The post is an if statement, and yet most people seem to assume it is an obvious answer.
What about the people who use Linux on a daily basis and *want* serious threats? I use KDE, and I am happy with Gnome, Windows and OSX sitting out there, coming up with nifty ideas. I also like the niche systems like Symphony. If one seems to be really better that what I'm using, I'll use that instead.
I have no allegiance to KDE and Linux, it just happens to be what I happen to think is best for me right now. I *don't* want my preferred solution to dominate and wipe everything else out, nor would I want everybody to drive my choice of vehicle. I would imagine that an E350 wouldn't fit other people's needs; probably even most people. But it fits my needs. My SO drives a VW Beetle (and uses OSX). It fits her needs.
Ya know, I just don't think we're going to agree. Prior to the Berkeley split (which was basically the same time as Xenix), SysV *was* UNIX... or at least to my way of thinking. Saying it isn't because it isn't the original version is just odd.
You're saying at one side that early PCs were riddled with mistakes, and at the same time that Xenix was a good, full featured port. Not quite sure how you reconcile those two things.
At the core, I disagree with your assertion that the mistakes made were due to bad engineering and not to the limitations of time, expense and resources and a very different focus by the PC makers. It took a hell of a lot of corner cutting to be able to have PCs at all... I think we both see that corner cutting as having produced bad results; I just see it as having also made the early PCs possible and affordable.
I'll take a kludge in my home office over a perfect system that is theoretical or out of my price range. And that's what the early PCs were.
Are you talking about the early preview of Longhorn (like the person who you are replying to is)? Or are you talking about a different version of Windows?
Early versions of Xenix were not very Unixish and felt very kludged together. No symlinks, no initab, no vi, short filenames, etc. It did, however have a hierarchical filesystem. It did not, however, run on a base model IBM PC (IIRC, the IBM PC shipped with 16k of memory).
my point is that many of the early PC operating systems were not good OSes even though people had had 20 years of experience of how to build good OSes.
My point was not to refute. It was simply to point out that there were also harsh limitations of hardware that led to the early systems being shipped with DOSes rather than OSes. 1k or 4k of memory is simply not enough to run a "real OS"; you're limited to an application loader, which is why they went with DOSes rather than OSes.
The people at Microsoft and Apple just did not know what they were doing.
Well, in the case of Apple, DOS was specifically positioned not an operating system, but rather a Disk Operating System, simply the minimal code to access the floppy drives. There were operating systems sold to run on the Apple (dirty slow but neat), but DOS was not an OS - it was a DOS. And with a base memory originally of 4k (later upped to 64k and the ][e and//c had 128k), you couldn't run a real OS on the basic system.
PC-DOS was positioned as more of an operating system, but that's more a marketing issue, and I'll not step into that very muddy water.:)
By the time you had 64k of memory, you did have enough of a system to run a real operating system, but early PCs didn't have that in the base configuration and that much memory was terribly expensive. By the time 64k (or more) was standard, DOSes had become standard too... and in that era, your point makes sense. At that point, DOSes should have been dropped for "real OSes". But by that time arrived, many many years had gone by and entire companies and lines of PCs had come and gone. People were used to the DOS that came with their PC and there was a large base of applications written to that DOS.
You're right, I should have stuck with the "4k and under" level of systems. Full windowing systems and decent OSes have fit in 64k. But for the first four or five years of PCs, 64k of memory was damn expensive, and most systems just didn't have it. It was during that era that the "legacy OSes" lamented in the original post were created.
And I'm not "slagging" them, just pointing out that there were limitations, and you can't just blithely write off the operating systems of the early PCs as being poorly written.
The problem is that the summary (and sometimes the article) for these posts are too vague. There are plenty of ways to make fusion devices. In fact, some of them are fairly safe and cost a few hundred dollars.
The problem is the same as fission until the discovery of neutrons and subsequent discovery of chain reactions in certain elements -- there's no apparent way to do it without putting more energy into the reaction than you get out. Einstein thought it couldn't be done until Szilard convinced him (which resulted in a few historically significant letters).
Now, these could be duplicates, if the method is the same between them. They could be old news if it is a well known fusion method. Or they could be new methods, worthy of new articles... but they are often written so vague that there is no real way to determine the method.
It's a bit as if every new CPU and GPU announcement read something like: "Engineers release chip on silicon!", and everybody referred to them as duplicates... not because there is not new news there, but rather that there are not enough details to distinguish the stories from each other.
CP/M and PC-DOS (later MS-DOS) were both products designed to maximize the capabilities of the hardware.
And even the first 8086 was perfectly capable of running a 16bit UNIX-like OS.
Yes, but the 8086 wasn't available when even the first IBM PC was made (which did not use the 8086). And the PC did not start with IBM - they entered the race a full six years after the first PCs.
If you haven't programmed for these early systems, I'd highly recommend you reconsider. A "16bit UNIX-like OS" cannot fit into 1k, 4k (or later 64k) on a sub 1Mhz, 4 or 8 bit processor.
I had been using PCs for many many years before I ran Minix on 17 8086 semi-PC compatable systems (Cordata/Corona luggables) and had something semi-decent. But those were kick-ass cutting edge machines for their time, and were at least 6 or 7 years past the start of the PC era.
Yes, I ran Xenix, I ran P-System, I ran CP/M. These were good OSes, but they were also nothing like a "multitasking OS with a hierarchical file system and a well-designed API". That didn't happen until much later.
Too be fair, it was the introduction of the mass production IC that allowed computers to be priced to where people could afford them (as opposed to large corporations and governments). Those early CPUs were very very underpowered compared to the "real computer" counterparts and OSes like CP/M and DOS were reflections of those limitations.
Cheap, but limited.
--
Evan "My first computer was an S100 bus handbuilt. My first OS wasn't."
The title was "Solution Unsatisfactory" written in 1940, before Pearl Harbor, before the Manhattan Project, half a decade before Trinity, Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The (dirty) atomic weapon forced surrender and ended the war. The story also ended in the realization that there would and must be a cold war where stockpiles of weapons that could not be used would dominate.
I think the title of the other was 'Requiem', which posited plutonium warheads with detonation triggers stationed on a moon base (the ultimate 'high ground'). Also written in 1940.
What if it gave other groups the idea to make their own dirty bombs in the unsettled postwar years?
Heinlein wrote a short story about that -- I believe in the original Universe. It was referred to as 'dusting'. A plane would fly over an area and drop radioactive dust.
It is conceivable that he wrote it before WWII, but I'm not sure as I cannot recall the exact title, and Universe was a compilation of works he had sold to pulps.
He also wrote a hell of a moving short story about someone who single-handedly stops a nuclear war while stationed on the moon. It still gives me a chill when I read it. Powerful stuff.
Peter David did a great job with the Starfleet Academy novels, both the adult and young adult ones.
But it's his other big novel series that I'd like to see made into a movie. Star Trek: New Frontier is the Next Gen era expansion of the Federation into the recently collapsed Thollian Empire. The crew is full of aliens and most are in posts where it makes sense (a Brikar security officer). Captain Calhoun is on a mission to stabilize the region and stop the warring worlds scrambling for power; he sometimes makes Cisco look like a kitten. He carries a big stick and sometimes uses it.
Hell, as long as I'm dreaming, get Joss Whedon to direct it. He has the Roddenberry-Trekish tendency to treat plots as "everything is a metaphor writ fantastic", but he does character development better.
Considering that each time a volunteer crew dies in the current prototype orbiters they halt the entire program, having civilian causalities would probably get the entire program scrapped. Or at least put on hold for a decade.
Let me guess - you are either in an American four year college or live on the west coast of America. That's where people know Macintosh.
I live in Davis, CA, but I also know what it's like elsewhere. There are pockets where Apple is very popular, but it is still the wankel engine in a world of pistons... and most people don't even know how to open their hood.
KDE just did a massive update including all tools and reporting software. It is the largest software repository running on Subversion. You might look into what they did.
I think I have you beat. Unless you live in Davis, CA too?;)
I can totally understand your situation. I just got done listening to somebody explain that it is ethical to lie about environmental issues because otherwise people won't understand how urgent they are.
Many of the silly law lists are populated with urban legends. Several date to 50s joke books and have been reproduced as fact.
That was part one. The second part was:
You list a site that does not cite any laws. I'd be wary of that, but it doesn't invalidate the really silly ones that I'm talking about like bathtubs in trees and elephants talking on the phone.
Do you note that the two are not connected? That I was not "defending" or "attacking" anything? Do you see that I even said that the examples given are not the really silly ones that I'm talking about?
Dishes must drip dry.
Canned corn is not to be used as bait for fishing.
Both of which have no actual statute attached to them and are merely rated as to how dumb they are. These are good examples of the ones that are ULs.
Drivers must yield to pedestrians who are standing on the sidewalk.
It is illegal to place a container filled with human fecal matter on the side of any highway.
These are the two which are real, and they make sense. There has been a real problem with fecal matter on the sides of highways from truckers and other travellers dumping their 'honeypots'. They aren't really strange; not like the goofy ones involving bathtubs in trees or elephants not being allowed to talk on the telephone.
The term was not used outside of groups promoting FUD about P2P. Now it is not used outside of the media that has accepted the FUD. It's a term designed specifically to cloud a group of fairly simple issues where the consumer also has rights. You speak of "IP Theft" as if it is a legal term. It is not.
The problem he was addressing was that referring to "intellectual property" is too vague for this discussion. It is like a chemist referring to "stuff".
IP does not apply in any situation, as it is a field of widely varying laws, not a law. Too many people use "IP" as a sort of handwaving. Sort of like two people discussing what kind of algorithm was used to render hair in The Incredibles and somebody comes along and says "You guys are both wrong - they used a computer!".
Slashdot Mirror
What about the people who use Linux on a daily basis and *want* serious threats? I use KDE, and I am happy with Gnome, Windows and OSX sitting out there, coming up with nifty ideas. I also like the niche systems like Symphony. If one seems to be really better that what I'm using, I'll use that instead.
I have no allegiance to KDE and Linux, it just happens to be what I happen to think is best for me right now. I *don't* want my preferred solution to dominate and wipe everything else out, nor would I want everybody to drive my choice of vehicle. I would imagine that an E350 wouldn't fit other people's needs; probably even most people. But it fits my needs. My SO drives a VW Beetle (and uses OSX). It fits her needs.
--
Evan
You're saying at one side that early PCs were riddled with mistakes, and at the same time that Xenix was a good, full featured port. Not quite sure how you reconcile those two things.
At the core, I disagree with your assertion that the mistakes made were due to bad engineering and not to the limitations of time, expense and resources and a very different focus by the PC makers. It took a hell of a lot of corner cutting to be able to have PCs at all... I think we both see that corner cutting as having produced bad results; I just see it as having also made the early PCs possible and affordable.
I'll take a kludge in my home office over a perfect system that is theoretical or out of my price range. And that's what the early PCs were.
--
Evan
--
Evan
my point is that many of the early PC operating systems were not good OSes even though people had had 20 years of experience of how to build good OSes.
My point was not to refute. It was simply to point out that there were also harsh limitations of hardware that led to the early systems being shipped with DOSes rather than OSes. 1k or 4k of memory is simply not enough to run a "real OS"; you're limited to an application loader, which is why they went with DOSes rather than OSes.
The people at Microsoft and Apple just did not know what they were doing.
Well, in the case of Apple, DOS was specifically positioned not an operating system, but rather a Disk Operating System, simply the minimal code to access the floppy drives. There were operating systems sold to run on the Apple (dirty slow but neat), but DOS was not an OS - it was a DOS. And with a base memory originally of 4k (later upped to 64k and the ][e and //c had 128k), you couldn't run a real OS on the basic system.
PC-DOS was positioned as more of an operating system, but that's more a marketing issue, and I'll not step into that very muddy water. :)
By the time you had 64k of memory, you did have enough of a system to run a real operating system, but early PCs didn't have that in the base configuration and that much memory was terribly expensive. By the time 64k (or more) was standard, DOSes had become standard too... and in that era, your point makes sense. At that point, DOSes should have been dropped for "real OSes". But by that time arrived, many many years had gone by and entire companies and lines of PCs had come and gone. People were used to the DOS that came with their PC and there was a large base of applications written to that DOS.
--
Evan
And I'm not "slagging" them, just pointing out that there were limitations, and you can't just blithely write off the operating systems of the early PCs as being poorly written.
--
Evan
The problem is the same as fission until the discovery of neutrons and subsequent discovery of chain reactions in certain elements -- there's no apparent way to do it without putting more energy into the reaction than you get out. Einstein thought it couldn't be done until Szilard convinced him (which resulted in a few historically significant letters).
Now, these could be duplicates, if the method is the same between them. They could be old news if it is a well known fusion method. Or they could be new methods, worthy of new articles... but they are often written so vague that there is no real way to determine the method.
It's a bit as if every new CPU and GPU announcement read something like: "Engineers release chip on silicon!", and everybody referred to them as duplicates... not because there is not new news there, but rather that there are not enough details to distinguish the stories from each other.
--
Evan
And even the first 8086 was perfectly capable of running a 16bit UNIX-like OS.
Yes, but the 8086 wasn't available when even the first IBM PC was made (which did not use the 8086). And the PC did not start with IBM - they entered the race a full six years after the first PCs.
If you haven't programmed for these early systems, I'd highly recommend you reconsider. A "16bit UNIX-like OS" cannot fit into 1k, 4k (or later 64k) on a sub 1Mhz, 4 or 8 bit processor.
I had been using PCs for many many years before I ran Minix on 17 8086 semi-PC compatable systems (Cordata/Corona luggables) and had something semi-decent. But those were kick-ass cutting edge machines for their time, and were at least 6 or 7 years past the start of the PC era.
Yes, I ran Xenix, I ran P-System, I ran CP/M. These were good OSes, but they were also nothing like a "multitasking OS with a hierarchical file system and a well-designed API". That didn't happen until much later.
--
Evan
Cheap, but limited.
--
Evan "My first computer was an S100 bus handbuilt. My first OS wasn't."
I think the title of the other was 'Requiem', which posited plutonium warheads with detonation triggers stationed on a moon base (the ultimate 'high ground'). Also written in 1940.
--
Evan
Heinlein wrote a short story about that -- I believe in the original Universe. It was referred to as 'dusting'. A plane would fly over an area and drop radioactive dust.
It is conceivable that he wrote it before WWII, but I'm not sure as I cannot recall the exact title, and Universe was a compilation of works he had sold to pulps.
He also wrote a hell of a moving short story about someone who single-handedly stops a nuclear war while stationed on the moon. It still gives me a chill when I read it. Powerful stuff.
--
Evan
--
Evan
But it's his other big novel series that I'd like to see made into a movie. Star Trek: New Frontier is the Next Gen era expansion of the Federation into the recently collapsed Thollian Empire. The crew is full of aliens and most are in posts where it makes sense (a Brikar security officer). Captain Calhoun is on a mission to stabilize the region and stop the warring worlds scrambling for power; he sometimes makes Cisco look like a kitten. He carries a big stick and sometimes uses it.
Hell, as long as I'm dreaming, get Joss Whedon to direct it. He has the Roddenberry-Trekish tendency to treat plots as "everything is a metaphor writ fantastic", but he does character development better.
--
Evan
--
Evan
--
Evan
Let me guess - you are either in an American four year college or live on the west coast of America. That's where people know Macintosh.
I live in Davis, CA, but I also know what it's like elsewhere. There are pockets where Apple is very popular, but it is still the wankel engine in a world of pistons... and most people don't even know how to open their hood.
--
Evan
--
Evan
I can totally understand your situation. I just got done listening to somebody explain that it is ethical to lie about environmental issues because otherwise people won't understand how urgent they are.
--
Evan
On that site, yes, they are not cited. That is what I said. So we agree on that point.
I'll grant though, that many supposed "laws" are completely urban legend.
Which was my original point.
So we agree. You're being awful antagonistic for somebody who agrees with what I said.
--
Evan
Many of the silly law lists are populated with urban legends. Several date to 50s joke books and have been reproduced as fact.
That was part one. The second part was:
You list a site that does not cite any laws. I'd be wary of that, but it doesn't invalidate the really silly ones that I'm talking about like bathtubs in trees and elephants talking on the phone.
Do you note that the two are not connected? That I was not "defending" or "attacking" anything? Do you see that I even said that the examples given are not the really silly ones that I'm talking about?
--
Evan
--
Evan
Canned corn is not to be used as bait for fishing.
Both of which have no actual statute attached to them and are merely rated as to how dumb they are. These are good examples of the ones that are ULs.
Drivers must yield to pedestrians who are standing on the sidewalk.
It is illegal to place a container filled with human fecal matter on the side of any highway.
These are the two which are real, and they make sense. There has been a real problem with fecal matter on the sides of highways from truckers and other travellers dumping their 'honeypots'. They aren't really strange; not like the goofy ones involving bathtubs in trees or elephants not being allowed to talk on the telephone.
--
Evan
The term was not used outside of groups promoting FUD about P2P. Now it is not used outside of the media that has accepted the FUD. It's a term designed specifically to cloud a group of fairly simple issues where the consumer also has rights. You speak of "IP Theft" as if it is a legal term. It is not.
--
Evan
IP does not apply in any situation, as it is a field of widely varying laws, not a law. Too many people use "IP" as a sort of handwaving. Sort of like two people discussing what kind of algorithm was used to render hair in The Incredibles and somebody comes along and says "You guys are both wrong - they used a computer!".
--
Evan
http://localhost:8002/LeChuck/addquery?sourceid=Ko nqueror&Operation=Add&submit=Search&Timeout=5.0&Ke ywords=\{@}&Expires=15&scope=Global
Remove any spaces that Slashdot added, and go to settings:/Network/WebBrowsing/ebrowsing and add it. I suggest using tsn as the shortcut.
You can then use tsn:Good Eats style urls anywhere you want.
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Evan
Then you can just use links like tsn:sith.
--
Evan