field be unique, and that the field not change. The SSN seems to fit that bill doesn't it?
Me: No, not everyone has a SSN.
Prof: This is an *employee* database. Of course they're all going to have SSNs.
Me: But these are not in anywway guarnteed to be unique or not change.
Prof: Oh, you're just talking silly things. Of course they're not going to change or be unique.
Me: Do YOU trust the government that much?
Prof: Stop being ridiculous.
So, you see... I *was* right!!! Heh.
Watch for their new handheld computer, the HPaq...seems like a step backwards, but it ain't! :)
Maybe we might end up with a hardware monopoly to rival Microsoft - aka IBM's PS/2 architecture.
:-)
Ummm...do I *have* to point out that IBM's PS/2 architecture fell flat on its ass in an all out war with Microsoft?
A lot of Microsoft shops don't use Outlook. For one, GM and EDS use Lotus Notes, which is the *original* groupware product. :)
For that matter, Evolution is catching up, provided Ximian doesn't go under....
I should also point out that the link to the "StarOffice source code" is a link to a very old verison of OpenOffice.org. Those seeking StarOffice source code should go here to get the latest build.
Meanwhile, they're dropping the price of a second IP from $10/month to $5/month - so if you had already bought one, you won't see any price change in your bill. I think they know a very large number of people are running NAT boxes & routers and want to push them away from it.
... I just signed up with RoadRunner last week because my DSL provider, Rythms, is out of business. I have received no letter as of yet...Time Waner Michigan just started with the cable modems late last year... prior to now I've had DSL service for over 2 years. Maybe their price won't change? :) IT wouldn't bother me that much because 44.95 is STILL $5 cheaper than what I was paying for SDSL. (No, that's not a typo, that's really SDSL :-) no wonder they went out of business, no?)
:)
Interesting
Anyway, I refuse to pay for a second IP. I have 5 boxes, and NAT is the only way for me to go...Linux 2.4 has a very NICE NAT implementation too... way better than in Linux 2.2, consider IPTables/Netfilter is a *stateful* firewall...
How does central application installation work under Windows? Is it even possible? How do they keep track of the licenses? Can you patch office once and have the changes propograte throughout the network?
:-P
There are a number of alternatives. There are third party solutions like Norton Ghost. Starting with Win2k, there is now the built-in MSI installer, which using Microsoft Scripting Host to do the installation work.
My point is that apart from the licensing fees, there's an overhead assocated with keeping track of who can run what. To protect their interests, MS has set things up in ways that make administration harder.
NO, it's not run. But there are lots of ways to automate it. At GM, they typically have everything loaded on an application server, and then control access through Tivoli, which takes care of a lot of stuff like giving access to the shares and actually downloading the registry entries, necessary files and installing the icon on the desktop, etc.
apt-get is a beautiful thing. What would an enterprise level apt-get look like?
Tivoli.
I don't think that's even the point. The point is that Trident's chipsets are very very common and that considering that most low-end PCs use Trident video chipsets by default, this effectively shuts Linux and *BSD out of the low-end desktop market. Not that we were there in the first place, but still.... :)
Good documentation. Better stability (in my experience) Good quality LVM and JFS. It's just a nicer, more complete whole than Linux with fewer rough edges. Much as the BSDs are. To me Linux often feels hacky, and almost like a toy compared to Solaris.
:)
I'll agree with you on some of those points, like the fact that Solaris has a good LVM and JFS... I'll even add stuff and say that Solaris is more scalable than Linux...but some of the others are a bit sketchy...
Stability is not a factor that is decided exclusively by the operating system. There are a LOT of variables in terms of stability: the hardware, the application, the networking environment, machine maintenance, and so forth. You can't tell much about a given machine's stability exclusively from the operating system.
Documentation? Much of the documentation that is available for Linux is actually very good. The Solaris documentation appears to be better only from the aspect that it comes from (more or less) one source, while Linux documentation is the product of many writers with many different writing styles. The only problem with Linux documentation is that there isn't enough of it for some of the newer projects (in particular, I find the GNOME documentation to be rather lacking in some respects), but you might be running those on Solaris anyway.
What does Linux have that you're missing? Freedom. Freedom to have the source, to edit that source, and to distribute that source, complete with your changes. Most Linux distributions consist of mainly open source software, and one distro, Debian, consists of nothing but open source software (in their definition of that term of course). You simply can't make changes to the Solaris code and start distributing "Chegosaurus" Solaris. But you could have "Chegosaurus Linux," sure no problem, just keep it open source. You just don't have that kind of freedom with Solaris.
whether I chose to hack the Linux source or not is irrelevant, btw... It is the freedom to choose to do so if I wish that it is the issue here, not whether or not I modify said code at all...
This fits into ESR's model quite nicely. See , particularly this section. Zope is an excellent example of what SourceForget is doing...
I can't see why a company may want to deploy sourceforge on site. Maybe I never worked for a big enough company but unless you have hundreds of projects I can't really see why one might one to have sourceforge in the office. Even when I worked for my biggest ever employer they had some sixteen distinct projects and that was a company with well over a thousand employees. Where's the selling point?
:)
Oh this is *easy*. General Motors, my employer, whom does not necessarily share my opinions and for whom I do not speak, has *easily* 50-100 different software projects going on right now.
None of of these are centralized efforts. They are scattered across different business units, even scattered across the globe. If they had could have one, centralized place to manage all of that source code, where developers could have access (or not have access, depending on setup) to different developers code, a lot of duplicated effort in the way of configuration management, and even in the realm of libraries and routine and such, could be eliminated.
In fact, I'm thinking of writing up a proposal right now and sending it in to appropriate management.
Ummm... They're not selling $3,000 Linux boxes, they're selling $3,000 Linux....
So in addition to the fact that HP-SUX, apparently now HP-LIX, too!! :)
This proves once again, that there still isn't a good browser for Linux. So we have to decide on which one is less crappy, and not which one is better.
I dunno. Tend to think that a lot of software sucks, including web browsers and operating systems. The question actually becomes which sucks less?
Mozilla sucks because it doesn't render some pages (mostly ones designed with IE in mind) correctly, and its load time is slow. IE sucks because of its tendency to crash and its tendency to bring the rest of the operating system (even on Win2k) down with it. Konqueror sucks because it doesn't render pages with Netscape OR IE in mind.
But everything is a tradeoff. Mozilla is, bar none, the most second most stable browser on Linux, following Netscape 4.x closely. IE loads fast on Windows because, well, the code for IE is always in memory on a system with ActiveDesktop installed and is fairly stable on WinNT or Win2K. Konqueror is pretty stable, but it loads fast on KDE and isn't a memory hog like Mozilla. Opera is cool, but has a tendency to be slow and not render pages correctly. Plus it costs money.
Mozilla, Konqueror and Galeon are the three most viable open source browsers on Linux.
Everything in software is a tradeoff in terms of peformance, size, and functionality. Performance, size, functionality: pick any two.
Given all of this info, I still prefer Konqueror, but I use Mozilla sometimes. To me Konqueror sucks less, but I tend to lean towards software that is higher performance. (That's one main reason I chose Linux over FreeBSD, Windows, or other operating systems available on my hardware)
You just need to decide which set of tradeoffs is best for you.
Ummm...dumb question. The site in question is LinuxToday, being a Linux site, they would do articles on browsers available to run on Linux natively.
Similarly, there have been many articles done on Windows browsers. Such articles would likely include IE, Mozilla, Netscape 4.x, and Opera, even though everyone one of those browsers, including IE, also run on other operating systems natively.
Geez, don't be so reactionary.
If you like Pascal, go with Kylix.
Kylix will do more than Pascal...it will do C++ as well.
If you like Java, there's Forte (don't know anything about it).
Isn't there also a Forte C++ compiler/IDE? Or am I thinking of commercial Unix?
GM hires EDS to do all their sys admin stuff. They wrote it into the contract that GM doesn't have the root password, only EDS. However, some machines that are not EDS maintained only GM has the password. There may be other machines where GM and EDS share the password.
In any case, anytime only EDS has the password, these are the machines that get maintained in the most timely manner. Machines where EDS does not have the root password, or where the root password is shared don't get as much service. So it is to GM's advantage to have most of their machines be purely EDS managed, as those are the machines where the serivce level agreements are pretty much guaranteed.
8 Track Player (with at least one tape of either Elvis or Parliment ... or at least Bowie playing Major Tom)
:)
Or "Magic Carpet Ride"
I would also want assurances that 8 track player could not play "Start Me Up" by the Rolling Stones. (It is rumored that a BSOD was the *actual* cause of the Challenger explosion.
In fact it was the reverse engineering of the IBM BIOS that let the Genie out of the bottle and let the clones out of the lab to ravage the land and the netscape, and yet this event, the KEY event in the development of the PC as we know it today, isn't even mentioned in most short histories of the development of the PC.
I respectfully disagree. They KEY event, the KEY enabler of the development of the "modern" PC as we know it today was Micros~1's success in convincing IBM to allow Micros~1 to license PC-DOS (renamed to MS-DOS) to other computer manufacturers...i.e., to allow Micros~1 to give IBM a more or less non-exclusive license.
Without that event, Rod Canion and the boys at Compaq would *never* have even bothered reverse-engineering IBM's BIOS. PC-DOS was not sold separately at that time. You had to buy an IBM PC to get PC-DOS, and making a product that revolved around pirating PC-DOS wouldn't have been a very viable business model for Compaq.