Actually, Microsoft didn't *violate* a patent, they *stole* Stac's code. That was why DOS 6.2 went on to become DOS 6.22 so quickly. You could even scan the executables for DriveSpace (I believe that's what it was called) and see Stac's name all over it. And actually, Stac got quite a hefty settlement out of it ($50M+). What really killed Stac was that drive space became so cheap, no one really needed to use realtime compression anymore (at least not at the filesystem level).
Deleware *used* to be the most popular, primarily because they had a very advanced set of laws with respect to corporations. This is not so true anymore. I recently read an article comparing Michigan Corps. with Deleware Corps. which found that they were very similar (i.e. other states are starting to mimic what Deleware has done). Hey, but Deleware had to have something, right? Since there's not a lot going on there, they went out and enacted several laws that made having a corporation there desirable. Again, other states caught on and decided to follow suit. There is no difference in the eyes of the Feds, so, best to incorporate in your own state. I say this especially since if you were to use a corporate service to incorporate in Deleware (provided you don't live in Deleware!), you will also have to pay your local state to get permission to do business as a foreign corporation (not Foreign as in from another country, but Foreign as in formed under the laws of another state). This can easily be several times more expensive than simply incorporating in your own state. In Michigan, Corporations cost $60 (LLC's $50), but North Carolina, for example, charges a $500 fee for a foreign corporation looking to do business there. Not very practical, especially in keeping with the trend of this thread (starting a software business on the cheap!).
Actually, you're right. I own a mortgage company, and we tried a company called DMG (Direct Marketing Group) to generate leads for us. First of all, right off the bat I asked if they "spammed" customers. They took it very poorly and said they used "targeted email campaigns only to customers who had opted in." Well, the day I received an email from them was the day we stopped using the service. I have never opted-in, and as a matter of fact, I go out of my way whenever I submit my email address anywhere to explicitly opt-out. Not only that, but the leads they generated were bunk anyway. It just goes to show that if companies are responsible corporate citizens (like mine!) then these marketing companies will go away, because I certainly know I don't want to be associated with spamming in any way, shape or form.
It's not usually my style to call out an AC, but isn't it true that if a laptop was recently purchased, it would probably have XP? Well, doesn't XP have a built-in firewall? Am I also not mistaken that a computer is not vulnerable to MSBlaster if a firewall is running? I know the firewall is not enabled by default, but your way seems like an awful lot of trouble...
IANAL, but I'm related to several... You bring up a very valid point. It is imperative to shield liability from owners of a corporation. Why? Simple, no one would invest in corporations if they could be held individually liable for the misgivings or screw-ups of a corporation. Would a venture capitalist buy a 10% stake in a firm building rocket engines if it knew that one day an accident involving those engines would subject the investor's home, bank accounts, autos, college funds, etc. to paying for the damage caused by those engines? Never! It would stifle innovation and funding. This is a basic truth in modern society. There must be a shield of liablity in order to facilitate innovation and risk-taking ventures with high sociological dividents. Without it, we'd still be using steam engines and pulse dialing.
Yeah, I had an interesting one a while back. I was using an older (KT133A) Athlon motherboard, and had a RAID array running on the built-in highpoint controller. Well, a quick visit to Windows Update made my day a whole lot longer than it needed to be. Apparently, wU decided that my Highpoint card had a more recent driver available, and always wanting to stay up to date, I obliged and downloaded the updated driver. Well, when the computer restarted, I got that wonderful BSOD 'Stop: 0x0000007B - INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE'. Wonderful. It was not the right driver. I had no way to simply tell 2k to use the old driver to boot. Well, after about 2 hours of messing with that lovely piece of software known as the 'Recovery Console' I was able to get everything back in order. About 2 hours later, that update was no longer appearing as an item on wU. I never heard much about it afterward, but it has to make you wonder just how many people had this experience, and how something like this happened in the first place. It seems to me that there should be extensive QA before ANY update is placed on the website for the public. Oh well, just one more adventure in Microsoft land...
Ahh yes. But they stated no patches would come out after 12/31/02. Support is still available, just no patches. It's not that hard to understand. And no, I would not expect MS to continue to support NT4 eight years after its release. Try going to a linux support board and asking questions about the 1.0 kernel. I'm sure you'd get more than a few "why are you using something so old? upgrade!" responses.
Well, in typical/. fashion, they have failed to mention that you CAN combine it, just not with source that would "infect" the code. I.E. you can combine it with anything, as long as that anything is not GPL'ed code. You cannot release under a license that is more restrictive, which the GPL is, at least in the sense that you cannot release a binary without making the source available, while MS explicitly states that you can. I really don't see a big deal with the license in the first place. I prefer BSD-style licenses, in philosophy and in general. Put quite simply, just because someone invented the wheel, I don't want to have to show them the entire car I built using that wheel. I know that it doesn't promote the sharing of ideas, but it certainly fosters the competetive atmosphere here in America!
Your blue-screen is probably an "Inaccessible boot device" error. RH7 & 8 did this to my old machine because of the way I had it set up (single hdd on a raid controller). I was able to fix the problem by re-installing windows as an upgrade. Not the best fix in the world, but it did work. Apparently, re-partitioning can cause this problem. It can be doubly bad if your boot drive (not your windows partition mind you) is NTFS. You may also try 'fixboot' and/or 'fixmbr' from the Windows recovery console. Beware that these may render your linux partition unusable. My advice to you is to plan very well your partition layout, and get it working with Windows BEFORE you install linux. That way, everything should still work fine.
Obviously, your problem may be different, so if this info. is useless, I apologize in advance.
a large majority of Linux's advantages are more in respects to the underlying architecture
Oh, if this were only true. As a systems developer and operating system architect (no, I do not work for MS), I can say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the underlying architecture of Linux (i.e. the kernel) is NOT superior to the 2k/XP kernel. Not by a longshot. OSS kernel hackers are making significant progress, but they are unfortunately stuck using an aging paradigm (UNIX) from a distant era of computing. UNIX is meant to be a data monster, nothing more, nothing less. Machines you could run for years without giving them a second thought as they churned through unfathomable amounts of information. And to be quite frank, it is still very well suited to its original purpose. On the flip-side, MS was able to start from scratch. The NT/2k/XP kernel, while similar in architecture to VMS (Dave Cutler from DEC who wrote VMS also single-handedly wrote the first NT kernel), is robust and modern. It's main issue to this point has been the inclusion of the Win32 API. But make no mistake, it is a well-designed, efficient kernel. The original NT design specification was over 1200 pages (there is quite a bit of information and excerpts available on the web). If you really want to get into architectural level discussions, or just peruse many of the thousands of threads on the "big" Win kernel vs. Linux, I suggest browsing the newsgroup alt.os.development for a while.
This is about the most short-sighted comment I've ever seen..NET is clearly Microsoft's "new" initiative, and if a truly compatible cross-platform implementation is made it can only be good. First, as more and more developers write applications upon the framework, that is more applications that were previously unavailable to "alternate" operating systems that will now work. Second, by being interoperable with MS's.NET from the start (nearly), Mono can change and adapt quickly to any additions or changes Microsoft may make to the.NET framework. Third, it gives us TRUE interoperability between platforms by virtue of the framework running on a "hackable" os. Fourth, it may help lure developers who would otherwise never touch an alternative operating system.
I see none of these as bad things, and it may be the extra "oomph" OSS projects need to hit a more mainstream audience. If someone had tried to implement the win32 layer on an alternate OS 10 years ago, imagine where OSS would be today (NOT crossover, that's for sure).
That's what you don't get. Your comment that "ASP.NET is a stupid idea on linux, and I think the linux community will see that." shows it clearly. It's not about the linux community thinking it's stupid, it's about the entire developer community finding something useful and possibly choosing to develop with a wider breadth of platforms in mind.
Indecision hurts worse than no decision, and I applaud the Mono team for being foresighted and disciplined enough to bring this project to fruition.
We OS developers like to refer to this as "unreal" mode. It works like a charm, but is technically considered "undocumented" processor behavior by Intel.
It can be very useful in getting a 32-bit protected mode operating system running. This is because as soon as you switch to protected mode, you need to write all of your own interrupt code (i.e. if you've ever written code in x86 assembly under DOS, you have access to a ton of INT(errupt) instructions that do things like write to the screen, read from a disk, etc, but in Pmode, YOU must write the code to do all of this yourself - quite tedious and time-consuming). Well, in unreal mode, you switch to pmode, then switch back to real mode without resetting the segment registers, and gain access to the entire 32-bit flat address space, and still use the real mode interrupts.
This mode is therefore most useful for a second-stage bootloader, and/or other miscellaneous times when you need to access memory beyond 1MB, but using real-mode interrupts. Plus, it can be a hell of a lot easier than setting up V86 mode (vitual-8086 mode), with the necessary Global Descriptor Table entries (GDT) and getting your Task State Segments (TSS's) correct. Eventually, you'll need V86 mode if you wish to execute 16-bit code from your 32-bit protected environment, but it's nice to be able to work on different parts of an operating system at different times without being relegated to do so in a certain and well defined order.
Yes, but I built a file server a few years ago with 4 IBM 30GB Deskstar 7200 RPM drives, and guess what? ALL 4 died within 1.5 years. That's a pretty terrible failure rate if you ask me. Replaced them with Maxtor's, and everything's been fine since.
As an aside, I am very impressed with the new Western Digital "Special Edition" drives (8MB Cache). Excellent performance, whisper quiet, and they continue to have a 3 year warranty despite WD changing all of their other drives over to the new 1 year policy. Definitely worth the extra $30-40 if you ask me.
Not to be a nit-picker because your comment was funny, but Brewster couldn't buy anything that had equity. Unfortunately, a couple.NET Advanced Servers and Exchange + the hardware to run them would definitely put something in the 'asset' column.
Of course with the rate of depreciation on hardware and software it wouldn't be worth dick soon enough, but not in 30 days!
You are mostly wrong. I use OfficeXP and my father runs '97. Never have a problem moving one doc to another*, and I don't save as another format. The last real change was with Office '95.
*I can't say it's entirely perfect because when I do a flowchart (graphics in word) he can't see it in editing mode, but he can in Print Preview and he can print it. Not a big deal since I do all of that and he doesn't ever use the feature, but I guess it could be a problem elsewhere.
I think you mean no STATE tax. I'm pretty sure it is not within an individual State's rights to waive Federal Taxes. And just in case you are simply talking about the flow-through of cash to the principals (who do not need to be disclosed in an LLC), you still must pay individual taxes on the income.
Uncle Sam's got his hands in everyone's pocket. Don't think you can escape.... At least not forever!
He was a news anchor of some sort, and then he went into politics. He ran for city council, and in Cincinnati, the city council member with the most votes becomes mayor.
All went well for him too until he went across the river to Kentucky and paid a prostitute with a personal check! It worked out for the best though.
The U.S. has an institution similar to CanCopy. It is called the Copyright Clearance Center, and if you look on the last page of any Popular Science, you will see that anyone registered with the CCC can copy information directly out of the magazine for $1/page per copy. This service is mostly used for education and libraries, but I don't think they preclude individuals from signing up. The service is not as robust as CanCopy in that it doesn't track the number of times a book has been checked out, etc., but it does provide an avenue for fair use without completely shunning the original copyright holder.
Mwave is the shit. I have ordered about $45k worth of stuff from them in the past year and everything has been great. I did recieve a defective hard drive, as well as a defective monitor, but they were all promptly replaced.
I especially like their quick shipping, and if you can stand the cost of FedEx overnight, you can get your stuff truly "next-day."
I build about 30-50 machines per year for clients, and MWave always has the best prices, ESPECIALLY when you factor in shipping. Not always at the bleeding edge when new processors and mobo's come out, but they do get stock pretty quickly.
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Actually, Microsoft didn't *violate* a patent, they *stole* Stac's code. That was why DOS 6.2 went on to become DOS 6.22 so quickly. You could even scan the executables for DriveSpace (I believe that's what it was called) and see Stac's name all over it. And actually, Stac got quite a hefty settlement out of it ($50M+). What really killed Stac was that drive space became so cheap, no one really needed to use realtime compression anymore (at least not at the filesystem level).
Deleware *used* to be the most popular, primarily because they had a very advanced set of laws with respect to corporations. This is not so true anymore. I recently read an article comparing Michigan Corps. with Deleware Corps. which found that they were very similar (i.e. other states are starting to mimic what Deleware has done). Hey, but Deleware had to have something, right? Since there's not a lot going on there, they went out and enacted several laws that made having a corporation there desirable. Again, other states caught on and decided to follow suit. There is no difference in the eyes of the Feds, so, best to incorporate in your own state. I say this especially since if you were to use a corporate service to incorporate in Deleware (provided you don't live in Deleware!), you will also have to pay your local state to get permission to do business as a foreign corporation (not Foreign as in from another country, but Foreign as in formed under the laws of another state). This can easily be several times more expensive than simply incorporating in your own state. In Michigan, Corporations cost $60 (LLC's $50), but North Carolina, for example, charges a $500 fee for a foreign corporation looking to do business there. Not very practical, especially in keeping with the trend of this thread (starting a software business on the cheap!).
Actually, you're right. I own a mortgage company, and we tried a company called DMG (Direct Marketing Group) to generate leads for us. First of all, right off the bat I asked if they "spammed" customers. They took it very poorly and said they used "targeted email campaigns only to customers who had opted in." Well, the day I received an email from them was the day we stopped using the service. I have never opted-in, and as a matter of fact, I go out of my way whenever I submit my email address anywhere to explicitly opt-out. Not only that, but the leads they generated were bunk anyway. It just goes to show that if companies are responsible corporate citizens (like mine!) then these marketing companies will go away, because I certainly know I don't want to be associated with spamming in any way, shape or form.
It's not usually my style to call out an AC, but isn't it true that if a laptop was recently purchased, it would probably have XP? Well, doesn't XP have a built-in firewall? Am I also not mistaken that a computer is not vulnerable to MSBlaster if a firewall is running? I know the firewall is not enabled by default, but your way seems like an awful lot of trouble...
IANAL, but I'm related to several... You bring up a very valid point. It is imperative to shield liability from owners of a corporation. Why? Simple, no one would invest in corporations if they could be held individually liable for the misgivings or screw-ups of a corporation. Would a venture capitalist buy a 10% stake in a firm building rocket engines if it knew that one day an accident involving those engines would subject the investor's home, bank accounts, autos, college funds, etc. to paying for the damage caused by those engines? Never! It would stifle innovation and funding. This is a basic truth in modern society. There must be a shield of liablity in order to facilitate innovation and risk-taking ventures with high sociological dividents. Without it, we'd still be using steam engines and pulse dialing.
Sorry to point this out and it is most definitely off-topic, but:
if you've got anything more to say, log in to say it
This is like the nerd version of "You wanna take this outside?" And no, I was not the original poster, but I saw this and had to chuckle.
Yeah, I had an interesting one a while back. I was using an older (KT133A) Athlon motherboard, and had a RAID array running on the built-in highpoint controller. Well, a quick visit to Windows Update made my day a whole lot longer than it needed to be. Apparently, wU decided that my Highpoint card had a more recent driver available, and always wanting to stay up to date, I obliged and downloaded the updated driver. Well, when the computer restarted, I got that wonderful BSOD 'Stop: 0x0000007B - INACCESSIBLE_BOOT_DEVICE'. Wonderful. It was not the right driver. I had no way to simply tell 2k to use the old driver to boot. Well, after about 2 hours of messing with that lovely piece of software known as the 'Recovery Console' I was able to get everything back in order. About 2 hours later, that update was no longer appearing as an item on wU. I never heard much about it afterward, but it has to make you wonder just how many people had this experience, and how something like this happened in the first place. It seems to me that there should be extensive QA before ANY update is placed on the website for the public. Oh well, just one more adventure in Microsoft land...
Ever hear of the separation of church and state??
Ahh yes. But they stated no patches would come out after 12/31/02. Support is still available, just no patches. It's not that hard to understand. And no, I would not expect MS to continue to support NT4 eight years after its release. Try going to a linux support board and asking questions about the 1.0 kernel. I'm sure you'd get more than a few "why are you using something so old? upgrade!" responses.
Well, in typical /. fashion, they have failed to mention that you CAN combine it, just not with source that would "infect" the code. I.E. you can combine it with anything, as long as that anything is not GPL'ed code. You cannot release under a license that is more restrictive, which the GPL is, at least in the sense that you cannot release a binary without making the source available, while MS explicitly states that you can. I really don't see a big deal with the license in the first place. I prefer BSD-style licenses, in philosophy and in general. Put quite simply, just because someone invented the wheel, I don't want to have to show them the entire car I built using that wheel. I know that it doesn't promote the sharing of ideas, but it certainly fosters the competetive atmosphere here in America!
Where are my moderation points when I finally read something that's *really* funny??
Your blue-screen is probably an "Inaccessible boot device" error. RH7 & 8 did this to my old machine because of the way I had it set up (single hdd on a raid controller). I was able to fix the problem by re-installing windows as an upgrade. Not the best fix in the world, but it did work. Apparently, re-partitioning can cause this problem. It can be doubly bad if your boot drive (not your windows partition mind you) is NTFS. You may also try 'fixboot' and/or 'fixmbr' from the Windows recovery console. Beware that these may render your linux partition unusable. My advice to you is to plan very well your partition layout, and get it working with Windows BEFORE you install linux. That way, everything should still work fine.
Obviously, your problem may be different, so if this info. is useless, I apologize in advance.
Yeah, Microsoft marketing copycats. Hey, when we say "free as in beer" here on slashdot, we don't actually mean "free as in beer!"
But... Their version is not all that bad!
a large majority of Linux's advantages are more in respects to the underlying architecture
Oh, if this were only true. As a systems developer and operating system architect (no, I do not work for MS), I can say, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the underlying architecture of Linux (i.e. the kernel) is NOT superior to the 2k/XP kernel. Not by a longshot. OSS kernel hackers are making significant progress, but they are unfortunately stuck using an aging paradigm (UNIX) from a distant era of computing. UNIX is meant to be a data monster, nothing more, nothing less. Machines you could run for years without giving them a second thought as they churned through unfathomable amounts of information. And to be quite frank, it is still very well suited to its original purpose. On the flip-side, MS was able to start from scratch. The NT/2k/XP kernel, while similar in architecture to VMS (Dave Cutler from DEC who wrote VMS also single-handedly wrote the first NT kernel), is robust and modern. It's main issue to this point has been the inclusion of the Win32 API. But make no mistake, it is a well-designed, efficient kernel. The original NT design specification was over 1200 pages (there is quite a bit of information and excerpts available on the web). If you really want to get into architectural level discussions, or just peruse many of the thousands of threads on the "big" Win kernel vs. Linux, I suggest browsing the newsgroup alt.os.development for a while.
Actually it's more along the lines of setting up KDE on a p200 with 64MB of memory and bitching about how slow MacOS is.
This is about the most short-sighted comment I've ever seen. .NET is clearly Microsoft's "new" initiative, and if a truly compatible cross-platform implementation is made it can only be good. First, as more and more developers write applications upon the framework, that is more applications that were previously unavailable to "alternate" operating systems that will now work. Second, by being interoperable with MS's .NET from the start (nearly), Mono can change and adapt quickly to any additions or changes Microsoft may make to the .NET framework. Third, it gives us TRUE interoperability between platforms by virtue of the framework running on a "hackable" os. Fourth, it may help lure developers who would otherwise never touch an alternative operating system.
I see none of these as bad things, and it may be the extra "oomph" OSS projects need to hit a more mainstream audience. If someone had tried to implement the win32 layer on an alternate OS 10 years ago, imagine where OSS would be today (NOT crossover, that's for sure).
That's what you don't get. Your comment that "ASP.NET is a stupid idea on linux, and I think the linux community will see that." shows it clearly. It's not about the linux community thinking it's stupid, it's about the entire developer community finding something useful and possibly choosing to develop with a wider breadth of platforms in mind.
Indecision hurts worse than no decision, and I applaud the Mono team for being foresighted and disciplined enough to bring this project to fruition.
We OS developers like to refer to this as "unreal" mode. It works like a charm, but is technically considered "undocumented" processor behavior by Intel.
It can be very useful in getting a 32-bit protected mode operating system running. This is because as soon as you switch to protected mode, you need to write all of your own interrupt code (i.e. if you've ever written code in x86 assembly under DOS, you have access to a ton of INT(errupt) instructions that do things like write to the screen, read from a disk, etc, but in Pmode, YOU must write the code to do all of this yourself - quite tedious and time-consuming). Well, in unreal mode, you switch to pmode, then switch back to real mode without resetting the segment registers, and gain access to the entire 32-bit flat address space, and still use the real mode interrupts.
This mode is therefore most useful for a second-stage bootloader, and/or other miscellaneous times when you need to access memory beyond 1MB, but using real-mode interrupts. Plus, it can be a hell of a lot easier than setting up V86 mode (vitual-8086 mode), with the necessary Global Descriptor Table entries (GDT) and getting your Task State Segments (TSS's) correct. Eventually, you'll need V86 mode if you wish to execute 16-bit code from your 32-bit protected environment, but it's nice to be able to work on different parts of an operating system at different times without being relegated to do so in a certain and well defined order.
Yes, but I built a file server a few years ago with 4 IBM 30GB Deskstar 7200 RPM drives, and guess what? ALL 4 died within 1.5 years. That's a pretty terrible failure rate if you ask me. Replaced them with Maxtor's, and everything's been fine since.
As an aside, I am very impressed with the new Western Digital "Special Edition" drives (8MB Cache). Excellent performance, whisper quiet, and they continue to have a 3 year warranty despite WD changing all of their other drives over to the new 1 year policy. Definitely worth the extra $30-40 if you ask me.
Not to be a nit-picker because your comment was funny, but Brewster couldn't buy anything that had equity. Unfortunately, a couple .NET Advanced Servers and Exchange + the hardware to run them would definitely put something in the 'asset' column.
Of course with the rate of depreciation on hardware and software it wouldn't be worth dick soon enough, but not in 30 days!
You are mostly wrong. I use OfficeXP and my father runs '97. Never have a problem moving one doc to another*, and I don't save as another format. The last real change was with Office '95.
*I can't say it's entirely perfect because when I do a flowchart (graphics in word) he can't see it in editing mode, but he can in Print Preview and he can print it. Not a big deal since I do all of that and he doesn't ever use the feature, but I guess it could be a problem elsewhere.
I think you mean no STATE tax. I'm pretty sure it is not within an individual State's rights to waive Federal Taxes. And just in case you are simply talking about the flow-through of cash to the principals (who do not need to be disclosed in an LLC), you still must pay individual taxes on the income.
Uncle Sam's got his hands in everyone's pocket. Don't think you can escape.... At least not forever!
Right.
He was a news anchor of some sort, and then he went into politics. He ran for city council, and in Cincinnati, the city council member with the most votes becomes mayor.
All went well for him too until he went across the river to Kentucky and paid a prostitute with a personal check! It worked out for the best though.
The U.S. has an institution similar to CanCopy. It is called the Copyright Clearance Center, and if you look on the last page of any Popular Science, you will see that anyone registered with the CCC can copy information directly out of the magazine for $1/page per copy. This service is mostly used for education and libraries, but I don't think they preclude individuals from signing up. The service is not as robust as CanCopy in that it doesn't track the number of times a book has been checked out, etc., but it does provide an avenue for fair use without completely shunning the original copyright holder.
Yes, but he said 1,000mbps, not 100. In light of that, it would stand to reason that his original post was correct.
Mwave is the shit. I have ordered about $45k worth of stuff from them in the past year and everything has been great. I did recieve a defective hard drive, as well as a defective monitor, but they were all promptly replaced.
I especially like their quick shipping, and if you can stand the cost of FedEx overnight, you can get your stuff truly "next-day."
I build about 30-50 machines per year for clients, and MWave always has the best prices, ESPECIALLY when you factor in shipping. Not always at the bleeding edge when new processors and mobo's come out, but they do get stock pretty quickly.