If you go to the SimH page, there are pointers to downloadable software that can be used with various simulators. Among these you'll find RT-11 and RSTS/e kits (alas, someone else bought the rights to RSX-11M and it isn't available). Also, there's a pointer to the information about the OpenVMS Hobbyist program which can be used as a source of licenses for just about any available OpenVMS software provided you are strictly a hobbyist user (no commercial use).
I'm currently running OpenVMS under SimH on an Athlon XP 1600 using hobbyist licenses. This gives me performance approximately equivalent to a MicroVAX II processor but I/O is quick since disk data is normally found in the linux disk cache.
I'll second the vote for VMWare. A friend of mine designs websites for a living. He uses IIS on his server so all his development is done on Microsoft platforms. I help him out a bit on the side and ended up buying VMWare so I wouldn't have to dual boot. I can maintain access to all of my linux files (my primary environment) while running Windows in a window.
The *.mx.aol.com name was derived from a reverse lookup of the ip address that the delivery attempt was coming from, not from the sender address in the mail header.
This is real funny. I've been trying to install some new sendmail milter programs on my mail server in an attempt to cut down on the amount of spam I receive. As a result, I've been taking a closer look at my mail logs.
I'm getting a lot of mail addressed to accounts that don't exist from systems with names like omr-m14.mx.aol.com. Are these legitimate MTAs or open relays?
If AOL wants to cut down on SPAM, they should start with what gets sent by their servers.
In my town, we have Cablevision. We had one cable box and a second
set connected without a box (translation: no scrambled content, even
if included in our package, was available at the second set without
the box to descramble it). We were paying about $55/mo. for extended
basic + Encore and Starz.
I had been a happy DirecTV DSL customer until they dropped that
service but I wasn't about to go to them for TV due to their recent
litigous nature. I looked into Dish Network instead. From what I
could figure out on their website, I could get both TVs set up and end
up with a bill within a few dollars of what I was paying Cablevision.
In the process, I'd get both MSG and FSNY, local channels, 8 Starz
movie channels, plus over 100 channels from the middle tier package.
We've had our dish for about 4-5 months now. We're paying less than
two dollars more per month for Dish Network than we were for cable and
have twice as many channels and many more premium channels. Our
reception has been excellent except for one night when we had heavy
rain and extremely strong winds. We had no reception for about 20
minutes that night.
I suspect that some of the war stories about poor reception are
probably about people who installed it themselves or had someone that
didn't have the proper equipment install it. I truly believe we had
more outages when we had cable than we have since going to satellite.
We'd regularly lose our cable in heavy rains.
Dish Network also offers a TiVo equipped box for an additional fee. I
don't know anything about it since we didn't get one.
Does anyone have an email address that can be used for sending comments on this matter to SSC? Their 'contact us' page only lists a snail-mail address.
Did you make it known to the shopkeeper that you would have purchased it if that warning wasn't there? You shouldn't have "noticed" the sticker until you got to the counter.
> I've actually heard tha Entwistle did some solo work though. Has anybody heard it? How is it?
Unmistakeably Entwistle. I have a disc called 'Thunderfingers: The Best of John Entwistle' (Rhino R2-72570). There isn't much that would get airplay but some good songs. The humo[u]r in the lyrics are definitely his style if you're familiar with the songs he wrote for the Who.
I once heard a story about the Denny's restaurant chain. I'm not sure if it's true but the moral is. The story goes like this.
Apparently, Denny's had intended to be a 24x365 operation, never closing its doors. Therefore, when they built the restaurants, they didn't bother putting locks on the doors.
One year, they decided to give their employees Christmas day off. In order to close the restaurants, they needed to be able to lock the doors. Therefore, they had locksmiths go out to all of the stores and install locks.
Now, instead of having spent about $10 per door when the store was built to have locks installed, they needed to send locksmiths to all of the stores and pay them for a couple of hours work resulting in a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars to give their employees a day off.
The moral: It's a lot easier to design security into a system in the first place than to try to add it on later.
Patent applications are supposed to cite prior art. The problem in the area of software development is that much of the prior art is hidden inside proprietary software that is protected not by patents but by trade secret status. Now these same companies come to the web and there's no such thing as trade secrets because everything is out in the open. They have to use patents in order to protect their space.
woops.../. stripped the formatting when I hit preview. Should have been:
errrr... wasn't GIF based on the LZW algorithm? And in any case, the stimulation of development of other algorithms is definitely one of the means by which patents were intended to promote innovation.
GIF was based on LZW but at the time I don't think they knew it was a patented algorithm. I wonder if Compuserve would have looked for another compression algorithm had they known.
At least LZW is in the public domain...
No, its not. That's what the whole UNISYS/GIF controversy is about
errrr... wasn't GIF based on the LZW algorithm? And in any case, the stimulation of development of other algorithms is definitely one of the means by which patents were intended to promote innovation.Yes, GIF was based on the LZW algorithm but at the time I don't think they knew the algorithm was patented. I wonder if Compuserve would have looked for another compression algorithm had they known.At least LZW is in the public domainNo, it isn't. That's what the big UNISYS/GIF controversy is about.
When the foundation was laid for our current patent system, we were an agrarian society. Patents allowed inventors to communicate their inventions to others who had the means to bring those inventions to market. Today, we are an industrial society where most inventors are employed by corporations. These inventors don't stand to gain directly from their inventions since their patents will most likely be filed by or through the corporation and the invention will be owned by or licensed at little or no cost to the corporation.
In those days, patents were issued mostly on machines. In order to get the patent, the inventor would send blueprints describing his invention to the patent office. These blueprints provided enough information for a potential investor to instantiate the inventor's ideas. Software patents are issued against what amounts to a program specification which describes what the program does in theoretical terms. The description that accompanies the patent does not include enough information to create a working instantiation of the idea. Writing the specification is only a small part of a working implementation. An analog to mechanical blueprints would be submitting the source code to a working implementation of an idea but this isn't done.
People who invent machines need a lot of capital to bring their ideas to market. They need to invest in manufacturing equipment and space. They need to purchase materials from which to make products. They need to pay someone to ship completed products to market. Software developers only need a small office (which could be in their home), a relatively inexpensive PC and some development software (which could be found for free thanks to the FSF and other free software and open source suppliers) to produce code. These are one time costs that don't need to be incurred again if the developer writes another program. Distribution is also less costly as the finished product can be distributed and advertised on the internet.
People who invent machines have no other means of protection besides patents. In some cases, it may be possible to rely on trade secret status but usually a piece of hardware can be dismantled to see how it works. Software source can be protected by copyright or trade secret status. Although it is possible to disassemble a program, this results in machine code which is not equivalent to the original sources. The usual means of reverse engineering software is to examine what a program does and write a new program that attempts to mimic its behaviour. This is a costly and time consuming process when applied to a program of any complexity.
Although software companies are making record profits, they continue to seek new ways to protect their investments. They have outgrown copyright and trade secret status. They won't sell you a product but will only give you a license to use it. Those license terms continue to get more strict. They lobby congress to extend copyright status for longer periods of time and to enact laws enforcing consumer unfriendly licensing terms. They patent every aspect of their programs possible so they can sue any and all competition.
Imagine where the software industry would be today if Xerox PARC had patented their groundwork on graphical user interfaces or if Lotus had patented ideas used in their spreadsheet. Entire industries have been built around these ideas that would not exist today or at least would not be nearly as expansive had these ideas been considered patentable.
It is not possible to copyright or patent the theme or plot of a book. It should also not be possible to patent the ideas and concepts of a computer program.
I think it was Alan Cox who had posted something showing the uptime of one of his machines at 180 days. The problem was the uptime counter had already wrapped. That happens every 497 days. So this machine had been up about 22 months.
I just recently sent him mail about the linux portaloo being stuck and not presenting any new articles. He replied "that's what happens when the clock rolls over after 497 days". So this means the man has had at least two different machines stay up for over 497 days. That's over 16 months!
I myself had a machine at my office stay up for over 325 days. It came down (hard) when the water from hurricane Floyd started rolling into the computer room. This machine is our news server. Came right back up after an fsck.
I believe the numbers were halved because they added up the costs for two years and then wanted to present a yearly TCO number.
Also, the other amusing thing I noticed in that study was some of the numbers up top related to the loads placed on the machines involved. It would appear that the NT machines cost 37% less to own and operate but it also appeared they did 50% less.
I think it will be a processor that can change it's personality by reloading microcode. If they do it right, I can imagine a processor that can support multiple personalities simultaneously. Imagine each process on the system running under a different personality by having multiple sets of microcode loaded and switching between them as processes are switched. One process could run linux or windows with a x86 microcode loaded while another could run MacOS with a 68K microcode loaded. Each of these processes would provide a virtual machine to run applications. On-chip cache memory densities have gotten to the point where I think this might be possible. It would be the ultimate in emulation.
Any solution that begins with 'require Microsoft to...' is inherently unworkable. This would require the creation of a government watchdog group tasked with keeping an eye on Microsoft to make sure they follow the decree. Besides, there are bound to be loopholes and we all know how adept MS is at slipping through those.
You know NT is on 10 times as many machines as linux, it is modern and is full of bugs waiting to be fixed.
Careful, there! There are thousands of programs out there that rely on those bugs!
This is why MS would never have to worry about a code fork if they released sources. Any fork would have to be bug-for-bug compatible with their version if it expected to support all the programs that are out there.
What is the minimum requirement stated by Microsoft for NT? Ever tried to actually run it? I bet linux on it's minimum requirement of a 386 would beat NT on whatever it's minimum requirement is.
As a matter of fact, there's an old 386/40 sitting in our communications closet that's collecting dust. One of our users had it until he needed to run Xcursions and got upgraded to a more modern machine. I've been thinking of installing linux on it to use as a print server, file server, WINS, etc.
I recently had a 486/40 (SX-20 upgraded with DX2-50 chip) running NT and it was a pig (no offense intended to pig lovers). The same machine used to scream with linux.
That's all well and good but Microsoft grabbed the desktop market with Windows 3.1 and then leveraged that domination to the datacenter with Windows NT. Windows 3.1 crashing once or twice a day on my desktop while I try to use a word processor or spreadsheet is one thing. Windows NT crashing once or twice a day in the datacenter while trying to host a database for my business is another.
This is why linux and Free/OpenBSD are doing so well. Microsoft tried to sell us a buggy desktop operating system to run our datacenters and failed miserably. As people are catching on, they're switching to more reliable but less easy to use alternatives.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do I sense that this will spawn the mother of all BSA audits?
If you go to the SimH page, there are pointers to downloadable software that can be used with various simulators. Among these you'll find RT-11 and RSTS/e kits (alas, someone else bought the rights to RSX-11M and it isn't available). Also, there's a pointer to the information about the OpenVMS Hobbyist program which can be used as a source of licenses for just about any available OpenVMS software provided you are strictly a hobbyist user (no commercial use).
I'm currently running OpenVMS under SimH on an Athlon XP 1600 using hobbyist licenses. This gives me performance approximately equivalent to a MicroVAX II processor but I/O is quick since disk data is normally found in the linux disk cache.
I'll second the vote for VMWare. A friend of mine designs websites for a living. He uses IIS on his server so all his development is done on Microsoft platforms. I help him out a bit on the side and ended up buying VMWare so I wouldn't have to dual boot. I can maintain access to all of my linux files (my primary environment) while running Windows in a window.
The *.mx.aol.com name was derived from a reverse lookup of the ip address that the delivery attempt was coming from, not from the sender address in the mail header.
This is real funny. I've been trying to install some new sendmail milter programs on my mail server in an attempt to cut down on the amount of spam I receive. As a result, I've been taking a closer look at my mail logs.
I'm getting a lot of mail addressed to accounts that don't exist from systems with names like omr-m14.mx.aol.com. Are these legitimate MTAs or open relays?
If AOL wants to cut down on SPAM, they should start with what gets sent by their servers.
Whoever wrote this report didn't look at my waistline.
In my town, we have Cablevision. We had one cable box and a second set connected without a box (translation: no scrambled content, even if included in our package, was available at the second set without the box to descramble it). We were paying about $55/mo. for extended basic + Encore and Starz.
I had been a happy DirecTV DSL customer until they dropped that service but I wasn't about to go to them for TV due to their recent litigous nature. I looked into Dish Network instead. From what I could figure out on their website, I could get both TVs set up and end up with a bill within a few dollars of what I was paying Cablevision. In the process, I'd get both MSG and FSNY, local channels, 8 Starz movie channels, plus over 100 channels from the middle tier package.
We've had our dish for about 4-5 months now. We're paying less than two dollars more per month for Dish Network than we were for cable and have twice as many channels and many more premium channels. Our reception has been excellent except for one night when we had heavy rain and extremely strong winds. We had no reception for about 20 minutes that night.
I suspect that some of the war stories about poor reception are probably about people who installed it themselves or had someone that didn't have the proper equipment install it. I truly believe we had more outages when we had cable than we have since going to satellite. We'd regularly lose our cable in heavy rains.
Dish Network also offers a TiVo equipped box for an additional fee. I don't know anything about it since we didn't get one.
Does anyone have an email address that can be used for sending comments on this matter to SSC? Their 'contact us' page only lists a snail-mail address.
Ok, so why is it GNU/Linux and GNU/Hurd but not GNU/NetBSD? Does NetBSD normally get distributed with non-GNU utilities?
Step 5: Reboot machine
Step 6: Goto Step 2
Be prepared to spend the day in this loop.
Did you make it known to the shopkeeper that you would have purchased it if that warning wasn't there? You shouldn't have "noticed" the sticker until you got to the counter.
I (and others) have been saying "just say '.NYET'" since M$ started with .NET.
> I've actually heard tha Entwistle did some solo work though. Has anybody heard it? How is it?
Unmistakeably Entwistle. I have a disc called 'Thunderfingers: The Best of John Entwistle' (Rhino R2-72570). There isn't much that would get airplay but some good songs. The humo[u]r in the lyrics are definitely his style if you're familiar with the songs he wrote for the Who.
I once heard a story about the Denny's restaurant chain. I'm not sure if it's true but the moral is. The story goes like this.
Apparently, Denny's had intended to be a 24x365 operation, never closing its doors. Therefore, when they built the restaurants, they didn't bother putting locks on the doors.
One year, they decided to give their employees Christmas day off. In order to close the restaurants, they needed to be able to lock the doors. Therefore, they had locksmiths go out to all of the stores and install locks.
Now, instead of having spent about $10 per door when the store was built to have locks installed, they needed to send locksmiths to all of the stores and pay them for a couple of hours work resulting in a cost of a few hundred thousand dollars to give their employees a day off.
The moral: It's a lot easier to design security into a system in the first place than to try to add it on later.
Microsoft has their work cut out for them.
Patent applications are supposed to cite prior art. The problem in the area of software development is that much of the prior art is hidden inside proprietary software that is protected not by patents but by trade secret status. Now these same companies come to the web and there's no such thing as trade secrets because everything is out in the open. They have to use patents in order to protect their space.
GIF was based on LZW but at the time I don't think they knew it was a patented algorithm. I wonder if Compuserve would have looked for another compression algorithm had they known.
No, its not. That's what the whole UNISYS/GIF controversy is about
errrr... wasn't GIF based on the LZW algorithm? And in any case, the stimulation of development of other algorithms is definitely one of the means by which patents were intended to promote innovation.Yes, GIF was based on the LZW algorithm but at the time I don't think they knew the algorithm was patented. I wonder if Compuserve would have looked for another compression algorithm had they known.At least LZW is in the public domainNo, it isn't. That's what the big UNISYS/GIF controversy is about.
When the foundation was laid for our current patent system, we were an agrarian society. Patents allowed inventors to communicate their inventions to others who had the means to bring those inventions to market. Today, we are an industrial society where most inventors are employed by corporations. These inventors don't stand to gain directly from their inventions since their patents will most likely be filed by or through the corporation and the invention will be owned by or licensed at little or no cost to the corporation.
In those days, patents were issued mostly on machines. In order to get the patent, the inventor would send blueprints describing his invention to the patent office. These blueprints provided enough information for a potential investor to instantiate the inventor's ideas. Software patents are issued against what amounts to a program specification which describes what the program does in theoretical terms. The description that accompanies the patent does not include enough information to create a working instantiation of the idea. Writing the specification is only a small part of a working implementation. An analog to mechanical blueprints would be submitting the source code to a working implementation of an idea but this isn't done.
People who invent machines need a lot of capital to bring their ideas to market. They need to invest in manufacturing equipment and space. They need to purchase materials from which to make products. They need to pay someone to ship completed products to market. Software developers only need a small office (which could be in their home), a relatively inexpensive PC and some development software (which could be found for free thanks to the FSF and other free software and open source suppliers) to produce code. These are one time costs that don't need to be incurred again if the developer writes another program. Distribution is also less costly as the finished product can be distributed and advertised on the internet.
People who invent machines have no other means of protection besides patents. In some cases, it may be possible to rely on trade secret status but usually a piece of hardware can be dismantled to see how it works. Software source can be protected by copyright or trade secret status. Although it is possible to disassemble a program, this results in machine code which is not equivalent to the original sources. The usual means of reverse engineering software is to examine what a program does and write a new program that attempts to mimic its behaviour. This is a costly and time consuming process when applied to a program of any complexity.
Although software companies are making record profits, they continue to seek new ways to protect their investments. They have outgrown copyright and trade secret status. They won't sell you a product but will only give you a license to use it. Those license terms continue to get more strict. They lobby congress to extend copyright status for longer periods of time and to enact laws enforcing consumer unfriendly licensing terms. They patent every aspect of their programs possible so they can sue any and all competition.
Imagine where the software industry would be today if Xerox PARC had patented their groundwork on graphical user interfaces or if Lotus had patented ideas used in their spreadsheet. Entire industries have been built around these ideas that would not exist today or at least would not be nearly as expansive had these ideas been considered patentable.
It is not possible to copyright or patent the theme or plot of a book. It should also not be possible to patent the ideas and concepts of a computer program.
4 months a record? Are you kidding?
I think it was Alan Cox who had posted something showing the uptime of one of his machines at 180 days. The problem was the uptime counter had already wrapped. That happens every 497 days. So this machine had been up about 22 months.
I just recently sent him mail about the linux portaloo being stuck and not presenting any new articles. He replied "that's what happens when the clock rolls over after 497 days". So this means the man has had at least two different machines stay up for over 497 days. That's over 16 months!
I myself had a machine at my office stay up for over 325 days. It came down (hard) when the water from hurricane Floyd started rolling into the computer room. This machine is our news server. Came right back up after an fsck.
I believe the numbers were halved because they added up the costs for two years and then wanted to present a yearly TCO number.
Also, the other amusing thing I noticed in that study was some of the numbers up top related to the loads placed on the machines involved. It would appear that the NT machines cost 37% less to own and operate but it also appeared they did 50% less.
I think it will be a processor that can change it's personality by reloading microcode. If they do it right, I can imagine a processor that can support multiple personalities simultaneously. Imagine each process on the system running under a different personality by having multiple sets of microcode loaded and switching between them as processes are switched. One process could run linux or windows with a x86 microcode loaded while another could run MacOS with a 68K microcode loaded. Each of these processes would provide a virtual machine to run applications. On-chip cache memory densities have gotten to the point where I think this might be possible. It would be the ultimate in emulation.
Any solution that begins with 'require Microsoft to...' is inherently unworkable. This would require the creation of a government watchdog group tasked with keeping an eye on Microsoft to make sure they follow the decree. Besides, there are bound to be loopholes and we all know how adept MS is at slipping through those.
Careful, there! There are thousands of programs out there that rely on those bugs!
This is why MS would never have to worry about a code fork if they released sources. Any fork would have to be bug-for-bug compatible with their version if it expected to support all the programs that are out there.
What is the minimum requirement stated by Microsoft for NT? Ever tried to actually run it? I bet linux on it's minimum requirement of a 386 would beat NT on whatever it's minimum requirement is.
As a matter of fact, there's an old 386/40 sitting in our communications closet that's collecting dust. One of our users had it until he needed to run Xcursions and got upgraded to a more modern machine. I've been thinking of installing linux on it to use as a print server, file server, WINS, etc.
I recently had a 486/40 (SX-20 upgraded with DX2-50 chip) running NT and it was a pig (no offense intended to pig lovers). The same machine used to scream with linux.
That's all well and good but Microsoft grabbed the desktop market with Windows 3.1 and then leveraged that domination to the datacenter with Windows NT. Windows 3.1 crashing once or twice a day on my desktop while I try to use a word processor or spreadsheet is one thing. Windows NT crashing once or twice a day in the datacenter while trying to host a database for my business is another.
This is why linux and Free/OpenBSD are doing so well. Microsoft tried to sell us a buggy desktop operating system to run our datacenters and failed miserably. As people are catching on, they're switching to more reliable but less easy to use alternatives.