Microsoft got into a monopoly position with MS-DOS pretty quickly after its release in 1981.
It is the orthodoxy that MS-DOS compatibility was the key factor in buying machines in the early eighties.
I disagree.
Does anyone here remember the Apricot? That was an MS-DOS compatible machine, in the sense that it ran MS-DOS. What it didn't do was run MS-DOS programs written for the IBM PC. In other words, it was purely MS-DOS compatible, not IBM PC compatible.
It was IBM compatibility that made the market. Just watch the TV news presentation of Compaq's first clone - "Actually, we kind of find it runs all the programs written for the IBM". Other machines from different platforms ran MS-DOS, but they couldn't run the same programs as the IBM.
A PS2 that could emulate older machines would be superb. Mame would be the prime candidate, but there are others too - notably the Spectrum, C64 and Amiga and perhaps also the ST.
Has anyone who has used one of these kits tried running any emulators on it?
Cheers,
Ian
(Anyone for Asteroids Deluxe followed by a game of Paradroid 90 followed by Dark Cloud?)
I'm reading a lot of comments along the lines of "Can't watch it, bad timeslot".
I've recently got a TiVo, and it's definitely improved the quality of my viewing. It's not perfect - has a really irritating tendency to miss the start or very end of longer programmes, but on the whole I find it works well.
It is a disturbing trend that businesses are more concerned with the act of POINTING OUT how crappy their security is than they are with the actual act of exploiting that bad security. They don't give a damn about the theft - they just don't like the bad press, and will gag you for trying to point out a truth about them that they find embarassing.
There's no proof of that. The department that will be concerned about tightening up security will not be the same department that contacts the public about infringements made easier due to past mistakes.
It's an assumption that "they don't care" and are "more concerned with the act of POINTING OUT". Fact is that neither you nor I know what's happening inside Apple's engineering department regarding this issue.
Sure it looks pretty. It's technically cool. It's very nice eyecandy. But useful? Hardly.
I could do with it right now, reading your post. Underneath I'm running a long process that prints out at the end - I would like to see when it's printed without constantly switching windows between the xterm and web browser.
Microsoft's answer to this failing was to make threading as fast as possible, and to push multithreaded programming as a hack around a fundemental OS problem.
Bit harsh, isn't it? Personally I don't think that multithreading is a hack to get around anything, Microsoft or no Microsoft. It's just a technique, and in my opinion a very useful one.
It's interesting - I read the book only three days before seeing the film (saw the film a week ago at a preview), and I seemed to be the only one that noticed the ending had been changed.
I won't be able to sneak in a spoiler alert due to the lameness filter, but to people who see the film and have read the book: think. There's someone missing at the end climax. I'm curious to know why - I haven't read any of the other books yet, but I suspect the real reason for that extra character's presence gets explained later on. Wonder how they'll do that in the sequels.
Though initially a complete sceptic, I must admit that I have now come to very much like the W2K-style dynamic menus, whereby only those options you use the most remain permenantly visible. I miss this functionality when using a Linux box's desktops.
At the risk of being flamed to hell for supporting a Microsoft 'innovation', that actually was an innovation and I think it's worth incorporating into KDE/Gnome/whichever. Only as optional behaviour of course - user should still have final say. However, I do think it's worth considering.
If they put it on some obscure ip block and give it no hostname, who will ever find it?
Not sure about the idea of an 'obscure' IP block? IP addresses follow defined patterns - you can scan for whatever range you like. Certainly the recent Nimda stuff isn't based on hostnames - it's based on going to nearby IP ranges. If you wanted to scan the entire net you could. Might take a while though...
Cheers,
Ian
Re:How long until RIAA makes a statement about thi
on
80 Gig MP3 Player
·
· Score: 1
Who cares what the RIAA has to say about it? It's made in Belgium, and not subject to these daft US laws that are coming out.
Who promised to divide Palestine between the Arabs and the Jews?
America and Britain jointly, with Britain providing its backing in exchange for Jewish support during the First World War.
Who drew the borders that separated Kuwait from Iraq? America, following its backing of the Shah's
regime.
Who left Africa in such a sorry state that most of the countries there have never recovered?
Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal and Holland. However, you are presuming that they found them in a state that was otherwise.
So now everybody expects the Americans to go around and clean up after your mess.
Such as with the Climate Control treaty? Obviously not true - actually everyone dreads America poking its nose into things it has no comprehension of. Again. The phrase 'bull in a china shop' is appropriate here.
And after all of that what's the big crime that the United States has committed? They got into the colonialism business too late, after it had already gone out of style.
Precisely. Failure to learn from experience is bad.
Cheers,
Ian
Re:i wish some one would write an xp on virus/worm
on
Windows XP Has Arrived
·
· Score: 1
I was stunned to find Konqueror recommending to me that I could accept and reject easily whole classes of cookies.
IE 6.0 will also allow that.
Not meant antagonistically, I mostly agree with your post. I personally can't use Linux full time due to the lack of finance, DVD player and MIDI composition apps. However, I do keep an eye on things and I certainly use Linux for my server and for development.
'Switch users' without having to close all your apps - very useful to me as my home machine has a user for myself and my girlfriend, and I will no longer have to close down all my ssh connections to the Raq in order for her to check email.
Remote desktop logon. Useful for all those times when relatives ring up and say "It's not working...".
Some of the Powertoys look quite nice too. See them here [microsoft.com].
Oh, and a default background that looks like the Laughing Cow advert on UK TV. Perhaps I could live without that particular feature...
Outlook uses Secure Password Authentication (SPA)....No other programs that I am aware of support it.
No other clients, but server software can be configured to accept it. I have a sendmail compiled to accept the LOGIN protocol - Outlook's SPA works with that.
>If something goes wrong with NET4.0, *then* I'd like to hear about it.
What if the bug you're dealing with is a failure to print information when something goes wrong? Worse still, what if it doesn't know something is about to go wrong?
Take this example:
Foo 3.6 is compatible with Bar 2.8
Bar 2.8 loads after Foo 3.6
Bar is upgraded to 2.9, which breaks Foo 3.6
So Foo 3.6 is unable to say that something is about to go wrong, because it doesn't know. Bar 2.9 may still function as it was never aware of Foo 3.6 anyway. Result? No error message, but a broken system.
Fixing this today, I'd search the newsgroups, looking for problems reported with a similar driver setup to mine. I'd know which drivers I had because dmesg would tell me. Tomorrow under the 'no version messages' policy? I wouldn't necessarily know which drivers I had installed, and would have less chance of resolving the problem.
An aside: The people least likely to want a verbose boot are also those most likely to not know which drivers their distro gave them. Without a more technical person being able to ask "Show us the result of dmesg" on the newsgroups it will be extremely hard for them to get out of this situation.
My solution? I support the multiple boot mode option that others are discussing. Make the standard boot pretty - I'd use that mode most of the time. However, I think that a more verbose mode should always be allowed for when problems arise.
Sorry - I remember in more detail now. The material had built up static by travelling through storms, there was a discharge between the ground and airship (caused by the mooring ropes?) and that combusted the coating.
As far as I recall however, current thinking is that the Hindenburg accident was not -caused- by hydrogen. A new coating had been placed over the skin, and a lightning flash combusted that material.
However, once the material was burning it is agreed that the hydrogen contributed to the speed of the disaster.
"Even in the "simple" case of driving an automobile, the accelerator has a "modal" effect on the behavior of the vehicle, depending on which gear is selected."
Not necessarily. Automatics disguise this to some extent, and there is the less well known but used since the '30s CVT - Continously Variable Transmission.
I rather think this comment cuts to the point the book's author is trying to make. He is pointing out that it is usually possible to avoid modes, and for standard user-level code, and even cars for the purposes of this discussion, I have to agree.
"The important item to keep in mind is the number of modalities and the complexity of their interactions."
I've read through a number of replies and people seem to be concentrating on the support contract and scalability. Quite right too - these things are important.
However, it should also be noted that mySQL in particular, which most people are referring to as an open-source alternative, is feature incomplete. It does not support foreign keys, nor does it support stored procedures. It does not support correlated sub-queries. It does not support triggers.
On the web page, The mySQL team argue that lack of foreign key support is an advantage. I simply cannot agree with this - working with declarative referential integrity can be more awkward, but as the name imples it is the best way of ensuring logical consistency throughout a database.
mySQL has its place, and I -am- a user of it. I wouldn't swap out Oracle or Sybase however and, to be fair, the mySQL team don't really seem to expect me to.
Cheers,
Ian
Slashdot Mirror
Ah ha - a Mercedes driver...
Cheers,
Ian
It is the orthodoxy that MS-DOS compatibility was the key factor in buying machines in the early eighties.
I disagree.
Does anyone here remember the Apricot? That was an MS-DOS compatible machine, in the sense that it ran MS-DOS. What it didn't do was run MS-DOS programs written for the IBM PC. In other words, it was purely MS-DOS compatible, not IBM PC compatible.
It was IBM compatibility that made the market. Just watch the TV news presentation of Compaq's first clone - "Actually, we kind of find it runs all the programs written for the IBM". Other machines from different platforms ran MS-DOS, but they couldn't run the same programs as the IBM.
Cheers,
Ian
A PS2 that could emulate older machines would be superb. Mame would be the prime candidate, but there are others too - notably the Spectrum, C64 and Amiga and perhaps also the ST.
Has anyone who has used one of these kits tried running any emulators on it?
Cheers,
Ian
(Anyone for Asteroids Deluxe followed by a game of Paradroid 90 followed by Dark Cloud?)
I'm reading a lot of comments along the lines of "Can't watch it, bad timeslot".
I've recently got a TiVo, and it's definitely improved the quality of my viewing. It's not perfect - has a really irritating tendency to miss the start or very end of longer programmes, but on the whole I find it works well.
Cheers,
Ian
There's no proof of that. The department that will be concerned about tightening up security will not be the same department that contacts the public about infringements made easier due to past mistakes.
It's an assumption that "they don't care" and are "more concerned with the act of POINTING OUT". Fact is that neither you nor I know what's happening inside Apple's engineering department regarding this issue.
Cheers,
Ian
Sure it looks pretty. It's technically cool. It's very nice eyecandy. But useful? Hardly.
I could do with it right now, reading your post. Underneath I'm running a long process that prints out at the end - I would like to see when it's printed without constantly switching windows between the xterm and web browser.
Cheers,
Ian
Bit harsh, isn't it? Personally I don't think that multithreading is a hack to get around anything, Microsoft or no Microsoft. It's just a technique, and in my opinion a very useful one.
Cheers,
Ian
It's interesting - I read the book only three days before seeing the film (saw the film a week ago at a preview), and I seemed to be the only one that noticed the ending had been changed.
I won't be able to sneak in a spoiler alert due to the lameness filter, but to people who see the film and have read the book: think. There's someone missing at the end climax. I'm curious to know why - I haven't read any of the other books yet, but I suspect the real reason for that extra character's presence gets explained later on. Wonder how they'll do that in the sequels.
Cheers,
Ian
At the risk of being flamed to hell for supporting a Microsoft 'innovation', that actually was an innovation and I think it's worth incorporating into KDE/Gnome/whichever. Only as optional behaviour of course - user should still have final say. However, I do think it's worth considering.
Cheers,
Ian
Not sure about the idea of an 'obscure' IP block? IP addresses follow defined patterns - you can scan for whatever range you like. Certainly the recent Nimda stuff isn't based on hostnames - it's based on going to nearby IP ranges. If you wanted to scan the entire net you could. Might take a while though...
Cheers,
Ian
Who cares what the RIAA has to say about it? It's made in Belgium, and not subject to these daft US laws that are coming out.
Cheers,
Ian
America and Britain jointly, with Britain providing its backing in exchange for Jewish support during the First World War.
America, following its backing of the Shah's
regime.
Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal and Holland. However, you are presuming that they found them in a state that was otherwise.
Such as with the Climate Control treaty? Obviously not true - actually everyone dreads America poking its nose into things it has no comprehension of. Again. The phrase 'bull in a china shop' is appropriate here.
Precisely. Failure to learn from experience is bad.
Cheers,
Ian
And this helps worldwide computing how, exactly?
Grow up.
IE 6.0 will also allow that.
Not meant antagonistically, I mostly agree with your post. I personally can't use Linux full time due to the lack of finance, DVD player and MIDI composition apps. However, I do keep an eye on things and I certainly use Linux for my server and for development.
Remote desktop logon. Useful for all those times when relatives ring up and say "It's not working...".
Some of the Powertoys look quite nice too. See them here [microsoft.com].
Oh, and a default background that looks like the Laughing Cow advert on UK TV. Perhaps I could live without that particular feature...
Outlook uses Secure Password Authentication (SPA)....No other programs that I am aware of support it.
No other clients, but server software can be configured to accept it. I have a sendmail compiled to accept the LOGIN protocol - Outlook's SPA works with that.
What if the bug you're dealing with is a failure to print information when something goes wrong? Worse still, what if it doesn't know something is about to go wrong?
Take this example:
- Foo 3.6 is compatible with Bar 2.8
- Bar 2.8 loads after Foo 3.6
- Bar is upgraded to 2.9, which breaks Foo 3.6
So Foo 3.6 is unable to say that something is about to go wrong, because it doesn't know. Bar 2.9 may still function as it was never aware of Foo 3.6 anyway. Result? No error message, but a broken system.Fixing this today, I'd search the newsgroups, looking for problems reported with a similar driver setup to mine. I'd know which drivers I had because dmesg would tell me. Tomorrow under the 'no version messages' policy? I wouldn't necessarily know which drivers I had installed, and would have less chance of resolving the problem.
An aside: The people least likely to want a verbose boot are also those most likely to not know which drivers their distro gave them. Without a more technical person being able to ask "Show us the result of dmesg" on the newsgroups it will be extremely hard for them to get out of this situation.
My solution? I support the multiple boot mode option that others are discussing. Make the standard boot pretty - I'd use that mode most of the time. However, I think that a more verbose mode should always be allowed for when problems arise.
Ian
Sorry - I remember in more detail now. The material had built up static by travelling through storms, there was a discharge between the ground and airship (caused by the mooring ropes?) and that combusted the coating.
Cheers,
Ian
Erm...never mind. :-)
As far as I recall however, current thinking is that the Hindenburg accident was not -caused- by hydrogen. A new coating had been placed over the skin, and a lightning flash combusted that material.
However, once the material was burning it is agreed that the hydrogen contributed to the speed of the disaster.
Cheers, Ian
Not necessarily. Automatics disguise this to some extent, and there is the less well known but used since the '30s CVT - Continously Variable Transmission.
I rather think this comment cuts to the point the book's author is trying to make. He is pointing out that it is usually possible to avoid modes, and for standard user-level code, and even cars for the purposes of this discussion, I have to agree.
"The important item to keep in mind is the number of modalities and the complexity of their interactions."
Now here we can agree.
Cheers,
Ian
I've read through a number of replies and people seem to be concentrating on the support contract and scalability. Quite right too - these things are important. However, it should also be noted that mySQL in particular, which most people are referring to as an open-source alternative, is feature incomplete. It does not support foreign keys, nor does it support stored procedures. It does not support correlated sub-queries. It does not support triggers. On the web page, The mySQL team argue that lack of foreign key support is an advantage. I simply cannot agree with this - working with declarative referential integrity can be more awkward, but as the name imples it is the best way of ensuring logical consistency throughout a database. mySQL has its place, and I -am- a user of it. I wouldn't swap out Oracle or Sybase however and, to be fair, the mySQL team don't really seem to expect me to. Cheers, Ian