Unlikely. Technically, MS actually sold Xenix, which was some kind of Unix clone.
Microsoft may have re-sold Xenix... but, as so often happens with Microsoft and technology, they bought it, they didn't build it.
Like I said, UNIX had proper multi-tasking... Microsoft licensed a variant of UNIX from AT&T, and the porting was done by SCO (the real one that used to do technology, not the one that just sues people now).
Please, don't go around either believing or spreading the notion that Microsoft developed Xenix. They didn't. Not by a freakin' long shot. Someone else wrote it.
I stand by my assertion, Microsoft was way behind the curve in real multi-tasking. Arguably, it wasn't until at least Windows '98 where Windows had any meaningful multi-tasking -- almost 20 years after they licensed the technology from someone else.
I'm surprised no one has mentioned that 4.2 gives the iPhone/iPad native MIDI support. As a musician, this is huge.
Really? My only exposure to MIDI has been really annoying sound-tracks on badly designed web pages that blare a badly representation of an instrument at deafening volumes.
I was wondering if anybody actually used it for anything that didn't sound like a cheap Casio keyboard (ie. Complete Crap).
What does this do for me as a user? Will it make games better?
What is the difference between real multitasking and fake multitasking? I don't think processors with multiple cores existed back then.
Windows 3.1 used to use time slicing... if you had three apps running, they each got around 1/3 of the CPU time, even if they were idle. (You could tweak it, but that's the gist of it.) It essentially meant that performance of multiple tasks in Windows 3.x degraded and was wasteful since apps you weren't using at the moment still got their chunk of the CPU time..
Pre-emptive multi-tasking allows the task schedule to interrupt a program at an arbitrary point, and swap it for another running program. It uses some hardware features introduced in the 286 but shored up in the 386 that allowed for memory to be segmented and kept separate, as well as support for hardware context-switches.
Apples used to run in a model where it was considered good form for the apps to offer to relinquish the CPU regularly, so that they could all cooperate and give the user a better experience.
I don't believe OS/2 was ever a competitor to the Windows 1.0 that the article is about. Maybe windows 3.x, but I believe Windows 1.0 predates OS/2 by a bit.
TFA indicate that IBM's Top View would have been around at the same time though.
I have done this. Not in the US, but the are a couple of practical issues:
1) kilt pins, stow them in your luggage and make sure to stay out of wind until you can out it back on. Three inches of pointy metal won't make you popular, and the pin weighs down the apron part of the kilt, so, use your imagination 2) the buckles, most of my kilts have 2-3 buckles made of metal 3) the sporran, mine has a chain and metal snaps 4) sitting in an airplane seat in a kilt is a tricky issue, especially if you are a little rounder like me and want to be sure not to give a show 5) don't even think of the dagger in your sock, and even the kilt flash on your socks have buckles 6) depending on what you wear for footwear, unlacing your shoes/boots could be tricky. I wear Doc Martens with my kilt, so there is some work involved. 7) my utilikilts have about 10 snaps. All metal.
However, the pat down procedure could be hilarious... Just hoist up the kilt and show the whole damned airport. Of course, that will get you arrested for a different reason.
Gold is non-bioreactive in humans. It won't matter if it enters our lungs, as it doesn't cause any issues.
So, taken to the absurd... if you were exposed to it long enough, you could literally "drown" in gold, no?
I mean, WTF happens when gold nano-particles get in the human lung? Hocking up something like Goldschlager can't be healthy.
I'd be skeptical about the notion that "nothing could go wrong" -- I could be convinced, but I'm skeptical. It sounds like it might not be something nice.
I've dealt with OSS and closed source stuff. And there've been many times with the latter that they ask $$$ for access to find out something that would be found by Google if it was OSS.
And, in fairness, some of us have tried looking for something related to OSS only to find that the closest thing is a 6 year old question on a forum that nobody answered or some snot-nosed little git saying "RTFM".
Sometimes, chasing down the docs for OSS stuff is either impossible, or way more work than it should be. I can definitely see that for some organizations the paid access to the good documentation is more valuable than the free access to non-existent/crappy documentation.
Not defending Oracle, but having seen both sides of this coin, sometimes the paid support model works well too. Open Source is not a magic bullet -- sometimes, either the doc or the product isn't really usable.
Much more likely, it was some sort of prototype/enhanced/modified missile tested by the USN, and they won't admit it just because doing so would mean admitting theres a development programme going on
As has been pointed out elsewhere, if you were trying to keep it a secret, would you launch it close enough to LA to have news helicopters film it?
I understand that stealth aircraft were tested for years before the technology was publicly acknowledged
Yes, at facilities that aren't publicly acknowledged to exist and under strict secrecy.
Top secret tests 35 miles off one of the biggest cities in the US seems kind of the opposite of stealthy. I don't entirely disagree with you, but it just seems a little showy for something meant to be secret.
A person could not accidentally launch a Trident missile bu bumping into the launch button any more than a NASA janitor could bump into something and accidentally launch the Space Shuttle.
That's what I want to believe, and that the notion of an "accidental" launch is utter rubbish.
However, with no first hand knowledge of fire control systems, I'm mostly just hoping that's the case.;-)
I'm pretty sure that this was a planned event by a US branch of the armed forces. If it aint them, then someone is playing a very dangerous game indeed.
Most likely of all, someone in the US Navy screwed up.
Are you implying someone accidentally launched something like this? Really?
I should think that there would be procedures in place so that some guy doesn't lean on the launch button or maliciously launch without authorization. Several at least.
God, please tell me that it's impossible for the Navy to just sorta go "whoops" and launch something like this. This was done by someone with a plan and authorization, or something is seriously wrong.
If it was a government launch then a NOTAM must have been filed to clear the air space.
Yeah, because no shady parts of the government exist who don't do things in public. I mean, do the CIA and NSA really admit to anything? What's to say some agency with a fancy radar that can say there's nothing to hit didn't sidestep the whole process?
And you can bet your bottom dollar that you do not just pop off long range missile with out telling Russia and China that you are going to do it!
Hasn't China done that exact thing?
BTW Subs do not launch intercontinental ballistic missiles "ICBMs". They launch Sub launched ballistic missiles "SLBMs"
Are all SLBM's implicitly intercontinental? You make a good point, but clearly you know more about this than most of us. I have no idea if most sub-launched missiles have that kind of range or not.
At this point the fact that nobody is saying anything and it is getting so little press really scares the daylights out of me.
Or, have people gotten used to not being told what's happening and moved onto other things? Maybe people have simply stopped asking when they get told to stop asking or the government denies something?
Sorry, I intended to include intentional saber rattling as part of scenario 1 -- they didn't shoot at anything, so it was more about being seen with the capability.
The fact that it was on the news and fairly visible tells me that someone wasn't trying to really keep it a secret -- merely keeping the who did it secret.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft may have re-sold Xenix ... but, as so often happens with Microsoft and technology, they bought it, they didn't build it.
Like I said, UNIX had proper multi-tasking ... Microsoft licensed a variant of UNIX from AT&T, and the porting was done by SCO (the real one that used to do technology, not the one that just sues people now).
Please, don't go around either believing or spreading the notion that Microsoft developed Xenix. They didn't. Not by a freakin' long shot. Someone else wrote it.
I stand by my assertion, Microsoft was way behind the curve in real multi-tasking. Arguably, it wasn't until at least Windows '98 where Windows had any meaningful multi-tasking -- almost 20 years after they licensed the technology from someone else.
Really? My only exposure to MIDI has been really annoying sound-tracks on badly designed web pages that blare a badly representation of an instrument at deafening volumes.
I was wondering if anybody actually used it for anything that didn't sound like a cheap Casio keyboard (ie. Complete Crap).
What does this do for me as a user? Will it make games better?
Windows 3.1 used to use time slicing ... if you had three apps running, they each got around 1/3 of the CPU time, even if they were idle. (You could tweak it, but that's the gist of it.) It essentially meant that performance of multiple tasks in Windows 3.x degraded and was wasteful since apps you weren't using at the moment still got their chunk of the CPU time..
Pre-emptive multi-tasking allows the task schedule to interrupt a program at an arbitrary point, and swap it for another running program. It uses some hardware features introduced in the 286 but shored up in the 386 that allowed for memory to be segmented and kept separate, as well as support for hardware context-switches.
Apples used to run in a model where it was considered good form for the apps to offer to relinquish the CPU regularly, so that they could all cooperate and give the user a better experience.
As of 1:12PM EST a "Check For Update" still tells me that 3.2.2 is the latest version.
Hoping I can get the update today and play with it.
Well, except for UNIX and a couple of others. There was real multi-tasking in 1985, don't let anybody tell you that Windows '95 was first with it.
MS was actually late to the game when it came to multi-tasking.
Both the summary and the article are discussing the 25th anniversary of Windows 1.0 which shipped in 1985.
OS/2 was not available "at the time" in question, which was 1985, and wasn't an "option" to Windows 1.0.
I don't believe OS/2 was ever a competitor to the Windows 1.0 that the article is about. Maybe windows 3.x, but I believe Windows 1.0 predates OS/2 by a bit.
TFA indicate that IBM's Top View would have been around at the same time though.
I'm leaning towards wearing a kilt.
I have done this. Not in the US, but the are a couple of practical issues:
1) kilt pins, stow them in your luggage and make sure to stay out of wind until you can out it back on. Three inches of pointy metal won't make you popular, and the pin weighs down the apron part of the kilt, so, use your imagination
2) the buckles, most of my kilts have 2-3 buckles made of metal
3) the sporran, mine has a chain and metal snaps
4) sitting in an airplane seat in a kilt is a tricky issue, especially if you are a little rounder like me and want to be sure not to give a show
5) don't even think of the dagger in your sock, and even the kilt flash on your socks have buckles
6) depending on what you wear for footwear, unlacing your shoes/boots could be tricky. I wear Doc Martens with my kilt, so there is some work involved.
7) my utilikilts have about 10 snaps. All metal.
However, the pat down procedure could be hilarious ... Just hoist up the kilt and show the whole damned airport. Of course, that will get you arrested for a different reason.
Happy kilting.
So, taken to the absurd ... if you were exposed to it long enough, you could literally "drown" in gold, no?
I mean, WTF happens when gold nano-particles get in the human lung? Hocking up something like Goldschlager can't be healthy.
I'd be skeptical about the notion that "nothing could go wrong" -- I could be convinced, but I'm skeptical. It sounds like it might not be something nice.
Wait ... we get guns?
"Gamma Ray Bubbles" is actually Sarah Palin's Stripper name.
And, in fairness, some of us have tried looking for something related to OSS only to find that the closest thing is a 6 year old question on a forum that nobody answered or some snot-nosed little git saying "RTFM".
Sometimes, chasing down the docs for OSS stuff is either impossible, or way more work than it should be. I can definitely see that for some organizations the paid access to the good documentation is more valuable than the free access to non-existent/crappy documentation.
Not defending Oracle, but having seen both sides of this coin, sometimes the paid support model works well too. Open Source is not a magic bullet -- sometimes, either the doc or the product isn't really usable.
Or, the same crap lifestyle. Tough call.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means. ;-)
Sounds more like an Ikea product to me. :-P
I continue to be amazed at the prescience of Asimov.
Sheer freakin' genius!!
I think the term in this case becomes a swarm.
A Beowulf gives you a bunch of compute power, a swarm gives you a bunch of little things working semi-autonomously working for a collective goal.
In the New World Order, the US Government doesn't do missile tests without the knowledge and approval of the defense contractors.
And, yes, they do have subs. With frickin' lasers on them.
Er, how about swamp gas from a weather balloon was trapped in a thermal pocket and refracted the light from Venus?
As has been pointed out elsewhere, if you were trying to keep it a secret, would you launch it close enough to LA to have news helicopters film it?
Yes, at facilities that aren't publicly acknowledged to exist and under strict secrecy.
Top secret tests 35 miles off one of the biggest cities in the US seems kind of the opposite of stealthy. I don't entirely disagree with you, but it just seems a little showy for something meant to be secret.
That's what I want to believe, and that the notion of an "accidental" launch is utter rubbish.
However, with no first hand knowledge of fire control systems, I'm mostly just hoping that's the case. ;-)
I'm pretty sure that this was a planned event by a US branch of the armed forces. If it aint them, then someone is playing a very dangerous game indeed.
Are you implying someone accidentally launched something like this? Really?
I should think that there would be procedures in place so that some guy doesn't lean on the launch button or maliciously launch without authorization. Several at least.
God, please tell me that it's impossible for the Navy to just sorta go "whoops" and launch something like this. This was done by someone with a plan and authorization, or something is seriously wrong.
Yeah, because no shady parts of the government exist who don't do things in public. I mean, do the CIA and NSA really admit to anything? What's to say some agency with a fancy radar that can say there's nothing to hit didn't sidestep the whole process?
Hasn't China done that exact thing?
Are all SLBM's implicitly intercontinental? You make a good point, but clearly you know more about this than most of us. I have no idea if most sub-launched missiles have that kind of range or not.
Or, have people gotten used to not being told what's happening and moved onto other things? Maybe people have simply stopped asking when they get told to stop asking or the government denies something?
OK, Pedantry first ... it's jibe. ;-)
Sorry, I intended to include intentional saber rattling as part of scenario 1 -- they didn't shoot at anything, so it was more about being seen with the capability.
The fact that it was on the news and fairly visible tells me that someone wasn't trying to really keep it a secret -- merely keeping the who did it secret.
But, yes, I should have articulated that better.
I embrace weird wherever I can ... but I still recognize it as weird. ;-)