Windows (win-doe's) n. : a 32 bit GUI shell written on top of a 16 bit operating system that was originally developed for an 8 bit personal computer with a 4 bit interrupt buss by a two bit company that can't stand one bit of competition.
Public education is a social institution, not a business. Traditional business rules do not apply to public education, hence M$ business tactics have backfired on them.
Anybody curious about the absence of Apple Computers, who once had a stronghold in education?
If the US Government has the idiocy to make this law... everybody who would bother to purchase one of these CBDTPA-compliant PCs or MP3 players, please raise their hands. Waiting... waiting... I thought so.
You can expect a BIG dropoff in PC sales (the market is already nearly saturated) leading to massive layoffs in the silicon and OEM PC industry.
Add a significant drop in sales of future Microsoft Windows releases - if PC sales fall off, then OEM licensed OSes fall off. Hell, maybe this is the punishment better suited for MS than the DoJ "settlement".
Then technology stocks get depressed in a panic selloff. Disposable income will drop from loss of stock value, and consumers will have to cut back on frivolous spending like... buying CDs, DVDs, and going to the movies.
Then the MPAA and the RIAA report a significant loss at the box office and at the music distribution channel, despite the copy protection controls designed to prevent loss of profits.
Then tinseltown suffers a glut in moviemaking and the thousands of businesses dependent on Hollywood see a drastic fall in media work, leading to more layoffs. And the major labels go through a shakeout; signed artists get dropped, recording studios see a drastic fall in work; musicians and engineers get laid off, disposable income decreases per capita.
CGI is big business in tinseltown; work decreases, demand for computer RAM drops off, the motherboard market gets glutted, and layoffs happen in the RAM and support IC industry.
With demand for studio work falling in the music industry, orders for new music gear falls, and the industry sees a shakeout with engineers and blue collar workers losing their jobs, disposable income decreases per capita... I can go on and on.
The glut in the job market and the drop in disposable income forces the unemployed to eliminate perks like cell phones, CDs, DVDs, cable or satellite TV, vacations, going to dinner & movie, and maybe internet access at worst.
The media industry should be careful what it asks for, huh?
a) Microsoft's budget for political lobbying during the 2000 election campaign was four times that of Enron,
b) During the antitrust trial from 1995 to 2000 political spending had increased from $16,000 to $6,100,000,
c) During the same period, M$ used the classic tactic of choking off air supply as they did with Netscape by increasing lobbyist retaining from one to almost all of them.
These lobbyists were assigned mundane work unrelated to M$'s interests to keep them unavailable. This is a pretty blatant harm to consumers; by retaining the lobbyists, the supply was cut off from M$ critics which made opposition to M$-friendly judicial and legislative action less effective. Justice is in danger of being tainted by the almighty buck.
I sincerely hope that is fresh in the judge's mind when she considers M$'s absurd argument of "constitutional issues".
I don't know of any C++ tool that meets your requirements. M$ Visual Studio is my least favorite development environment; way too convoluted and MFC is a pain in the ass for debugging.
Although it's an ANSI C IDE, I highly recommend National Instruments LabWindows/CVI from the people who brought us LabVIEW. LW/CVI is my preferred IDE; drag-and-drop GUI design, excellent debugging tools, a full-featured API to cover everything from event handling to SQL to advanced data analysis, excellent documentation, excellent online and phone support, excellent training seminars around the country, and portable across Windows (even 3.1), Mac, Sun/HPUX, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux. Don't overlook this product for its automated test applications, it is very capable of applications of any kind.
I used to program in C++ but wound up reverting back to ANSI C years ago, the aggravations were not worth the gains. Especially after digging deep enough into MFC code only to find the old ANSI C Windows API calls underneath all that bloat!!!
Years ago one of the April Fool's jokes involving components was known as the WOM chip, or the Write Only Memory. When I saw Write Once, I thought it was a repeat of the old joke.
The WOM chip was up there with the BD-1 Battery Discharger IC and the Darkness Emitting Diode (DED) which was initialized by applying 110VAC across the anode and cathode.
A components engineer fabricated a spec sheet for the BD-1 and submitted it to the catalog department, and it actually got published. When customers started requesting samples, the supplier got wise and requested that customers return their databooks. True Story.
...when they removed the long outdated FS/FA/ebay posts. Auction posts have no purpose two weeks past their posting date and they render the generic search engine useless; you have to use the advanced features to weed out the trash. FS posts cease to be useful after a month to a year depending on the item.
Think of the server storage space they'd gain if they deleted these posts.
Henry Juszkiewicz, CEO of Gibson, is an acknowledged scum of the industry for destroying Opcode, a popular MIDI
sequencer. Juszkiewicz was also instrumental in destroying Oberheim.
In both cases Juszkiewicz sought to wrestle the intellectual property rights at the expense of the
owners and the customers. Opcode was acquired by Gibson in the late 90s. They had a flagship product called Vision that had a large established
customer base. In the struggle for IP rights Gibson pulled development and support, effectively
abandoning their customers. Opcode and Vision have ceased to exist, yet Juszkiewicz is sitting on the
IP waiting for it to grow in value which gives you an idea how clueless he is about software.
Oberheim was a well-known respected synthesizer brand that had been acquired by Gibson in the early 90s. Their only
product during the Gibson tenure, the OBMx, was a dismal failure in the market. The OBMx was designed
by Don Buchla who shares the credit of pioneering the modern voltage
controlled synthesizer with Bob Moog. The OBMx prototypes sounded great but Don withdrew his design
team before it reached the production stage. It was completed by an inept design team with no
experience in synthesizer design. The production models sounded inferior compared to the Buchla-built
prototypes, were prone to breaking down, sold poorly, and within a couple of years Gibson pulled all
production & support and pretended that the OBMx never even existed. No schematics or service manuals
are known to exist and owners are left with no one to fix their broken units, and legal wrangling
continues with the firmware coders over IP rights.
Gibson builds very nice guitars, but I seriously question their integrity in anything software or electronics related.
But in order to achieve commercial gain (Dmitri), one has to do research (Felton). Think about that.
The RIAA waved their DMCA and threatened to sue. Felton had nothing to gain of monetary value, therefore the issue is freedom of speech.
Oh, how I'd love to see this go to that championed bastion of constitutional rights, the US Supreme Court.
Re:No more 16-bit DOS code... again?
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: 1
[Bill Gates] stated, "It's the end of the MS-DOS era," referring to the exorcism of 16-bit code from the Windows code base.
What, you mean they took away my favorite Windows repair tool "format c:"?
Re:MS-DOS doesn't deserve a fond remembrance
on
MS DOS: A Eulogy
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
And heck--and everyone forgets this--you couldn't even properly edit the command line until doskey came along.
That's not entirely true. Before DOSKEY came along, the F3 key would recall the previous command (only one, mind you) and you could edit the command. You could press F2 and a character and the previous command would recall the previous command up to the character, and then you could edit at will and press F3 to recall the rest of the command line.
Crude yes, but it was better than nothing.
My three favorite DOS commands are still more powerful than anything MS has tried to shoehorn into Windows Explorer: XCOPY, ATTRIB, and DIR/S.
In case anybody's interested, a recent issue of Poptronics Magazine had an article about SIT's and how they could be used to defeat telemarketers. Sorry, I don't recall the month, but it was quite recent...
Magnetic platters are non-volatile and do not require power for storage. When you turn the power off, the contents of magnetic platters stays there.
RAM ICs *are* volatile and they *do* require power for storage, when you turn the power off then you lose the contents of memory (FlashRAM is an exception, but has a finite life because read/write cycles degrades the memory). You need a battery to hold the RAM contents in the absence of power. You don't want to reinstall that OS, your apps, and restore your data because the battery drained too far while the power is turned off, do you?
I used to develop hardware and software for automated component testers for analog, digital, and memory components. One important spec of RAM ICs is the retention voltage. The RAM retention voltage is the minimum supply voltage at which the RAM will reliably hold its contents. This is important when backup battery cells are involved.
Do the math. A typical 3.3v 256MB RAM card may require 20mA of current at a retention voltage of 3.0v. 20mA is an arbitrary but *conservative* number. To get a RAM equivalent of a 10GB hard drive, you'd need 40 of those 256MB cards at 20mA each, therefore you'd need a battery system to supply 40 times 20mA equals 800mA at 3.0v. Most portable batteries, UPS excluded, when asked to supply even a quarter of that current demand will see their voltage drop to zero in less than an hour, and you're asking for that kind of power for *hours* while your PC is turned off and not in use.
We haven't even covered the support components yet. We're talking DRAM=Dynamic RAM which uses charged capacitors to store their contents and therefore has to be periodically refreshed or the caps will discharge and memory will lose their contents. Gotta power those support ICs too, so add their power demands to the battery.
The RAM that holds your BIOS settings on your motherboard is static RAM. Static RAM does not require refresh cycles and consumes less power, therefore they can operate on a single type 2232 battery cell the size of a US nickel. But static RAM doesn't offer near the density of dynamic RAM ICs. Static RAM has topped out at kilobit capacity per IC, compare that to dynamic RAMs' hundred-megabit capacity per IC.
The demand on a laptop battery is already enormous, they don't stand a chance with RAM HDs. You could pack a battery cell as large as a car battery into your desktop for RAM backup power but that's overkill. The technology to pack more power into a portable battery hasn't been invented yet, and that's the same achille's heel that is holding back electric cars.
Sorry to rain on your parade but there's a reason why these things haven't been implemented yet. Sure, I'd love a RAM HD; RAM access times are in the nanosecond range while HD access times are in the millisecond range. I'd love to see my OS and apps load 1000 times faster, but we have to wait for better batteries or for RAM ICs that consume less current.
If an anonymous post threatens terrorism (potential harm to a large body of people) then it's not protected. You can betcherass that the law will be on their tail.
If an anonymous poster threatens to hurt/kill you or someone you love, then it's not protected.
If an anonymous post incites people to riot, there is no first amendment protection.
The law still applied when the printing press became widespread in the 1800s. When the telegraph appeared. Telephone. Grammophone and other portable media. Radio. Television. It still applies to the internet.
However it is up to the citizen to separate fact from fiction.
That's pretty much it for exceptions to freedom of speech. Other than that, you can say anything you want. Pre-Paid Legal wanted to unmask its critics but the postings in question were protected by the first amendment. Fortunately the judge recognized the potential for retribution against the unmasked posters and the detrimental effect on speech. Trade secrets have no constitutional protection, that's why the patent office and trademark office exists. Slander/Libel doesn't apply because the postings didn't originate from a single person.
The founding fathers were well aware of the citizens' right to speak out without fear of retribution and the judge recognized that.
Tomorrow you could be involved in a tragic accident, lose your ability to work, the government and/or your employer can limit or refuse your disability benefits, and you could be forced to sell off all your belongings and join the ranks of the poor.
It can and does happen. If the public library system is dismantled, how are you gonna start over?
Ben Franklin understood the need for the less fortunate to have the tools to better themselves. He understood that the poor will always be with us and that the well-to-do can fend for themselves. If the publishers shut out the public library then the poor will have lost an all important tool to pull themselves out of the hole.
The great inventor Thomas Edison had no formal education. Where do you think he learned to bring his ideas to fruition?
Slashdot Mirror
Q: What's the definition of perfect pitch?
A: When you throw the accordian in the dumpster and it lands square on the ukulele.
Pull the plug? :)
(Husband is driving and wife is reading the road map)
Husband: How far is it to the next exit?
Wife: about two centimeters.
'Living Robot' bites man!
A year ago a fellow /.er provided this NYT logon alias:
UserID = allyourbaseare
pswd = belongtous
That's pretty easy to remember, no?
Public education is a social institution, not a business. Traditional business rules do not apply to public education, hence M$ business tactics have backfired on them.
Anybody curious about the absence of Apple Computers, who once had a stronghold in education?
So the RIAA wants a taxpayer-funded IP Police?
Fair enough; how about we repeal the "piracy tax" on blank audio tapes, VHS tapes, CDRs, etc since that doesn't seem to be doing the job.
Would that make them happy?
You can expect a BIG dropoff in PC sales (the market is already nearly saturated) leading to massive layoffs in the silicon and OEM PC industry.
Add a significant drop in sales of future Microsoft Windows releases - if PC sales fall off, then OEM licensed OSes fall off. Hell, maybe this is the punishment better suited for MS than the DoJ "settlement".
Then technology stocks get depressed in a panic selloff. Disposable income will drop from loss of stock value, and consumers will have to cut back on frivolous spending like... buying CDs, DVDs, and going to the movies.
Then the MPAA and the RIAA report a significant loss at the box office and at the music distribution channel, despite the copy protection controls designed to prevent loss of profits.
Then tinseltown suffers a glut in moviemaking and the thousands of businesses dependent on Hollywood see a drastic fall in media work, leading to more layoffs. And the major labels go through a shakeout; signed artists get dropped, recording studios see a drastic fall in work; musicians and engineers get laid off, disposable income decreases per capita.
CGI is big business in tinseltown; work decreases, demand for computer RAM drops off, the motherboard market gets glutted, and layoffs happen in the RAM and support IC industry.
With demand for studio work falling in the music industry, orders for new music gear falls, and the industry sees a shakeout with engineers and blue collar workers losing their jobs, disposable income decreases per capita... I can go on and on.
The glut in the job market and the drop in disposable income forces the unemployed to eliminate perks like cell phones, CDs, DVDs, cable or satellite TV, vacations, going to dinner & movie, and maybe internet access at worst.
The media industry should be careful what it asks for, huh?
a) Microsoft's budget for political lobbying during the 2000 election campaign was four times that of Enron,
b) During the antitrust trial from 1995 to 2000 political spending had increased from $16,000 to $6,100,000,
c) During the same period, M$ used the classic tactic of choking off air supply as they did with Netscape by increasing lobbyist retaining from one to almost all of them.
These lobbyists were assigned mundane work unrelated to M$'s interests to keep them unavailable. This is a pretty blatant harm to consumers; by retaining the lobbyists, the supply was cut off from M$ critics which made opposition to M$-friendly judicial and legislative action less effective. Justice is in danger of being tainted by the almighty buck.
I sincerely hope that is fresh in the judge's mind when she considers M$'s absurd argument of "constitutional issues".
Although it's an ANSI C IDE, I highly recommend National Instruments LabWindows/CVI from the people who brought us LabVIEW. LW/CVI is my preferred IDE; drag-and-drop GUI design, excellent debugging tools, a full-featured API to cover everything from event handling to SQL to advanced data analysis, excellent documentation, excellent online and phone support, excellent training seminars around the country, and portable across Windows (even 3.1), Mac, Sun/HPUX, Sun Solaris, HP-UX, and Linux. Don't overlook this product for its automated test applications, it is very capable of applications of any kind.
I used to program in C++ but wound up reverting back to ANSI C years ago, the aggravations were not worth the gains. Especially after digging deep enough into MFC code only to find the old ANSI C Windows API calls underneath all that bloat!!!
The WOM chip was up there with the BD-1 Battery Discharger IC and the Darkness Emitting Diode (DED) which was initialized by applying 110VAC across the anode and cathode.
A components engineer fabricated a spec sheet for the BD-1 and submitted it to the catalog department, and it actually got published. When customers started requesting samples, the supplier got wise and requested that customers return their databooks. True Story.
Made me look twice :)
Think of the server storage space they'd gain if they deleted these posts.
In both cases Juszkiewicz sought to wrestle the intellectual property rights at the expense of the owners and the customers. Opcode was acquired by Gibson in the late 90s. They had a flagship product called Vision that had a large established customer base. In the struggle for IP rights Gibson pulled development and support, effectively abandoning their customers. Opcode and Vision have ceased to exist, yet Juszkiewicz is sitting on the IP waiting for it to grow in value which gives you an idea how clueless he is about software.
Oberheim was a well-known respected synthesizer brand that had been acquired by Gibson in the early 90s. Their only product during the Gibson tenure, the OBMx, was a dismal failure in the market. The OBMx was designed by Don Buchla who shares the credit of pioneering the modern voltage controlled synthesizer with Bob Moog. The OBMx prototypes sounded great but Don withdrew his design team before it reached the production stage. It was completed by an inept design team with no experience in synthesizer design. The production models sounded inferior compared to the Buchla-built prototypes, were prone to breaking down, sold poorly, and within a couple of years Gibson pulled all production & support and pretended that the OBMx never even existed. No schematics or service manuals are known to exist and owners are left with no one to fix their broken units, and legal wrangling continues with the firmware coders over IP rights.
Gibson builds very nice guitars, but I seriously question their integrity in anything software or electronics related.
But in order to achieve commercial gain (Dmitri), one has to do research (Felton). Think about that.
The RIAA waved their DMCA and threatened to sue. Felton had nothing to gain of monetary value, therefore the issue is freedom of speech.
Oh, how I'd love to see this go to that championed bastion of constitutional rights, the US Supreme Court.
What, you mean they took away my favorite Windows repair tool "format c:"?
That's not entirely true. Before DOSKEY came along, the F3 key would recall the previous command (only one, mind you) and you could edit the command. You could press F2 and a character and the previous command would recall the previous command up to the character, and then you could edit at will and press F3 to recall the rest of the command line.
Crude yes, but it was better than nothing.
My three favorite DOS commands are still more powerful than anything MS has tried to shoehorn into Windows Explorer: XCOPY, ATTRIB, and DIR/S.
May 2001.
Magnetic platters are non-volatile and do not require power for storage. When you turn the power off, the contents of magnetic platters stays there.
RAM ICs *are* volatile and they *do* require power for storage, when you turn the power off then you lose the contents of memory (FlashRAM is an exception, but has a finite life because read/write cycles degrades the memory). You need a battery to hold the RAM contents in the absence of power. You don't want to reinstall that OS, your apps, and restore your data because the battery drained too far while the power is turned off, do you?
I used to develop hardware and software for automated component testers for analog, digital, and memory components. One important spec of RAM ICs is the retention voltage. The RAM retention voltage is the minimum supply voltage at which the RAM will reliably hold its contents. This is important when backup battery cells are involved.
Do the math. A typical 3.3v 256MB RAM card may require 20mA of current at a retention voltage of 3.0v. 20mA is an arbitrary but *conservative* number. To get a RAM equivalent of a 10GB hard drive, you'd need 40 of those 256MB cards at 20mA each, therefore you'd need a battery system to supply 40 times 20mA equals 800mA at 3.0v. Most portable batteries, UPS excluded, when asked to supply even a quarter of that current demand will see their voltage drop to zero in less than an hour, and you're asking for that kind of power for *hours* while your PC is turned off and not in use.
We haven't even covered the support components yet. We're talking DRAM=Dynamic RAM which uses charged capacitors to store their contents and therefore has to be periodically refreshed or the caps will discharge and memory will lose their contents. Gotta power those support ICs too, so add their power demands to the battery.
The RAM that holds your BIOS settings on your motherboard is static RAM. Static RAM does not require refresh cycles and consumes less power, therefore they can operate on a single type 2232 battery cell the size of a US nickel. But static RAM doesn't offer near the density of dynamic RAM ICs. Static RAM has topped out at kilobit capacity per IC, compare that to dynamic RAMs' hundred-megabit capacity per IC.
The demand on a laptop battery is already enormous, they don't stand a chance with RAM HDs. You could pack a battery cell as large as a car battery into your desktop for RAM backup power but that's overkill. The technology to pack more power into a portable battery hasn't been invented yet, and that's the same achille's heel that is holding back electric cars.
Sorry to rain on your parade but there's a reason why these things haven't been implemented yet. Sure, I'd love a RAM HD; RAM access times are in the nanosecond range while HD access times are in the millisecond range. I'd love to see my OS and apps load 1000 times faster, but we have to wait for better batteries or for RAM ICs that consume less current.
Well this means that every online yellow/white pages directory is now in violation of the DMCA.
And while we're at it, we'll have to dispose of our phonebooks since they are now vulnerable to lawsuits of patent infringement.
I wouldn't be surprised if someone were to patent IP addresses.
"Beam me up Scotty, there's no quality entertainment down here"
Translation:
My dog has no nose.
How does he smell?
Awful!
...when they pry it from my cold dead fingers.
Freedom of speech is protected, with exceptions.
If an anonymous post threatens terrorism (potential harm to a large body of people) then it's not protected. You can betcherass that the law will be on their tail.
If an anonymous poster threatens to hurt/kill you or someone you love, then it's not protected.
If an anonymous post incites people to riot, there is no first amendment protection.
The law still applied when the printing press became widespread in the 1800s. When the telegraph appeared. Telephone. Grammophone and other portable media. Radio. Television. It still applies to the internet.
However it is up to the citizen to separate fact from fiction.
That's pretty much it for exceptions to freedom of speech. Other than that, you can say anything you want. Pre-Paid Legal wanted to unmask its critics but the postings in question were protected by the first amendment. Fortunately the judge recognized the potential for retribution against the unmasked posters and the detrimental effect on speech. Trade secrets have no constitutional protection, that's why the patent office and trademark office exists. Slander/Libel doesn't apply because the postings didn't originate from a single person.
The founding fathers were well aware of the citizens' right to speak out without fear of retribution and the judge recognized that.
Score one for citizen Joe and the Constitution.
Tomorrow you could be involved in a tragic accident, lose your ability to work, the government and/or your employer can limit or refuse your disability benefits, and you could be forced to sell off all your belongings and join the ranks of the poor.
It can and does happen. If the public library system is dismantled, how are you gonna start over?
Ben Franklin understood the need for the less fortunate to have the tools to better themselves. He understood that the poor will always be with us and that the well-to-do can fend for themselves. If the publishers shut out the public library then the poor will have lost an all important tool to pull themselves out of the hole.
The great inventor Thomas Edison had no formal education. Where do you think he learned to bring his ideas to fruition?