It's been a *long* time since I wrote the program in question, and I've forgotten the details. (This was ten or so jobs ago, and I've long since lost the source code.)
But I wrote a printer TSR back in 1981 or thereabouts that ran (only) on MS-DOS 1.0 that was a TSR (although people didn't call it that then) and did disk access (to load custom fonts) when it encountered certain escape codes in the print stream.
I do recall that I had to intercept a truly amazing number of interrupts in order to make it work, including the calls to set & get the MS-DOS DTA (so that I could reset the DTA when I needed to access the floppy & put it back when I was done).
I'm pretty sure that I didn't use the chain program feature, because it would have used too much memory to load another copy of command.com.
Actually, WordStar, if I recall correctly, wasn't ported to the IBM until 1983 or thereabouts; the word processor that I had in mind was John Draper's EasyWriter (I think) - it did not use MS-DOS, but ran on the bare metal (actually, I think it used the BIOS extensively, but I could be mistaken about that) and used its own floppy format.
Once MS-DOS (and the IBM) gained some traction, EasyWriter disappeared into the mists of history.
MS-DOS 2.0 and above had a memory allocator. MS-DOS 1.0 didn't. It made writing TSR programs (particularly TSRs that did disk access) rather interesting.
As someone who was actually around for MS-DOS 1.0, it wasn't at all clear for 2-3 years that:
(a) The IBM PC would be a big seller, or that (b) MS-DOS (as opposed to, say, CP/M 86, UCSD Pascal, or bare-metal programming) would be the winning programming environment.
The best-selling IBM PC word processor for the first couple of years had no OS at all - it ran on the bare metal.
Get it right. IBM chopped 384K off the top. There were several other manufacturers (Victor, Zenith, Tandy) who had MS-DOS implementations with 900K usable memory.
Microsoft didn't spec the IBM PC, and IBM didn't spec MS-DOS.
Furthermore, since MS-DOS didn't provide a memory allocator, it's stupid to say that MS-DOS can't address non-contiguous memory.
hell even a new file system was involved so most people cant even access their old files.
What are you smoking, and can I get some?
XP runs on FAT32 as well as NTFS; it also has a filesystem conversion program to (transparently) convert FAT32 (or FAT16, I suppose, but I don't know anyone who still uses it).
I've upgraded a half-dozen Win98 systems to XP, and every last one of them can access their old files.
Uh, I remember the days before Microsoft, when software ran on 37 completely incompatible platforms. Hell, on CP/M, most of the time you couldn't even exchange _floppies_, because every two-bit vendor had some half-assed way of formatting them. (Let's see - 10 hard sectors, 16 hard sectors, aleph-null variants of soft-sectors....)
If BillG hadn't happened, we would (at best) still be fighting the Unix Wars.
In order to open any door, you have to remember your 17-character (mixed case with at least 3 numbers and two symbols) password; for security's sake, of course, the passwords are different for each door.
Instead of lights that come on, you have sparks flying from the bare wires. Insulation will be added in Linux House 0.18.
Your mail gets read, but it sounds like Don Ho after a couple of pan-galactic gargleblasters. You still have 137 messages about penis enlargers, because the spam filter craps out with some unintelligible error message when you try to turn it on.
When you run a chicken pot pie under the barcode reader, the kernel faults and your lights go out.
You can get lots of media for free, but all you can get are garage bands. Lots and lots of bad garage bands. Oh yeah, and the Star Wars Kid.
Your house still listens to you - it just listens for swear words directed at Supreme Leader Richard Stallman and Adjutant Diety Linus Torvalds.
Those who take the names of the Supreme Leader in vain are chained to a teletype and forced to use lynx to surf the web while watching Revolution OS 24 hours a day.
Oh, please. Norton, McAfee, etc, will survive by doing things that Microsoft does not - better user interfaces, etc.
This is another damned if you do and damned if you don't scenarios for Microsoft.
For that matter, it's not obvious that Microsoft will create an actual antivirus scanner for end users - it could well end up 'under the covers' as a filter driver on top of the file system.
In this scenario, Norton, Mcafee, etc, would provide databases & user interface drivers to interface to the filter.
Or, I suppose, you could have installed the Word 6 reader that comes with Word 95 (and all subsequent versions). In fact, if I recall correctly, the Word 6 reader comes with every Microsoft product that edits formatted text (works, publisher, etc.).
Nah. God forbid Linux users should actually learn something.
Re:Happen to own a copy of the book...
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Do these government thinktanks that develop the cancer drugs, etc., get the drugs approved? I don't think so. It takes $897 million to get a drug completely through the FDA approval process. Only 21% of drugs submitted to FDA approval make it all the way through.
The people need to realize that the drug approval process pretty much sets the base price of the drug.
For an economics major, you don't know a heck of a lot about your subject, do you?
The interesting thing to me is that according to theoretical analysis, the simplex method ought to have exponential complexity in the worst case. (Hence, all the fuss about Karmakar's algorithm, which has provably polynomial complexity.) But for almost all problems, the simplex method actually has polynomial complexity. What the researchers have discovered is why simplex runs as well as it does.
Unlikely. Microsoft doesn't provide any (documented) hooks into Outlook Express except Simple MAPI, which isn't quite sophisticated enough to do a nice interface. (You can't get new mail notifications, you can't move messages between folders, and if you delete a message, it's gone forever. Also, scanning large inboxes with Simple MAPI is really slow.)
So all these girls went out and got fantastic brand new computers preloaded with XP Home and couldn't connect to their home directories or use the Internet.
Well, I hate to tell you, I do this every day. So, it's obviously possible. I never claimed it was the world's easiest solution. Personally, I find mapped drives to be a pain in the ass, but, even with mapped drives, you only have to log in once you use the drives.
Second, you obviously haven't even bothered learning item one about any version of Office, since two minute's googling would tell you that yes, the converters are fully compatible with all international versions. The converters use RTF as an intermediate format. So, if Works has an Arabic version (which I doubt, incidentally), you should be able to save your works document as Word2K and open it up in Word2K (assuming that you have the appropriate fonts - arabic fonts aren't standard with english Word).
Since you've obviously got this massive hard-on hatefest for Microsoft going, I doubt that anything I say further will change your opinion. But, for the record, I don't believe that MS is perfect; I just believe that they're better than Linux.
So let me get this straight. When Microsoft includes some feature that you don't need, it's bloatware, but when they factor their product line, it's 'scary'. Make up your mind, dude.
And Microsoft has *full* compatibility across Office versions. You can download converters (that run on old versions of Office) to load and save files in the new version of Office.
As for XP Home being unable to connect to a domain: Oddly enough, I'm running XP Home right now, and I can access domain resources at will. I have to type my domain username & password for each server, but I get access to them. My machine isn't *part* of the domain, and I can't *log into* the domain (which is why I have to type the username/password combo), but I can certainly access the resources.
How hard is it to click on a dropdown box? How hard is it to select 'save as RTF'? It's no harder than selecting 'save as XML'. And, Slashdot FUD aside, all office versions will save/load XML documents using the office schema. Home users aren't going to be editing Docbook XML, by and large.
I still think that David Brin has it right - personal data will get collected, collated, etc; what's important is that you be able to see what's being done with your data, and to make sure that everyone gets the same treatment - no exceptions for corporations, governments, politicians, etc.
Development tools are better on Linux? Obviously you've never used Visual Studio for any length of time. GDB/Insight is such a pain in the ass that I can't imagine anybody using it for any length of time.
Hmm. Maybe that's why all the linux devs say that they use printf() for debugging....
Where are the conditional breakpoints? Where are the data breakpoints? Where are the variable inspectors?
On VS 2002/2003, you've even got decent interlanguage and inter-host debugging. Step from ASP to VB to C++.
And Microsoft makes uplevel converters for old versions of Word & Works, too. If you go to the Office download center, you will find Word 2000/2002 converters for all Microsoft products. Since Microsoft uses the same converter format for all their word processing programs, the same converter will work in Works, Word 97, Word 95, Publisher, and probably a few more that I've forgotten. Oh yeah, and they're free. You don't need to update anything, just do a little research. You know, like you're supposed to do as a good little Linux user.
As far as international versions go, as far as I know, any version of Word after Word 97 (I think - could have been as early as Word 95, but probably not Word 6) is exactly the same for all international versions except for one DLL that contains the international resources. Can't speak for Works; didn't work on it. So if you've got Word 2K, you should be good to go.
uh, did you try view/full screen and the various WP options under Tools/Options/General? Word 97/98 had a ton of funky options (mostly under tools options) that tried to make it more comfortable for WordPerfect users. Word 2K seems to have removed some of them - I seem to recall a monospace mode in Word 97, but can't find the options flag in Word 2000.
Then I would suggest that you get a better floating-point to decimal conversion routine. Guy Steele, if I recall correctly, wrote a couple of papers on how to do bit-accurate floating-point to decimal & decimal to floating-point conversion routines. I'm sure that the glibc team would appreciate your contribution.
Jack Williamson had a much better reply to Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics in his Humanoids stories (With Folded Hands, and so forth). The problem, as Williamson saw it, is that the first law (in particular, 'through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm') effectively requires robots to remove all objects that could conceivably cause a human being to come to harm. Hence, no skydiving, no driving (you could crash), no butter knives (you could slip and cut an artery). In short, humanity ends up stuffed into individualized padded cells, served gruel in paper bowls. It was very depressing.
NT 3.51 did not have an OS/2 2.x subsystem. It had an OS/2 1.x subsystem. And Microsoft abandoned MIPS, PPC, and the other architectures because they didn't sell. I heard that the sales of all versions of PPC NT numbered (at most) in the low hundreds, and MIPS sales was in the low thousands. Microsoft wasn't in the mood to expend the effort to support platforms that couldn't carry their weight.
It's hard to direct tax breaks at the low end of the economy, since hardly anybody at the low end of the income distribution actually pays income tax to begin with (incomes less than $30K pay 5.8% of all income tax - see here for more details).
The upper 10% of the income bracket pays 50% of all income taxes (same source). Maybe those who actually pay taxes might appreciate it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been a *long* time since I wrote the program in question, and I've forgotten the details. (This was ten or so jobs ago, and I've long since lost the source code.)
But I wrote a printer TSR back in 1981 or thereabouts that ran (only) on MS-DOS 1.0 that was a TSR (although people didn't call it that then) and did disk access (to load custom fonts) when it encountered certain escape codes in the print stream.
I do recall that I had to intercept a truly amazing number of interrupts in order to make it work, including the calls to set & get the MS-DOS DTA (so that I could reset the DTA when I needed to access the floppy & put it back when I was done).
I'm pretty sure that I didn't use the chain program feature, because it would have used too much memory to load another copy of command.com.
Actually, WordStar, if I recall correctly, wasn't ported to the IBM until 1983 or thereabouts; the word processor that I had in mind was John Draper's EasyWriter (I think) - it did not use MS-DOS, but ran on the bare metal (actually, I think it used the BIOS extensively, but I could be mistaken about that) and used its own floppy format.
Once MS-DOS (and the IBM) gained some traction, EasyWriter disappeared into the mists of history.
MS-DOS 2.0 and above had a memory allocator. MS-DOS 1.0 didn't. It made writing TSR programs (particularly TSRs that did disk access) rather interesting.
As someone who was actually around for MS-DOS 1.0, it wasn't at all clear for 2-3 years that:
(a) The IBM PC would be a big seller, or that
(b) MS-DOS (as opposed to, say, CP/M 86, UCSD Pascal, or bare-metal programming) would be the winning programming environment.
The best-selling IBM PC word processor for the first couple of years had no OS at all - it ran on the bare metal.
Get it right. IBM chopped 384K off the top. There were several other manufacturers (Victor, Zenith, Tandy) who had MS-DOS implementations with 900K usable memory.
Microsoft didn't spec the IBM PC, and IBM didn't spec MS-DOS.
Furthermore, since MS-DOS didn't provide a memory allocator, it's stupid to say that MS-DOS can't address non-contiguous memory.
hell even a new file system was involved so most people cant even access their old files.
What are you smoking, and can I get some?
XP runs on FAT32 as well as NTFS; it also has a filesystem conversion program to (transparently) convert FAT32 (or FAT16, I suppose, but I don't know anyone who still uses it).
I've upgraded a half-dozen Win98 systems to XP, and every last one of them can access their old files.
Right. Just like Team OS/2, the Amigoids, Linux Freaks, Mac lovers, RPN vs algebraic calculators, etc, etc., etc.
Actually, I've noticed a lot less religious enthusiasm amongst Windows users than almost any other OS.
Uh, I remember the days before Microsoft, when software ran on 37 completely incompatible platforms. Hell, on CP/M, most of the time you couldn't even exchange _floppies_, because every two-bit vendor had some half-assed way of formatting them. (Let's see - 10 hard sectors, 16 hard sectors, aleph-null variants of soft-sectors....)
If BillG hadn't happened, we would (at best) still be fighting the Unix Wars.
Shya, right. Like the Linux household:
In order to open any door, you have to remember your 17-character (mixed case with at least 3 numbers and two symbols) password; for security's sake, of course, the passwords are different for each door.
Instead of lights that come on, you have sparks flying from the bare wires. Insulation will be added in Linux House 0.18.
Your mail gets read, but it sounds like Don Ho after a couple of pan-galactic gargleblasters. You still have 137 messages about penis enlargers, because the spam filter craps out with some unintelligible error message when you try to turn it on.
When you run a chicken pot pie under the barcode reader, the kernel faults and your lights go out.
You can get lots of media for free, but all you can get are garage bands. Lots and lots of bad garage bands. Oh yeah, and the Star Wars Kid.
Your house still listens to you - it just listens for swear words directed at Supreme Leader Richard Stallman and Adjutant Diety Linus Torvalds.
Those who take the names of the Supreme Leader in vain are chained to a teletype and forced to use lynx to surf the web while watching Revolution OS 24 hours a day.
It does no such thing. It sends a minidump of the crashed program to MS for analysis. You can do the same thing for your applications, if you want.
I'm surprised that more 3rd party programs aren't doing the same; it's an easy way to find out about obscure bugs.
Oh, yeah, Linux programs never crash. Giggle. Snort. Guffaw.
Oh, please. Norton, McAfee, etc, will survive by doing things that Microsoft does not - better user interfaces, etc.
This is another damned if you do and damned if you don't scenarios for Microsoft.
For that matter, it's not obvious that Microsoft will create an actual antivirus scanner for end users - it could well end up 'under the covers' as a filter driver on top of the file system.
In this scenario, Norton, Mcafee, etc, would provide databases & user interface drivers to interface to the filter.
Or, I suppose, you could have installed the Word 6 reader that comes with Word 95 (and all subsequent versions). In fact, if I recall correctly, the Word 6 reader comes with every Microsoft product that edits formatted text (works, publisher, etc.).
Nah. God forbid Linux users should actually learn something.
Do these government thinktanks that develop the cancer drugs, etc., get the drugs approved? I don't think so. It takes $897 million to get a drug completely through the FDA approval process. Only 21% of drugs submitted to FDA approval make it all the way through.
The people need to realize that the drug approval process pretty much sets the base price of the drug.
For an economics major, you don't know a heck of a lot about your subject, do you?
The interesting thing to me is that according to theoretical analysis, the simplex method ought to have exponential complexity in the worst case. (Hence, all the fuss about Karmakar's algorithm, which has provably polynomial complexity.) But for almost all problems, the simplex method actually has polynomial complexity. What the researchers have discovered is why simplex runs as well as it does.
Unlikely. Microsoft doesn't provide any (documented) hooks into Outlook Express except Simple MAPI, which isn't quite sophisticated enough to do a nice interface. (You can't get new mail notifications, you can't move messages between folders, and if you delete a message, it's gone forever. Also, scanning large inboxes with Simple MAPI is really slow.)
Well, I hate to tell you, I do this every day. So, it's obviously possible. I never claimed it was the world's easiest solution. Personally, I find mapped drives to be a pain in the ass, but, even with mapped drives, you only have to log in once you use the drives.
Second, you obviously haven't even bothered learning item one about any version of Office, since two minute's googling would tell you that yes, the converters are fully compatible with all international versions. The converters use RTF as an intermediate format. So, if Works has an Arabic version (which I doubt, incidentally), you should be able to save your works document as Word2K and open it up in Word2K (assuming that you have the appropriate fonts - arabic fonts aren't standard with english Word).
Since you've obviously got this massive hard-on hatefest for Microsoft going, I doubt that anything I say further will change your opinion. But, for the record, I don't believe that MS is perfect; I just believe that they're better than Linux.
So let me get this straight. When Microsoft includes some feature that you don't need, it's bloatware, but when they factor their product line, it's 'scary'. Make up your mind, dude.
And Microsoft has *full* compatibility across Office versions. You can download converters (that run on old versions of Office) to load and save files in the new version of Office.
As for XP Home being unable to connect to a domain: Oddly enough, I'm running XP Home right now, and I can access domain resources at will. I have to type my domain username & password for each server, but I get access to them. My machine isn't *part* of the domain, and I can't *log into* the domain (which is why I have to type the username/password combo), but I can certainly access the resources.
Oops. Microsoft paranoia strikes again!
How hard is it to click on a dropdown box? How hard is it to select 'save as RTF'? It's no harder than selecting 'save as XML'. And, Slashdot FUD aside, all office versions will save/load XML documents using the office schema. Home users aren't going to be editing Docbook XML, by and large.
I still think that David Brin has it right - personal data will get collected, collated, etc; what's important is that you be able to see what's being done with your data, and to make sure that everyone gets the same treatment - no exceptions for corporations, governments, politicians, etc.
Development tools are better on Linux? Obviously you've never used Visual Studio for any length of time. GDB/Insight is such a pain in the ass that I can't imagine anybody using it for any length of time.
Hmm. Maybe that's why all the linux devs say that they use printf() for debugging....
Where are the conditional breakpoints? Where are the data breakpoints? Where are the variable inspectors?
On VS 2002/2003, you've even got decent interlanguage and inter-host debugging. Step from ASP to VB to C++.
I've never seen anybody do that with GDB.
Hm. Looks like an XMLified version of RTF. Not too surprising - MS has lots of experience in RTF, and it would be stupid to throw it away.
And Microsoft makes uplevel converters for old versions of Word & Works, too. If you go to the Office download center, you will find Word 2000/2002 converters for all Microsoft products. Since Microsoft uses the same converter format for all their word processing programs, the same converter will work in Works, Word 97, Word 95, Publisher, and probably a few more that I've forgotten. Oh yeah, and they're free. You don't need to update anything, just do a little research. You know, like you're supposed to do as a good little Linux user.
As far as international versions go, as far as I know, any version of Word after Word 97 (I think - could have been as early as Word 95, but probably not Word 6) is exactly the same for all international versions except for one DLL that contains the international resources. Can't speak for Works; didn't work on it. So if you've got Word 2K, you should be good to go.
uh, did you try view/full screen and the various WP options under Tools/Options/General? Word 97/98 had a ton of funky options (mostly under tools options) that tried to make it more comfortable for WordPerfect users. Word 2K seems to have removed some of them - I seem to recall a monospace mode in Word 97, but can't find the options flag in Word 2000.
Then I would suggest that you get a better floating-point to decimal conversion routine. Guy Steele, if I recall correctly, wrote a couple of papers on how to do bit-accurate floating-point to decimal & decimal to floating-point conversion routines. I'm sure that the glibc team would appreciate your contribution.
Jack Williamson had a much better reply to Asimov's 3 Laws of Robotics in his Humanoids stories (With Folded Hands, and so forth). The problem, as Williamson saw it, is that the first law (in particular, 'through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm') effectively requires robots to remove all objects that could conceivably cause a human being to come to harm. Hence, no skydiving, no driving (you could crash), no butter knives (you could slip and cut an artery). In short, humanity ends up stuffed into individualized padded cells, served gruel in paper bowls. It was very depressing.
NT 3.51 did not have an OS/2 2.x subsystem. It had an OS/2 1.x subsystem. And Microsoft abandoned MIPS, PPC, and the other architectures because they didn't sell. I heard that the sales of all versions of PPC NT numbered (at most) in the low hundreds, and MIPS sales was in the low thousands. Microsoft wasn't in the mood to expend the effort to support platforms that couldn't carry their weight.
It's hard to direct tax breaks at the low end of the economy, since hardly anybody at the low end of the income distribution actually pays income tax to begin with (incomes less than $30K pay 5.8% of all income tax - see here for more details).
The upper 10% of the income bracket pays 50% of all income taxes (same source). Maybe those who actually pay taxes might appreciate it.