this is so true that some late PC-XTs here in brasil had 704 kB of ram availlable to DOS. after loading up MS-DOS you still had some 640-650 kB of _free_ memory. this was made by reclaiming some memory reserved for graphics that wasn't neccessary.
microsoft created OS/2 v1 for IBM when the big blue released the first PC-AT based around intel's 80286 (they still had the 80 prefix at that time). the objective was to take advantage of 286's protected mode, which allowed the OS to use a flat 16 MB memory space and multitasking capabilities.
it was a fiasco for several reasons. one of them was the 286 could switch from "real mode" (in this mode it was little more than a glorified 8086) to "protected mode" (with all the new features), but there was no way to switch back to real mode. the result was that to run MS-DOS (which required "real mode") they needed some ugly hacks, and the compatibility was far from perfect, specially for things like lotus 1-2-3.
when they added a GUI, things became even worse. if you tried to run a real-mode DOS app in full (text) screen, it was almost impossible to switch back and forth between graphical an text mode. the reason was the EGA graphics cards. those older cards (CGA, Hercules, EGA, etc.) had write-only registers. this meant that the OS had to keep a table in main memory with a copy of the registers, otherwise it was impossible to know the state of the graphics card. since DOS apps had direct access to card's registers, it was impossible for OS/2 to know in wich state DOS programs left the graphics card, making switching modes impossible.
the GUI was called "desktop manager" and looks pretty much like windows 3.0's. here's some screenshots
but they needed a mac ROM to operate. which means having access to one to copy the ROM or downloading one. the emulator itself might not be ilegal per se, but distributing the macs ROM certainly was.
except that a 50 year old car is still street legal if it's kept in pristine conditions. same thing for old airplanes or boats or guns. being "streetworthy" or "airworthy" or "*worthy" has more relation with good maintenance than age per se.
i still see an ocasional 50's era car in the streets, in air shows is not unusual to see 30, 40 years old airplanes still flying. on of my aunts recently divorced an italian guy whose parents live in an 800 year old house. and it's still legal to live in such houses in itally.
making an old tech ilegal to own just because it's old is an incredibly stupid reason to do it. i can understand making an old, 1950s era, nuclear reactor ilegal to operate, since no matter how good the maintenance is, an old reactor os a serious threat, but computers ? cars ? boats ? no way.
i have familiar with opie running on my ipaq 6500, and i'm too used to it to change to GPE. my question is, as soon as this is mature enough for "production" use, can i run opie instead ?
where did you get this stupid idea that amazon forest is beein cut to create arable land ?
amazon is beein deforested for the wood and to create pastures, everyone here in brasil knows that amazon soil is incapable of sustaining any decent crop.
most of our crops comes from southeast, west and south regions. even the semi-arid north-east produces more than the amazon region.
what do you mean you can't heat water quickly with resistences ???
my grandmother's home had an on-demand resistence based heater on the kitchen since the 1970's... small electric showers that heat water on-demand are ubiquitous here in brasil, and has been like that since i remember.
i fail to see then what's the big deal about this microwave heater.
this melanie wyne is the classical exemple of what anrchists and comunists like to call "capitalist pig"...
she takes something perfectly innocent and beneficial (a government demanding open file formats), equals it to a criminal activity (large scale piracy. and i mean the industrial level piracy we see in chinese sweatshops, not P2P) and distorts completly another fact (the eminent domain issue. a clear case of a corrupt government selling itself to real estate corporations) to paint a completelly wrong picture of the whole IP situation.
let me explain.
Massachusetts government IS NOT stealing IP from anyone, is not overcharging anyone, is not opressing the people or the corporations, it's only doing what it's suposed to do, protecting the people's right to access data in the future by adopting well documented file formats. if she feels microsoft was wronged here, is microsoft's own fault. they don't have to pay royalties to implement the OASIS file formats in their products.
it's not, as she says, "confiscatory government policy (...) used to even the score". it'd be confiscatory policy if Mass. had forced MS to open source MS Office at gun point, and this is not the case.
fortunatelly, i live in a country where being socialist (or in my case, anarchist) is not seen as a deadly sin, so i don't have to cope with trolls like melanie.
you want to know the most _popular_ or the best _selling_ toy ???
completly different things.
any poor south american or african kid can cut a hollow straw from a plant, dissolve a small bar of soap (which can be home made too) in water and start blowing some bubbles. i used to do that with papaya straws when i was little. since those don't count in sales charts, the difference between "popular" and "best selling" can be huge.
when people stop caring for their freedoms, handle more and more power to government/church/corporations without receiving it back, in other words, when people get tired of thinking for themselves, this is the beggining of a dark age.
nobody, except a few, cares anymore if the reason for a war is the greed of a few corporations and their puppet-president, nobody cares if the consolidation of large corporations would hurt them by allowing price fixing and monopolistic pratices, nobody seem to care that a cartel of media companies are keeping them oblivion to all those things happening.
soon we'll see (well, actually we won't "see", per se) content being blocked at router level. anything that speaks against the interests of the corporations giving a "connection reset by peer"...
the investigation concluded he was using the barometric altimeter instead of the radio altimeter to measure altitude. and it apears the device wasn't calibrated correctly deu to manufacturing errors (http://www.airdisaster.com/investigations/af296/a f296.shtml#oeb)
he also had an engine stall when he tried to ramp the power up. due to the long delays (again, manufacturing errors) in delivering power at low altitude, the pilot thought it was a short circuit in the controls, so he pulled the lever all the way down, then up. this caused one of the engines to stall. this conclusion came after survivors said they heard two loud bangs coming from one ot he engines, also, the trees chopped by the wings were chopped lower at one side of the plane, indicating that one of the engines was producing more power than the other.
the kind of fraternal war that killed pretty much all of the comercial unices...
how many of them are still around ? HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, SCO...
comercial distros should focus in bringing windows users on board the FOSS wagon, not trying to steal users from each other. in this regard KDE is a much better choice, mostly because is the one that looks and feels more like windows.
techies can adapt to diferent paradigms much easilly than regular users, and what regular users know is windows. at the begining, give them something almost identical to what they're used to, then move them gradually to something better. mind-twisting changes can be somewhat traumatic, and will probably scare new users enough so they return to the place they feel more confortable: Billy G's hands.
they keep solaris' internal name, reported by uname -a, as "sunOS" for the same reason DEC/compaq/HP keeps the internal name of TRU64 as "OSF1". compatibility with older, unmantained apps and scripts.
this information exists in several Tru64 documents. since many multi-plataform apps/scripts rely on the information from uname -a to identify the OS and adjust itself, changing the internal name would break compatibility with several important 3rd party stuff, which means users would have to spend lots of $$$ to upgrade apps that would otherwise work perfectly in the new OS had it kept the internal name unchanged.
the deal is for tech support, migration, development of custom apps...
even if they go debian or slack or fedora... they'll still have to pay for tech support.
this "distro X is free, so is more bang for the buck" speech is what scares companies away from migrating to open plataforms. the ones who fell for this got severelly burned once they saw the cost of the support.
if you want to convince someone to migrate, be honest. say "the software is free, but related costs exists and they're as high as microsoft's one. what you really get for your cash is the freedom to choose vendor, the assurance that your data will still be available in 20 years, etc., etc., etc.."
put the students and the faculty working in the distro. create tech support incubator companies.
gives a boost to the local industry, trains new ppl, brings new ideas, tailor the software according to local needs/culture, keeps the money in the country...
Slashdot Mirror
time to wake up then.
japan is testing 4G cellphones wich deliver... gigabit rates static and fast ethernet (100 Mbps) rates in movement.
Of course, this doesn't means that this was written to critize other desktops neither it means you should start Yet Another Gnome vs KDE flamewar...
too late.
this is so true that some late PC-XTs here in brasil had 704 kB of ram availlable to DOS. after loading up MS-DOS you still had some 640-650 kB of _free_ memory. this was made by reclaiming some memory reserved for graphics that wasn't neccessary.
here in brasil you _can not_ defend yourself. in any case involving more than 20x the national minimun wage, the law mandates a lawyer.
less than 20x the minimum wage you can settle in the small claims court, but in such case neither party is entitled to a lawyer.
microsoft created OS/2 v1 for IBM when the big blue released the first PC-AT based around intel's 80286 (they still had the 80 prefix at that time). the objective was to take advantage of 286's protected mode, which allowed the OS to use a flat 16 MB memory space and multitasking capabilities.
it was a fiasco for several reasons. one of them was the 286 could switch from "real mode" (in this mode it was little more than a glorified 8086) to "protected mode" (with all the new features), but there was no way to switch back to real mode. the result was that to run MS-DOS (which required "real mode") they needed some ugly hacks, and the compatibility was far from perfect, specially for things like lotus 1-2-3.
when they added a GUI, things became even worse. if you tried to run a real-mode DOS app in full (text) screen, it was almost impossible to switch back and forth between graphical an text mode. the reason was the EGA graphics cards. those older cards (CGA, Hercules, EGA, etc.) had write-only registers. this meant that the OS had to keep a table in main memory with a copy of the registers, otherwise it was impossible to know the state of the graphics card. since DOS apps had direct access to card's registers, it was impossible for OS/2 to know in wich state DOS programs left the graphics card, making switching modes impossible.
the GUI was called "desktop manager" and looks pretty much like windows 3.0's. here's some screenshots
but they needed a mac ROM to operate. which means having access to one to copy the ROM or downloading one. the emulator itself might not be ilegal per se, but distributing the macs ROM certainly was.
except that a 50 year old car is still street legal if it's kept in pristine conditions. same thing for old airplanes or boats or guns. being "streetworthy" or "airworthy" or "*worthy" has more relation with good maintenance than age per se.
i still see an ocasional 50's era car in the streets, in air shows is not unusual to see 30, 40 years old airplanes still flying. on of my aunts recently divorced an italian guy whose parents live in an 800 year old house. and it's still legal to live in such houses in itally.
making an old tech ilegal to own just because it's old is an incredibly stupid reason to do it. i can understand making an old, 1950s era, nuclear reactor ilegal to operate, since no matter how good the maintenance is, an old reactor os a serious threat, but computers ? cars ? boats ? no way.
i have familiar with opie running on my ipaq 6500, and i'm too used to it to change to GPE. my question is, as soon as this is mature enough for "production" use, can i run opie instead ?
where did you get this stupid idea that amazon forest is beein cut to create arable land ?
amazon is beein deforested for the wood and to create pastures, everyone here in brasil knows that amazon soil is incapable of sustaining any decent crop.
most of our crops comes from southeast, west and south regions. even the semi-arid north-east produces more than the amazon region.
in 1992 i saw a demonstration of air drums running on an amiga with a camera and a frame grabber...
as usual, it took a decade for peecees to match the fabulous amiga of lore
forgot blair witch project, it costed about 35 thousand and neted more than 200 million...
what do you mean you can't heat water quickly with resistences ???
my grandmother's home had an on-demand resistence based heater on the kitchen since the 1970's... small electric showers that heat water on-demand are ubiquitous here in brasil, and has been like that since i remember.
i fail to see then what's the big deal about this microwave heater.
this melanie wyne is the classical exemple of what anrchists and comunists like to call "capitalist pig"...
she takes something perfectly innocent and beneficial (a government demanding open file formats), equals it to a criminal activity (large scale piracy. and i mean the industrial level piracy we see in chinese sweatshops, not P2P) and distorts completly another fact (the eminent domain issue. a clear case of a corrupt government selling itself to real estate corporations) to paint a completelly wrong picture of the whole IP situation.
let me explain.
Massachusetts government IS NOT stealing IP from anyone, is not overcharging anyone, is not opressing the people or the corporations, it's only doing what it's suposed to do, protecting the people's right to access data in the future by adopting well documented file formats. if she feels microsoft was wronged here, is microsoft's own fault. they don't have to pay royalties to implement the OASIS file formats in their products.
it's not, as she says, "confiscatory government policy (...) used to even the score". it'd be confiscatory policy if Mass. had forced MS to open source MS Office at gun point, and this is not the case.
fortunatelly, i live in a country where being socialist (or in my case, anarchist) is not seen as a deadly sin, so i don't have to cope with trolls like melanie.
you want to know the most _popular_ or the best _selling_ toy ???
completly different things.
any poor south american or african kid can cut a hollow straw from a plant, dissolve a small bar of soap (which can be home made too) in water and start blowing some bubbles. i used to do that with papaya straws when i was little. since those don't count in sales charts, the difference between "popular" and "best selling" can be huge.
we are certainly entering one.
when people stop caring for their freedoms, handle more and more power to government/church/corporations without receiving it back, in other words, when people get tired of thinking for themselves, this is the beggining of a dark age.
nobody, except a few, cares anymore if the reason for a war is the greed of a few corporations and their puppet-president, nobody cares if the consolidation of large corporations would hurt them by allowing price fixing and monopolistic pratices, nobody seem to care that a cartel of media companies are keeping them oblivion to all those things happening.
soon we'll see (well, actually we won't "see", per se) content being blocked at router level. anything that speaks against the interests of the corporations giving a "connection reset by peer"...
it's scary what the future holds...
they only sell 2,749,999 consoles ?
wil it be considered a failure ?
no it's not.
/. eeeevil is so great it can take coralcache down too...
the
the investigation concluded he was using the barometric altimeter instead of the radio altimeter to measure altitude. and it apears the device wasn't calibrated correctly deu to manufacturing errors (http://www.airdisaster.com/investigations/af296/a f296.shtml#oeb)
he also had an engine stall when he tried to ramp the power up. due to the long delays (again, manufacturing errors) in delivering power at low altitude, the pilot thought it was a short circuit in the controls, so he pulled the lever all the way down, then up. this caused one of the engines to stall. this conclusion came after survivors said they heard two loud bangs coming from one ot he engines, also, the trees chopped by the wings were chopped lower at one side of the plane, indicating that one of the engines was producing more power than the other.
the kind of fraternal war that killed pretty much all of the comercial unices...
how many of them are still around ? HP-UX, AIX, Solaris, SCO...
comercial distros should focus in bringing windows users on board the FOSS wagon, not trying to steal users from each other. in this regard KDE is a much better choice, mostly because is the one that looks and feels more like windows.
techies can adapt to diferent paradigms much easilly than regular users, and what regular users know is windows. at the begining, give them something almost identical to what they're used to, then move them gradually to something better. mind-twisting changes can be somewhat traumatic, and will probably scare new users enough so they return to the place they feel more confortable: Billy G's hands.
this means uncle sam will make export of sony BMG audio CDs ilegal as a tool for hiding information ?
i'm more concerned about keeping my booze cool than hiding bodies. the bodies can be dissolved in caustic soda and flushed down the toilet
they keep solaris' internal name, reported by uname -a, as "sunOS" for the same reason DEC/compaq/HP keeps the internal name of TRU64 as "OSF1". compatibility with older, unmantained apps and scripts.
this information exists in several Tru64 documents. since many multi-plataform apps/scripts rely on the information from uname -a to identify the OS and adjust itself, changing the internal name would break compatibility with several important 3rd party stuff, which means users would have to spend lots of $$$ to upgrade apps that would otherwise work perfectly in the new OS had it kept the internal name unchanged.
what's the alternative ? crucial government tax software written by microsoft ???
the distro costs _NOTHING_, zero, zip, nada...
the deal is for tech support, migration, development of custom apps...
even if they go debian or slack or fedora... they'll still have to pay for tech support.
this "distro X is free, so is more bang for the buck" speech is what scares companies away from migrating to open plataforms. the ones who fell for this got severelly burned once they saw the cost of the support.
if you want to convince someone to migrate, be honest. say "the software is free, but related costs exists and they're as high as microsoft's one. what you really get for your cash is the freedom to choose vendor, the assurance that your data will still be available in 20 years, etc., etc., etc.."
that's what public universities are for.
put the students and the faculty working in the distro. create tech support incubator companies.
gives a boost to the local industry, trains new ppl, brings new ideas, tailor the software according to local needs/culture, keeps the money in the country...