The 286 had all the infrastructure needed to do multitasking. However, the segmentation model was still the same 16-bit model with segments of at most 64 kB. I suppose that was the braindead-ness that Gates referred to.
The 386 built really extended the 286 hardware by adding a segment selection size so that segments of 4Gb could be addressed and then added paging on top of it to provide a good virtual memory system.
The project roadmap feature of trac is nice to help you set up your project.
First define the partitioning of your project as trac components, so that it is easier to assign tasks, features, bug tracking, etc. Then define your roadmap. Enter features on components as different tickets and assign them accordingly to your roadmap. Maybe you know other systems, but having a good central database for assigning and completing tasks and being able to track progress with it is invaluable. trac is really good and with relatively low overhead compared with other systems to start with.
That is true, but I do not think they implemented those lessons in Java, even when people like Richard P. Gabriel and Guy L. Steele helped developing and implementing the language.
Bah, you do not know what you are talking about. I wrote not only applications in COBOL, but even tools to help automate my compilations, and once even a remote login shell. For every language the Turing principle counts, and if your COBOL gives access to your operating system calls, then the sky is the limit.
The problem with Java is that it is too much hyped and sold to business types as the silver bullet. As Fred Brooks said more than 30 years ago : THERE IS NO SILVER BULLET (yelling intentional)! Is Java better than Cobol ? Probably not, as Java is also an imperative language. Do not fool yourself : object-oriented languages of the type SIMULA (and Java is not better than Simula, just the wheel reinvented) is nothing more than an imperative language with a small layer for dispatching on type, be it in the compilation or the run-time. However, Java does have a big marketing machine behind it and a whole lot of people who have stakes in it, and it is hyped in all kind of schools. Java is a success but for the wrong reasons. Compare it with any other type of language and it does not have any more advantages or deficiencies. It is just used much because it sounded cool 13 years ago.
There is a Dutch translation of Machiavelli, which has as title "The Ruler" (De heerser), instead of "The Prince", where the translator based his choice of wording that the original title "Il Principe" originally means more than someone of noble blood who is the son of a king. Lorenzo de Medici was a nobleman, but not of royal blood. This is in this meaning even closer to the concept of a politician than that of a prince.
This is 30-year old technology. I have at home an issue of an old electronics magazine where the same is shown for a 30 MFlops computer, built with TTL, which has a dispatching processor and 15 computing processors.
The real advantages in the for the desktop would be that they finally start using the ideas from 40 to 50 years ago : that IO needs separate processors where these operations can be offloaded. However, to be really effective, it becomes time that hard drive manufacturers start to apply RAID internally to their hard drives in order to increase the speed with which data can be transported between the IO processors and the peripheral.
My daily work entails building large embedded software. My speed is mainly capped by the IO from my harddrives, not by the amount of processing that can be done. If the speed of hard drives can be increased four fold (possible with RAID-5, but too expensive for the people that guard the budgets), then my processors would be utilized much better.
I remember in 1990, on my first job, I had to install a harddrive in a PC XT system. When I arrived, I installed it and the people using it where perplexed. Turned out they wanted 128kB extra memory in their 512 kB system, but the people who had to actually confirm the decision and create the order thought that they needed an extra harddrive. This was in a home for the elderly, ran by a mutuality (?).
The people using the computer where very knowledgeable, but they were not given purchase decision, or even the possibility to check the orders.
Regulation is the damping of a process. Compare with Watt's steam machine. The regulator is needed to make sure that the system does not blow itself up.
However, in order to get a good regulation, you should first understand the process and be able to show that there is a possibility of run-away, and then create a regulator for the process.
If you read the chapter about the history about the IEEE FP standard in Microprocessors : a quantitative approach, then you will see that in the past accuracy was already sacrificed for speed in supercomputers.
I think it is more a question of self defence. I am sure that Microsoft really wants to destroy any way that people can produce software which does not involve them or software that offers services without their involvement. They want to be the gatekeeper, they want to make money from all software usage across the whole world.
The very existence of Free Software, Open Source and even Apple undermines the notion that Microsoft wants to plant in everybodies head : that software is so complex that you need a company as big as them for research, development, production and support of software.
No Free Software or Open Source project has, AFAIK, been started to 'battle' Microsoft. Microsoft themselves, however, feel threatened and have initiated hostilities. It is everybodies right to defend themselves against this.
We are a multi-national, and in one research site tooling was developed for building, first all Win32 C++, later.NET C#.
Recently came the day that we got in bed with people who only work on Linux, so all our tools must now run on Linux. There is NO gui dependency here. In this case, Mono was really our rescue.
We used to use Notes in the last 8 years, last quarter we changed to Outlook.
I never had Notes crash on me in those 8 years, while Outlook seems to crash every 2 or 3 weeks, and that is with restarting my computer every day.
And let's not talk about the fact that our mail is not maintained anymore by someone from the company, but outsourced to HP, just to be able to say if you cannot get access to your mail, that it is someone else fault.
And do not begin about the integration with calendaring and all that other shit. I use emacs + org-mode to organise my work and planning, and I am the one who is always on time, not the people who rely on Outlook for that.
And the interface of Outlook is still the same as PCTools 5.0, which included the same functionality, except that it was not network savvy and did not have e-mail.
Slashdot Mirror
The 286 had all the infrastructure needed to do multitasking. However, the segmentation model was still the same 16-bit model with segments of at most 64 kB. I suppose that was the braindead-ness that Gates referred to.
The 386 built really extended the 286 hardware by adding a segment selection size so that segments of 4Gb could be addressed and then added paging on top of it to provide a good virtual memory system.
The project roadmap feature of trac is nice to help you set up your project.
First define the partitioning of your project as trac components, so that it is easier to assign tasks, features, bug tracking, etc. Then define your roadmap. Enter features on components as different tickets and assign them accordingly to your roadmap. Maybe you know other systems, but having a good central database for assigning and completing tasks and being able to track progress with it is invaluable. trac is really good and with relatively low overhead compared with other systems to start with.
I think that most of the best science-fiction is firmly grounded in logic, and that is where most fantasy literature fails.
If you really want to compare bad science-fiction with weird, you should read the works of R.A. Lafferty.
That is true, but I do not think they implemented those lessons in Java, even when people like Richard P. Gabriel and Guy L. Steele helped developing and implementing the language.
Bah, you do not know what you are talking about. I wrote not only applications in COBOL, but even tools to help automate my compilations, and once even a remote login shell. For every language the Turing principle counts, and if your COBOL gives access to your operating system calls, then the sky is the limit.
Not different than C or C++ then.
The problem with Java is that it is too much hyped and sold to business types as the silver bullet. As Fred Brooks said more than 30 years ago : THERE IS NO SILVER BULLET (yelling intentional)! Is Java better than Cobol ? Probably not, as Java is also an imperative language. Do not fool yourself : object-oriented languages of the type SIMULA (and Java is not better than Simula, just the wheel reinvented) is nothing more than an imperative language with a small layer for dispatching on type, be it in the compilation or the run-time. However, Java does have a big marketing machine behind it and a whole lot of people who have stakes in it, and it is hyped in all kind of schools. Java is a success but for the wrong reasons. Compare it with any other type of language and it does not have any more advantages or deficiencies. It is just used much because it sounded cool 13 years ago.
There is a Dutch translation of Machiavelli, which has as title "The Ruler" (De heerser), instead of "The Prince", where the translator based his choice of wording that the original title "Il Principe" originally means more than someone of noble blood who is the son of a king. Lorenzo de Medici was a nobleman, but not of royal blood. This is in this meaning even closer to the concept of a politician than that of a prince.
Yeah, Apple only builds home computers.
This is 30-year old technology. I have at home an issue of an old electronics magazine where the same is shown for a 30 MFlops computer, built with TTL, which has a dispatching processor and 15 computing processors.
The real advantages in the for the desktop would be that they finally start using the ideas from 40 to 50 years ago : that IO needs separate processors where these operations can be offloaded. However, to be really effective, it becomes time that hard drive manufacturers start to apply RAID internally to their hard drives in order to increase the speed with which data can be transported between the IO processors and the peripheral.
My daily work entails building large embedded software. My speed is mainly capped by the IO from my harddrives, not by the amount of processing that can be done. If the speed of hard drives can be increased four fold (possible with RAID-5, but too expensive for the people that guard the budgets), then my processors would be utilized much better.
This story has already played out in Belgium : a so called child pornography searcher did not have an exactly clean slate regarding child abuse.
I remember in 1990, on my first job, I had to install a harddrive in a PC XT system. When I arrived, I installed it and the people using it where perplexed. Turned out they wanted 128kB extra memory in their 512 kB system, but the people who had to actually confirm the decision and create the order thought that they needed an extra harddrive. This was in a home for the elderly, ran by a mutuality (?).
The people using the computer where very knowledgeable, but they were not given purchase decision, or even the possibility to check the orders.
Regulation is the damping of a process. Compare with Watt's steam machine. The regulator is needed to make sure that the system does not blow itself up.
However, in order to get a good regulation, you should first understand the process and be able to show that there is a possibility of run-away, and then create a regulator for the process.
Yep, I even enjoyed elite on a ZX Spectrum, 48k and 8-bit Z80 processor. Wire drawn 3D.
You have to enable histappend in your .bashrc :
shopt -s histappend
that Bill Gates is a charlatan. No news there for me.
If you read the chapter about the history about the IEEE FP standard in Microprocessors : a quantitative approach, then you will see that in the past accuracy was already sacrificed for speed in supercomputers.
I think it is more a question of self defence. I am sure that Microsoft really wants to destroy any way that people can produce software which does not involve them or software that offers services without their involvement. They want to be the gatekeeper, they want to make money from all software usage across the whole world.
The very existence of Free Software, Open Source and even Apple undermines the notion that Microsoft wants to plant in everybodies head : that software is so complex that you need a company as big as them for research, development, production and support of software.
No Free Software or Open Source project has, AFAIK, been started to 'battle' Microsoft. Microsoft themselves, however, feel threatened and have initiated hostilities. It is everybodies right to defend themselves against this.
We are in such a case.
We are a multi-national, and in one research site tooling was developed for building, first all Win32 C++, later .NET C#.
Recently came the day that we got in bed with people who only work on Linux, so all our tools must now run on Linux. There is NO gui dependency here. In this case, Mono was really our rescue.
My experience is that they even do not make good mice. They always get terribly dirty, it is a collector for dust, particles and cruft.
I think that we all should have a healthy wage at the expense of the shareholders.
See subject...
We used to use Notes in the last 8 years, last quarter we changed to Outlook.
I never had Notes crash on me in those 8 years, while Outlook seems to crash every 2 or 3 weeks, and that is with restarting my computer every day.
And let's not talk about the fact that our mail is not maintained anymore by someone from the company, but outsourced to HP, just to be able to say if you cannot get access to your mail, that it is someone else fault.
And do not begin about the integration with calendaring and all that other shit. I use emacs + org-mode to organise my work and planning, and I am the one who is always on time, not the people who rely on Outlook for that.
And the interface of Outlook is still the same as PCTools 5.0, which included the same functionality, except that it was not network savvy and did not have e-mail.
Bah, or Continuus. But luckily Continuus has been bought by IBM, and I think they are end-of-life-ing it (I hope). Jurgen
Use Common Lisp, CLISP and SBCL can both compile to native executables, while having the best methods available for interactive testing.