Unweildy mice? Microsoft has consistently made* some of the best mice on the market. But thanks for giving an opportunity to mention it.
Complicated home WiFi gear? No more complicated than any other. Are you, say, engaging in a FUD campaign? Look beyond your hate of Microsoft, dood, you get to seem like a buffoon if you're not careful how you present your hatred.
(*do they make their mice, or contract it out is a good question.)
What I want is not schematics for the mod chip insertion, not the 'X Box Secrets' that the mod chips manipulate.
What I want is for crackers to start reverse engineering and releasing the code in the mod chips. I see no reason why we should buy mod chips from mod chip vendors. I have a PIC chip programmer and I could rig up an EEPROM programmer from existing known circuits. Let's liberate this knowledge from the mod chip vendors. It wants to be free!
I recently bought 3 Laserjet IIs, a Laserjet 3 and a Laserjet 4 at auction, with some other gear. They all had partially used toner cartridges. And I paid $5 for all of them.
Nobody's gonna tell me I can get a better deal on one of those inkspray printers. I gave away my Deskjet 500 when I got my first laser printer. The wobbly alignment, the ink that streaks if you sneeze on the page... there's nothing there I want.
Which, of course, begs the question of the medical industry 'causing problems' in the third world countries.
If your house is burning down and I live 300 miles away in an entirely different area, the fact that fire engines from my citie's fire department aren't rushing to your house doesn't indicate I caused a problem for you.
If it takes a little longer to develop, that's just fine.
Didn't you know? We're supposed to be rushing out into space because we need to be ready to leave soon. Because we want to continue being allowed to destroy this planet's biosphere at will.
The 'we need to hurry up efforts to get into space' people are serving multiple masters.
It took somebody with a garage (think Apple and others), a soldering iron, and a vision to bring it to everybody else.
Actually, it took somebody with a huge expensive FAB to produce the Microprocessors, to bring it to 'everybody else.' All those dirty hippies in the garage couldn't have done shit without LSI semiconductors from big, expensive corporations.
Still, it's romantic to think that a few guys in a garage could change the world....
Correct. Other than the Shuttle program itself...." etc. etc.
You're forgetting how many people have watched too much Star Trek and think no space exploration can be done unless we haul up a Winnebago-style meat wagon carrying passengers.
It's sad how many people think we can just hop away from the biosphere we are part of as if we're true individuals and not part of a complex system.
Microsoft saw and realized the Internet was out there.
They just thought for a time that private networks like AOL and their MSN would prevail.
MSN was included for free on Windows 95 beta. Anybody who was a beta tester, or who got ahold of a copy of a Windows 95 beta could dial up and wander around a free MSN with no charges for connection. It was a non-Internet MSN, with some connectivity to the Internet. They were basically shaking out a wholly Microsoft Network, similar to the proprietary parts of AOL.
The assumption seems to have been that the Internet would be overshadowed by proprietary networks.
And with regard to Mosaic: Microsoft licensed Mosaic. Andreesen, on the other hand, just stole the development team, closed the source, and ran with it. If Netscape had 'won' we would be in about the same shape as we are now. They were really big on proprietary extensions to the Netscape server technology hooked into by their browser, ya know.... Kinda like Microsoft with IIS only different, cuz the brand name was different.
Most early versions of Excel for MS-DOS came bundled with a 'Windows runtime' version.
That means that, while most early Excel users ran it from MS-DOS, they installed a little vestigal version of Windows, the stub of a full Windows 2, to run Excel from within.
I remember the truly underwhelming experience of running Excel with a Windows 2 runtime on my turbo XT. I think I still have the disks around. But then I still have a complete boxed set of Windows 1.03 in my collection.
OS/2 never really intended to go head to head against the 'Windows empire' either. There was a certain extreme faction of OS/2 advocates just like there is with Linux.
Some of them have crowded onto the 'linux platform' and they, plus former Amiga fanatics and various other malcontents, make up one of the noisier wings of the 'Linux community.' Some would say they detract from the value of Linux.
Some of us only buy a case or two and use them for years. It doesn't pay to put your expensive hardware in the cheapest case/power supply you can find. Those $35 case/power supply combos are fine if you just run common easily replaced hardware. If you've got expensive hardware, i.e. data acqusition and MPEG capture boards, you don't want the power supply to smoke it all. And that's what cheap power supplies are all about.
If you're a light duty gamer sort whose hardware goes obsolete ever six months, that's probably not a problem.
My laptop runs on an old car battery when I run it out on the back porch. It isn't much of a laptop anymore, of course. I bought it at a bankruptcy auction for a dollar and I'm just too cheap to round up the actual 'power pack' for it, or spend the huge amount for a replacement NiMH battery. So I tore it open, put on a common 1/8" audio jack to feed in the voltage, and it runs happily now on whatever 12 volt supply I feed it.
I'm looking for a tiny enough distro of Linux to put on it that has actual features, i.e. a C compiler and vi at a minimum. It's only a 386SX-25 and it only has 4 megs of RAM.
I still can't figure out why a distributed task like this isn't handled locally by a sound card in each room and everything distributed around the network as IP.
Go to Ebay. Buy a pile of SparcStation IPX boxes. They have 'good enough' audio output, can be had very cheaply these days, and can run NetBSD in a diskless and headless configuration so they won't make much noise. Boot them off a boot server, share over the sound files with NFS. Telnet into each machine from any other machine on the network to launch the sound you want at that location. The IPX is a little lunchbox case machine so it will be unobtrusive. And IPXs are built to last forever. And best of all they're real UNIX hardware, cheap Taiwanese clone machines that looks like something from WalMart.
Believe me, they know me, and lots of other people here. Our warranties are void the minute we take the thing out of the styrofoam packing.
Of course we disassemble stuff. Sometimes before ever even powering the thing up. I recently dismembered two Actimates Teletubbies. There's some cool, cool parts inside those things. An 8x10 array of dual-color LEDs to be exact. You have to basically "gut" the Teletubby (if you leave it powered on while you're gutting it, it says 'hooray' and 'oh-oh' and giggles and stuff while you're stripping out the stuffing and shredding it). Then you've got the plastic module. They used 'special screws' to hold the module together but did something new: the special screws are on breakaway pieces of plastic. So it's a simple twist with the pliers to break it open, but it's a VERY tamper apparent thing to do. My theory is it's designed for recyclability.
Anyhooow, people who don't take everything apart soon after acquiring it.... are they tourists to the geek community or what?
Microsoft would be wise to release a castrated not-really-Linux kit for the X-Box, the way Apple did with MkLinux for the old Macintoshes.
MkLinux wasn't really 'Linux' in the fact that it wasn't just additional files in the kernel source tree, that would enable people to download the kernel source and do builds the way it's done on other architectures. By doing so, Apple kept the classic Macintosh hardware more or less still secret. They took away a lot of the motivation for hackers to dig deep into the Apple hardware and reveal much more low level tech data.
Microsoft could release a binary-only thing for the Linux crowd that'd let the gas out of the push to develop a fully disclosed loader.
Not that they probably care. What segment of the X-Box market are we talking about here? 1% or less?
Win2k is the first real operating system Microsoft ever put out.
I'd disagree. Win2k is 'version 3.0' (actually version 4) of the first real operating system Microsoft ever put out.
1) NT 3.1 2) NT 3.51 3) NT 4.0 4) W2K
I remember trying NT 3.1 when it first came out. It wasn't all there. Horrible driver support and no real reason to run it. I stayed away for quite awhile.
Then I was working at a place where I was (component level) troubleshooting new Pentium-based embedded controllers (fresh from the board stuffer, eeek!), where we were sticking a drive with NT 3.51 on the boards and booting it as part of the test. NT 3.51 looked nice, and snappy, because at the time I was languishing in Windows 95. The threading in the GUI just made it so much nicer to use than an old GUI-on-DOS. NT 3.51 had a 'Unix-style' home directory structure. Each user has a home directory (not just a nebulous bunch of chunks of subdirectory under 'My Documents' like these days). In the 3.51 days, lots of Unix types started porting over all the goodies, i.e. the GNU tools started making it over.
In many technical respects NT 4.0 was a step backwards for Microsoft. They shoved in the new GUI model and the days of severe DLL hell began. NT 4.0 looks like a hasty shoveing of the Win95 desktop onto NT. And they screwed up the kernel space by putting graphics functions down at that layer where they did NOT belong.
Just like anything Microsoft, it took them quite a few 'burns' to make their 'real operating system' something anybody would want to use.
I'd correct your comment and say 'Win2k is the first viable version of the first real oparting system Microsoft ever put out.'
And even that might not be true: I never tried it, but I occasionally used to see boxed sets of Microsoft OS/2 1.0 out there in the surplus houses. Anybody ever do anything with it? Was it a 'real' Operating System?? Was it Microsoft's first?
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Unweildy mice? Microsoft has consistently made* some of the best mice on the market. But thanks for giving an opportunity to mention it.
Complicated home WiFi gear? No more complicated than any other. Are you, say, engaging in a FUD campaign? Look beyond your hate of Microsoft, dood, you get to seem like a buffoon if you're not careful how you present your hatred.
(*do they make their mice, or contract it out is a good question.)
What I want is not schematics for the mod chip insertion, not the 'X Box Secrets' that the mod chips manipulate.
What I want is for crackers to start reverse engineering and releasing the code in the mod chips. I see no reason why we should buy mod chips from mod chip vendors. I have a PIC chip programmer and I could rig up an EEPROM programmer from existing known circuits. Let's liberate this knowledge from the mod chip vendors. It wants to be free!
I recently bought 3 Laserjet IIs, a Laserjet 3 and a Laserjet 4 at auction, with some other gear. They all had partially used toner cartridges. And I paid $5 for all of them.
Nobody's gonna tell me I can get a better deal on one of those inkspray printers. I gave away my Deskjet 500 when I got my first laser printer. The wobbly alignment, the ink that streaks if you sneeze on the page... there's nothing there I want.
But you've failed to note that the proposed solution would kill those people.
It isn't simply a matter of changing their behavior. Eliminating them from the road would be fine, too.
Did the email from warisnottheanswer.com say that today is the day to rag on Popular Science magazine?
Which, of course, begs the question of the medical industry 'causing problems' in the third world countries.
If your house is burning down and I live 300 miles away in an entirely different area, the fact that fire engines from my citie's fire department aren't rushing to your house doesn't indicate I caused a problem for you.
If it takes a little longer to develop, that's just fine.
Didn't you know? We're supposed to be rushing out into space because we need to be ready to leave soon. Because we want to continue being allowed to destroy this planet's biosphere at will.
The 'we need to hurry up efforts to get into space' people are serving multiple masters.
It took somebody with a garage (think Apple and others), a soldering iron, and a vision to bring it to everybody else.
Actually, it took somebody with a huge expensive FAB to produce the Microprocessors, to bring it to 'everybody else.' All those dirty hippies in the garage couldn't have done shit without LSI semiconductors from big, expensive corporations.
Still, it's romantic to think that a few guys in a garage could change the world....
Correct. Other than the Shuttle program itself ...." etc. etc.
You're forgetting how many people have watched too much Star Trek and think no space exploration can be done unless we haul up a Winnebago-style meat wagon carrying passengers.
It's sad how many people think we can just hop away from the biosphere we are part of as if we're true individuals and not part of a complex system.
The fact that it must be licenced as public domain completely castrates the GPL provisions.
Motherboard form factors have changed exactly once over the entire life of the PC Clone market. From baby-AT to ATX.
There's also full-AT, and there are all the proprietary layouts. Every two years? Ridiculous.
Actually, it has to some degree.
Does your boss favor a Linux solution? Has your company switched over to the GPL for their software licenses?
(I expect the minority of people whose companies have to loudly answer yes. The rest of you know you can't say so....)
Microsoft saw and realized the Internet was out there.
They just thought for a time that private networks like AOL and their MSN would prevail.
MSN was included for free on Windows 95 beta. Anybody who was a beta tester, or who got ahold of a copy of a Windows 95 beta could dial up and wander around a free MSN with no charges for connection. It was a non-Internet MSN, with some connectivity to the Internet. They were basically shaking out a wholly Microsoft Network, similar to the proprietary parts of AOL.
The assumption seems to have been that the Internet would be overshadowed by proprietary networks.
And with regard to Mosaic: Microsoft licensed Mosaic. Andreesen, on the other hand, just stole the development team, closed the source, and ran with it. If Netscape had 'won' we would be in about the same shape as we are now. They were really big on proprietary extensions to the Netscape server technology hooked into by their browser, ya know.... Kinda like Microsoft with IIS only different, cuz the brand name was different.
Most early versions of Excel for MS-DOS came bundled with a 'Windows runtime' version.
That means that, while most early Excel users ran it from MS-DOS, they installed a little vestigal version of Windows, the stub of a full Windows 2, to run Excel from within.
I remember the truly underwhelming experience of running Excel with a Windows 2 runtime on my turbo XT. I think I still have the disks around. But then I still have a complete boxed set of Windows 1.03 in my collection.
OS/2 never really intended to go head to head against the 'Windows empire' either. There was a certain extreme faction of OS/2 advocates just like there is with Linux.
Some of them have crowded onto the 'linux platform' and they, plus former Amiga fanatics and various other malcontents, make up one of the noisier wings of the 'Linux community.' Some would say they detract from the value of Linux.
Some of us only buy a case or two and use them for years. It doesn't pay to put your expensive hardware in the cheapest case/power supply you can find. Those $35 case/power supply combos are fine if you just run common easily replaced hardware. If you've got expensive hardware, i.e. data acqusition and MPEG capture boards, you don't want the power supply to smoke it all. And that's what cheap power supplies are all about.
If you're a light duty gamer sort whose hardware goes obsolete ever six months, that's probably not a problem.
My laptop runs on an old car battery when I run it out on the back porch. It isn't much of a laptop anymore, of course. I bought it at a bankruptcy auction for a dollar and I'm just too cheap to round up the actual 'power pack' for it, or spend the huge amount for a replacement NiMH battery. So I tore it open, put on a common 1/8" audio jack to feed in the voltage, and it runs happily now on whatever 12 volt supply I feed it.
I'm looking for a tiny enough distro of Linux to put on it that has actual features, i.e. a C compiler and vi at a minimum. It's only a 386SX-25 and it only has 4 megs of RAM.
If you want to try SuSE inexpensively, you can buy a 7.3 version CD for $4.99 from CheapBytes.
correction to last sentence:
And best of all they're real UNIX hardware, not cheap Taiwanese clone machines that look like something from WalMart.
I still can't figure out why a distributed task like this isn't handled locally by a sound card in each room and everything distributed around the network as IP.
Go to Ebay. Buy a pile of SparcStation IPX boxes. They have 'good enough' audio output, can be had very cheaply these days, and can run NetBSD in a diskless and headless configuration so they won't make much noise. Boot them off a boot server, share over the sound files with NFS. Telnet into each machine from any other machine on the network to launch the sound you want at that location. The IPX is a little lunchbox case machine so it will be unobtrusive. And IPXs are built to last forever. And best of all they're real UNIX hardware, cheap Taiwanese clone machines that looks like something from WalMart.
Believe me, they know me, and lots of other people here. Our warranties are void the minute we take the thing out of the styrofoam packing.
Of course we disassemble stuff. Sometimes before ever even powering the thing up. I recently dismembered two Actimates Teletubbies. There's some cool, cool parts inside those things. An 8x10 array of dual-color LEDs to be exact. You have to basically "gut" the Teletubby (if you leave it powered on while you're gutting it, it says 'hooray' and 'oh-oh' and giggles and stuff while you're stripping out the stuffing and shredding it). Then you've got the plastic module. They used 'special screws' to hold the module together but did something new: the special screws are on breakaway pieces of plastic. So it's a simple twist with the pliers to break it open, but it's a VERY tamper apparent thing to do. My theory is it's designed for recyclability.
Anyhooow, people who don't take everything apart soon after acquiring it.... are they tourists to the geek community or what?
Bird poop?
We're talking fried bird carcasses here, dude.
Microsoft would be wise to release a castrated not-really-Linux kit for the X-Box, the way Apple did with MkLinux for the old Macintoshes.
MkLinux wasn't really 'Linux' in the fact that it wasn't just additional files in the kernel source tree, that would enable people to download the kernel source and do builds the way it's done on other architectures. By doing so, Apple kept the classic Macintosh hardware more or less still secret. They took away a lot of the motivation for hackers to dig deep into the Apple hardware and reveal much more low level tech data.
Microsoft could release a binary-only thing for the Linux crowd that'd let the gas out of the push to develop a fully disclosed loader.
Not that they probably care. What segment of the X-Box market are we talking about here? 1% or less?
Have they merged in the Interix functionality?
I have been wondering if that particular red-headed stepchild product was going to be mothballed.
Win2k is the first real operating system Microsoft ever put out.
I'd disagree. Win2k is 'version 3.0' (actually version 4) of the first real operating system Microsoft ever put out.
1) NT 3.1
2) NT 3.51
3) NT 4.0
4) W2K
I remember trying NT 3.1 when it first came out. It wasn't all there. Horrible driver support and no real reason to run it. I stayed away for quite awhile.
Then I was working at a place where I was (component level) troubleshooting new Pentium-based embedded controllers (fresh from the board stuffer, eeek!), where we were sticking a drive with NT 3.51 on the boards and booting it as part of the test. NT 3.51 looked nice, and snappy, because at the time I was languishing in Windows 95. The threading in the GUI just made it so much nicer to use than an old GUI-on-DOS. NT 3.51 had a 'Unix-style' home directory structure. Each user has a home directory (not just a nebulous bunch of chunks of subdirectory under 'My Documents' like these days). In the 3.51 days, lots of Unix types started porting over all the goodies, i.e. the GNU tools started making it over.
In many technical respects NT 4.0 was a step backwards for Microsoft. They shoved in the new GUI model and the days of severe DLL hell began. NT 4.0 looks like a hasty shoveing of the Win95 desktop onto NT. And they screwed up the kernel space by putting graphics functions down at that layer where they did NOT belong.
Just like anything Microsoft, it took them quite a few 'burns' to make their 'real operating system' something anybody would want to use.
I'd correct your comment and say 'Win2k is the first viable version of the first real oparting system Microsoft ever put out.'
And even that might not be true: I never tried it, but I occasionally used to see boxed sets of Microsoft OS/2 1.0 out there in the surplus houses. Anybody ever do anything with it? Was it a 'real' Operating System?? Was it Microsoft's first?