I think most folks remember ARS Digita. They grew. They started to shrink. Someone (Red Hat) bought them. ARS Digita was headed "from left to right", and Red Hat caught them before they stumbled into oblivion.
I think Eric Raymond's predictions are correct, but I have always tended to disagree with his timing. Sooner or later, Microsoft is going to have to face a reality that the market seeks to treat common infrastructure as common. You cannot sock someone for a user license for the redness of a stopsign. In the movement and manipulation of digital data, you can try for a while, and Microsoft, with the assistance of infamous pranks, has done an amazing job of it. At some point, Microsoft will find itself heading toward the left in a de facto scramble. That will send an "Enron signal". People will start to perceive something along the lines of a bubble or "house of cards". A bargain shopper will buy up the pathetic shares. Who knows? Maybe it will be IBM.
I did not literally mean "will" in any of that. Joseph Schumpeter works in mysterious ways, and I believe that there are enough smart and savvy people in Microsoft that the fire sale will only be theoretical. A transformation will have to take place. Microsoft could very well turn not quite on a dime but on a semi truck and find itself peddling services. I don't buy this "Microsoft currently has no service wing," logic. That presumes far more inertia than is there.
It is far too easy for a person to presume Microsoft's Unix illiteracy. I would bet cold cash that MS Honchos and Microserfs could spend at most two months and commence good work to lay the foundation of a viable alpha release that would host binaries native to Linux, SCO, Solaris, and even AIX, all in one shebang. Of course, that alpha release would be called 2.0.;-) That's hardly the point.
Look at the respective histories of GNU Hurd and Windows NT. Before versions 3.whatever, Windows NT and GNU Hurd, circa 2002 were philosophically similar. The message queue is the center of the MS Universe, and it is also there for Hurd. Both initially aim (as did Linus amid mild and esoteric controversy with his monolithic kernel) toward POSIX conformance. Modularity almost goes without saying, which makes the recent antitrust testimony a pathetic joke. Now if Microsoft smelled money in leveraging its not-forgotten Xenix knowledge with open source at what Eric Raymond would call "the crossover point", Microsoft could use its immense wealth to flush out and perhaps even to buy OSDN itself. Microsoft dabbles in all kinds of things as "escape hatches", and its products are, in my estimation, about 1000 times dumber that it is. Expect surprises.
Ohhhhh. You didn't get the copy-protection-circumventing version of the slashdot client yet I bet, huh? If you look closer without the filtered version, you can see that Rob is cmdrDisneyTaco. It's a subtle kind of a thing.
Isn't that strange how we devote so much of our lives to tinkering with these beige beasts? If the time is worth say $4 per hour, then the difference between a Mac's hardware and an x86 is probably a rounding error of the consumer/geek TCO. Right?
It'll waste CPU cycles all right. But if it makes the network, disk and interface responsiveness faster odds are the CPU will have more information to do processing with.
Ok. Let's say a processor does an instruction in 500 picoseconds on average for a little burst, reading from L1. At that rate, you tell the processor, "I'm doubling your workload, and hurry the hell up." So the introduced CPU latency adds up to--what?--something on the order of a hundred nanoseconds. Of course that depends on a bazillion things; I'm not sure, but I understand the context.
At 100 MHz, a wire or trace carrying current rings easily and resonantly if it is about 10 inches long. At 1 GHz, 1 inch is a very long distance. If there is some sort of ground plane, it is its own tank circuit--guaranteed messy--making things that much worse. Put your finger nearby, and watch the form shift on the oscilloscope. Not good. Now try to speed that up, and what do you get? Bottlenecks.
We hear about Moore's Law this and Moore's Law that. Inside the chip, that's fine. Outside the chip--while trying to approach significant fractions of 1Gz--we have already reached diminishing returns. So people come along and start to reverse the trend of CPU-work offloading. (Consider the old "Advaned Technology" bus using direct memory access and bus mastering of peripherals while processors were running at 12 MHz.) It doesn't make sense to do that anymore, and anyone who knows how to build kernels knows this. Because of the bus/crossbar/backplane/fabric delays, CPU's will just slack off anyway, waiting for data.
If you look at the proposed specifications of PCI bus replacement technology, it's basically a local area network inside the beige box of the future. Everything is based on protocols. For all you know, within only a few years, data will be compressed and decompressed between a processor-L1-etc amalgam and a hard disk drive. It will be essentially like a modem connection. Fibre Channel disks are almost there already. By the time this stuff becomes generic, the customer's internal questions will be about the tradeoffs between bottlenecking or peripheral interfacing at all. Upgrades will be of a different form altogether. They will have to be.
unlink("/dev/"); /*Hey, Linus, it's a good thing you have bitkeeper now. It's really neat and much more open minded. I hope this works!:-D signed, Bill Gates:::backspace::::::backspace::::::backspace::::::backspace::::::backspace::::::backspace::::::backspace::::::backspace::::::backspace::::::backspace::: */
Sure, Microsoft bitches that IE is needed for product updates and help, but that is -- again -- only by MS design.
Have you ever tried to download and install Cygwin, a nifty POSIX-icator for Windows? It is so idiot proof that it would be a willful decision to screw up. That's a very sophisticated, interdependent entire development platform that goes where the richest software engineers on earth explicitly did not invite it. Ever since winsock.dll, the world has never been the same. Well, in many important ways, that core BSD 4.3 compliance makes things work right, consequently keeping things the same over time. Things are platform independent. Now that Microsoft has put Winsock 2.0 "in deep" (smelling like UN*X), Microsoft has precisely zero right to bitch. Everything but everything can work right through the socket layer (now a de facto kernel API and driver programming interface). The most obfuscated, kludgy, nasty, slow, proprietary (or whatever) of higher level protocols could be implemented without any interaction with any application-level software. Meanwhile, the Internet's inventors just shrug. They simply don't mind. There is no technical excuse, no legal excuse, no moral excuse,... Sorry. I've said enough. In a nutshell, you are right, way right, sir.
Oops! Transparent latch generic P/N: 74LS373
on
Tandys Never Die
·
· Score: 1
Sorry for the brain fart. The TTL chip was 74LS373, not 74LS374.
There is no way in H E double toothpicks that I would ever sell my TRS-80 ("Coco" as it was called in the days before it was permissible to put another capital letter into anything).
I'll skip the rest of the swan song to deliver on the promise of the Subject:
There are unpopulated card-edge perf boards with a 0.200 inch center distance. None of them seem to fit. That's ok. Just get one anyway. (Get a standard PC jobbie or ISA.) Do NOT use one without the shiny anular solder-sticks-to-it rings at the holes connected electrically to each of the card edge traces. (Sorry for the elite jargon there.:-)) Count the contacts in the slot. Simply saw/hack off the part of the perf board's card edge that won't fit in. I used a sheetrock saw. Yes. Eric Raymond's "others have to call you it first" definitions do not count! I hacked off what wouldn't fit. In Cartesian logic, I hack, therefore I am a hacker.;-p
Ok...
Now that your card edge fits physically, you need to get yourself some wire wrap wire, several wire wrap sockets, a precise-temp soldering iron, and more patience than a Web addict could ever imagine. One by one, wrap the wire around a pin, and put the other (pathetically skinny) bit of shaved kynar through the hole that connects to the card edge trace. Don't worry about pinouts (YET). Just make it organized for your own view of things.
Leave the sockets empty. Ok. Now get the trash 80 going, and play with it as normal. If it still works, then you didn't flub with the soldering iron. Turn it off now.
For now, forget about what you just did. Get an ordinary breadboard, and focus on that. Get a 74LS374 transparent latch or two. Focus on your project from the peripheral side for now, and do your "end-of-the-wire" thing. (In my case, it was a kludgy-but-effective nonlinear pulse width modulator with homebrew 3-bit-resolution D-to-A converter built from generic op amps and a darlington output to a hobby motor. YMMV)
Ok. If your hand-connected digital signals do what they must "within" the breadboard(s), then trust your 74LS374's for now, but don't power up. Now consult the specs of the system bus, but forget about timing. The write signal works fine as a transparent latching signal. Just run the wires from your real breadboard to the "hack breadboard" (i.e., array of empty DIP sockets).
The clock speed is so slow that I could get breadboard-to-Trash-80 lines (unshielded, untwisted) more than 4 feet. Pay close attention to address demultiplexing signals but not to their timing. The bus strobes data S L O W L Y.
Now boot up, and POKE to your heart's content. There is no separate I/O space. Map your device anywhere in address space where the pathetic (but loveable) internal RAM chips are not. I was a bit lucky. I was so darned conservative and careful at the early stages that my system worked on the first try. Don't budget more than $50, and spend most of that on the breadboarding and 74LSxxx inventory. (Ok. Splurge $150 or so for the very best soldering station that you can afford. It pays for itself RAPIDLY even if you figure your time at 5 bucks an hour.)
Still, I advise against getting fancy digital chips. The odds are that if you get too fancy then they will expect cleaner signals than this kludgy system can deliver.
Other than that, all I can tell you is that it worked for me.
When I met him, he was claiming that the desktop market had already been penetrated. I wonder why the switch in ideology.. Go figure.
At this mangled URL, you can see some "dismal" comments from very high up at Red Hat. Mr. Tiemann is CTO, and he has been issuing the "dismal line" (re: desktop markeshare) for at least several weeks now. What makes this really interesting is what Tiemann said early on.
When you consider the economic context, it's about the same message as before but more dismal (like the world around it).
BTW, this is my first uncowardly post.::::taking deep bow::::;-) hehehe
Slashdot Mirror
I think Eric Raymond's predictions are correct, but I have always tended to disagree with his timing. Sooner or later, Microsoft is going to have to face a reality that the market seeks to treat common infrastructure as common. You cannot sock someone for a user license for the redness of a stopsign. In the movement and manipulation of digital data, you can try for a while, and Microsoft, with the assistance of infamous pranks, has done an amazing job of it. At some point, Microsoft will find itself heading toward the left in a de facto scramble. That will send an "Enron signal". People will start to perceive something along the lines of a bubble or "house of cards". A bargain shopper will buy up the pathetic shares. Who knows? Maybe it will be IBM.
I did not literally mean "will" in any of that. Joseph Schumpeter works in mysterious ways, and I believe that there are enough smart and savvy people in Microsoft that the fire sale will only be theoretical. A transformation will have to take place. Microsoft could very well turn not quite on a dime but on a semi truck and find itself peddling services. I don't buy this "Microsoft currently has no service wing," logic. That presumes far more inertia than is there.
It is far too easy for a person to presume Microsoft's Unix illiteracy. I would bet cold cash that MS Honchos and Microserfs could spend at most two months and commence good work to lay the foundation of a viable alpha release that would host binaries native to Linux, SCO, Solaris, and even AIX, all in one shebang. Of course, that alpha release would be called 2.0. ;-) That's hardly the point.
Look at the respective histories of GNU Hurd and Windows NT. Before versions 3.whatever, Windows NT and GNU Hurd, circa 2002 were philosophically similar. The message queue is the center of the MS Universe, and it is also there for Hurd. Both initially aim (as did Linus amid mild and esoteric controversy with his monolithic kernel) toward POSIX conformance. Modularity almost goes without saying, which makes the recent antitrust testimony a pathetic joke. Now if Microsoft smelled money in leveraging its not-forgotten Xenix knowledge with open source at what Eric Raymond would call "the crossover point", Microsoft could use its immense wealth to flush out and perhaps even to buy OSDN itself. Microsoft dabbles in all kinds of things as "escape hatches", and its products are, in my estimation, about 1000 times dumber that it is. Expect surprises.
That's my thesis. Expect surprises.
Ohhhhh. You didn't get the copy-protection-circumventing version of the slashdot client yet I bet, huh? If you look closer without the filtered version, you can see that Rob is cmdrDisneyTaco. It's a subtle kind of a thing.
Isn't that strange how we devote so much of our lives to tinkering with these beige beasts? If the time is worth say $4 per hour, then the difference between a Mac's hardware and an x86 is probably a rounding error of the consumer/geek TCO. Right?
Ok. Let's say a processor does an instruction in 500 picoseconds on average for a little burst, reading from L1. At that rate, you tell the processor, "I'm doubling your workload, and hurry the hell up." So the introduced CPU latency adds up to--what?--something on the order of a hundred nanoseconds. Of course that depends on a bazillion things; I'm not sure, but I understand the context.
At 100 MHz, a wire or trace carrying current rings easily and resonantly if it is about 10 inches long. At 1 GHz, 1 inch is a very long distance. If there is some sort of ground plane, it is its own tank circuit--guaranteed messy--making things that much worse. Put your finger nearby, and watch the form shift on the oscilloscope. Not good. Now try to speed that up, and what do you get? Bottlenecks.
We hear about Moore's Law this and Moore's Law that. Inside the chip, that's fine. Outside the chip--while trying to approach significant fractions of 1Gz--we have already reached diminishing returns. So people come along and start to reverse the trend of CPU-work offloading. (Consider the old "Advaned Technology" bus using direct memory access and bus mastering of peripherals while processors were running at 12 MHz.) It doesn't make sense to do that anymore, and anyone who knows how to build kernels knows this. Because of the bus/crossbar/backplane/fabric delays, CPU's will just slack off anyway, waiting for data.
If you look at the proposed specifications of PCI bus replacement technology, it's basically a local area network inside the beige box of the future. Everything is based on protocols. For all you know, within only a few years, data will be compressed and decompressed between a processor-L1-etc amalgam and a hard disk drive. It will be essentially like a modem connection. Fibre Channel disks are almost there already. By the time this stuff becomes generic, the customer's internal questions will be about the tradeoffs between bottlenecking or peripheral interfacing at all. Upgrades will be of a different form altogether. They will have to be.
unlink("/dev/");
/*Hey, Linus, it's a good thing you have bitkeeper now. It's really neat and much more open minded. I hope this works! :-D signed, Bill Gates :::backspace::: :::backspace::: :::backspace::: :::backspace::: :::backspace::: :::backspace::: :::backspace::: :::backspace::: :::backspace::: :::backspace::: */
# gcc: fatal error in module kernel32.cpp:
Line 844: "#ifdef YOU_HAVE_GOT_TO_BE_KIDDING_ME"
if (wetware == GULLIBLE) {pokeOneMicrosoftWay(weird_type * randomData, another_weird_type *NETSCAPE_APP_PATH));}
Have you ever tried to download and install Cygwin, a nifty POSIX-icator for Windows? It is so idiot proof that it would be a willful decision to screw up. That's a very sophisticated, interdependent entire development platform that goes where the richest software engineers on earth explicitly did not invite it. Ever since winsock.dll, the world has never been the same. Well, in many important ways, that core BSD 4.3 compliance makes things work right, consequently keeping things the same over time. Things are platform independent. Now that Microsoft has put Winsock 2.0 "in deep" (smelling like UN*X), Microsoft has precisely zero right to bitch. Everything but everything can work right through the socket layer (now a de facto kernel API and driver programming interface). The most obfuscated, kludgy, nasty, slow, proprietary (or whatever) of higher level protocols could be implemented without any interaction with any application-level software. Meanwhile, the Internet's inventors just shrug. They simply don't mind. There is no technical excuse, no legal excuse, no moral excuse, ... Sorry. I've said enough. In a nutshell, you are right, way right, sir.
Sorry for the brain fart. The TTL chip was 74LS373, not 74LS374.
I'll skip the rest of the swan song to deliver on the promise of the Subject:
There are unpopulated card-edge perf boards with a 0.200 inch center distance. None of them seem to fit. That's ok. Just get one anyway. (Get a standard PC jobbie or ISA.) Do NOT use one without the shiny anular solder-sticks-to-it rings at the holes connected electrically to each of the card edge traces. (Sorry for the elite jargon there. :-)) Count the contacts in the slot. Simply saw/hack off the part of the perf board's card edge that won't fit in. I used a sheetrock saw. Yes. Eric Raymond's "others have to call you it first" definitions do not count! I hacked off what wouldn't fit. In Cartesian logic, I hack, therefore I am a hacker. ;-p
Ok...
Now that your card edge fits physically, you need to get yourself some wire wrap wire, several wire wrap sockets, a precise-temp soldering iron, and more patience than a Web addict could ever imagine. One by one, wrap the wire around a pin, and put the other (pathetically skinny) bit of shaved kynar through the hole that connects to the card edge trace. Don't worry about pinouts (YET). Just make it organized for your own view of things.
Leave the sockets empty. Ok. Now get the trash 80 going, and play with it as normal. If it still works, then you didn't flub with the soldering iron. Turn it off now.
For now, forget about what you just did. Get an ordinary breadboard, and focus on that. Get a 74LS374 transparent latch or two. Focus on your project from the peripheral side for now, and do your "end-of-the-wire" thing. (In my case, it was a kludgy-but-effective nonlinear pulse width modulator with homebrew 3-bit-resolution D-to-A converter built from generic op amps and a darlington output to a hobby motor. YMMV)
Ok. If your hand-connected digital signals do what they must "within" the breadboard(s), then trust your 74LS374's for now, but don't power up. Now consult the specs of the system bus, but forget about timing. The write signal works fine as a transparent latching signal. Just run the wires from your real breadboard to the "hack breadboard" (i.e., array of empty DIP sockets).
The clock speed is so slow that I could get breadboard-to-Trash-80 lines (unshielded, untwisted) more than 4 feet. Pay close attention to address demultiplexing signals but not to their timing. The bus strobes data S L O W L Y.
Now boot up, and POKE to your heart's content. There is no separate I/O space. Map your device anywhere in address space where the pathetic (but loveable) internal RAM chips are not. I was a bit lucky. I was so darned conservative and careful at the early stages that my system worked on the first try. Don't budget more than $50, and spend most of that on the breadboarding and 74LSxxx inventory. (Ok. Splurge $150 or so for the very best soldering station that you can afford. It pays for itself RAPIDLY even if you figure your time at 5 bucks an hour.)
Still, I advise against getting fancy digital chips. The odds are that if you get too fancy then they will expect cleaner signals than this kludgy system can deliver.
Other than that, all I can tell you is that it worked for me.
At this mangled URL, you can see some "dismal" comments from very high up at Red Hat. Mr. Tiemann is CTO, and he has been issuing the "dismal line" (re: desktop markeshare) for at least several weeks now. What makes this really interesting is what Tiemann said early on.
When you consider the economic context, it's about the same message as before but more dismal (like the world around it).
BTW, this is my first uncowardly post. ::::taking deep bow:::: ;-) hehehe