I seriously doubt that this could be proved. If you look at the post below, it makes the very good point that you can probably prove any finite sequence appears. However, I think it depends on how random Pi is. If it's truly random than obviously if you wait long enough you get Shakespeare. I think you can say that it would have to repeat in some way to avoid hitting any specific sequence.
I'm not so sure about that. I know this is truly pathetic, but I remember when the Charlie's Angels show was on they talked about Farrah Fawcett's contract. She was signed up for three years, and wanted to leave, and somehow the studio didn't have a signed contract from her. However, they had been paying her according to the terms of the contract, and so the studio sued her for breach of contract. The studio won, and she had to come back and do guest appearances on the show. I'm not claiming this is relevant, but it's a clear case of a situation where there was no signed contract and yet a judge ruled there was a breach. All the posters who talked about tricking HR might think twice about that as a legal tactic.
I went to the talk as well, and took quite a lot of notes on the Q+A, since the (Win98 running) streaming guys left during the break after the talk. However, the problem is that if I go to the bother and type them up, no one will ever see them, since this page hasn't gotten any new comments for a while. Sigh. If anyone is interested in my highly paraphrased notes, let me know.
I was thinking that it would be a good idea to do a distributed war against those who try to enforce patents that are worthless. We could bake special "Patent Pies" and fling them at the faces of David Wetherell et al whenever they appear in public. Maybe they could be made of my granny's patented pecan pie recipe.
Would this be violent and childish? Sure. But I see two things working in our favor. First, it's pretty damn violent and childish to abuse a clearly fatally broken system to put your competitors out of business, all the while claiming that it was they who stole from you. Second, the average/. reader is 14 years old with plenty of free time, so we could be really effective.
>> Unfortunately there's so much suckage that is ingrained into current systems (and no, its not confined to Microsoft platforms)
>Part of the problem with the Windows API sucking so bad, is that once a bug is found in a kernel function - M$ can't go fixing it, lest they break all the old apps that code around for the bug!
Actually, they do break them from release to release. When writing enterprise software (not me, but an uncle of mine) one frequently has to work around different revisions' bugs. I remember him complaining about how there were four windows platforms, Windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, and WFWG!
I would argue that the state-of-the-art in software engineering has changed quite a bit since MMM (not Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing) but that it's still right because people haven't learned. Managers still do things like adding more people to a late software project. Customers still ask for everything they could possibly use, reducing the probability that they will get anything to use at all. It's still possible to get through a CS degree at even very presitigious institutions like Harvey Mudd without having read MMM!
All MMM does is prevent you from making some of the most common fatal mistakes, such as I've listed above. People still make them (I make them, when I'm not careful), and avoiding them helps your chances for successs a lot. However, as Steve McConnell points out in SW Project Survival Guide, merely avoiding the most common mistakes is not enough to ensure success, just that you won't fail because of that particular mistake.
It seems that the difficulty in teaching SW engineering comes from the reluctance of academics and SW companies alike to recognize proper development methods as being important. I took a semester of SW development at Harvey Mudd, and it was incredibly helpful. Now, at least I can shout out, "Wait! That's suicide!", but I have a lot more to learn about how to do things right.
Actually, you make an interesting point about the copyright clause in the constitution. I find it unlikely that we would have made it through 200 years without some form of protecting people's expression of ideas. In some ways, it's a good thing that we started out with a reasonable copyright law, because we got the benefits of idea protection without the problems of perpetual protection, at least for a while.
Does anyone have any ideas on what copyright might be like if it came about later? Or for that matter, what would have happened to the US if it didn't have copyright?
This solution is effectively the same as the one proposed by the big content companies that Mr. Gilmore is criticising. The problem still remains that companies would be able to remove fair use through technical means, and also that any transfer to analog would result in the potential for completely uncontrolled copies. You haven't added any features.
As the other posters noted, the USPS does not lose money in the long term. You're not hurting them.
All you are doing is trying to reverse the currently favorable economics of sending out junk mail. Right now, you send out 1 million letters at some small amount each ($.30?) and get back a couple percent with orders. A customer acquisition cost of less than ten bucks. Not bad, and clearly quite profitable. I bought a wine cellar, and have been deluged with what I like to call "Rich idiot" catalogs for $100 dog food dispensers and $2500 suits of armor.
Returning the reply card and causing them to spend money handling it could conceivably reverse the profitability, which is why people do it. Okay, they do it because they are vindictive snots, but if they were rational this is why they would do it.
Even though this has been noted several times on/. before, it's important to remind people that in order to have full anonymity, one must pay cash. Using a credit card and the club card together links them in the database. For instance, notice what happens when you go into Wal-Mart with a new credit card. Usually the computer will ask the clerk to check your ID. After a few times, the computer will stop asking, because the card has not been used for any fradulent transactions.
Especially obvious given that in the article at the bottom of the page they talk about AOL being their biggest consumer competitor. How many "biggest competitors" can one software company have? See the AOL article.
A Faraday cage is only useful for keeping interference out. Shielding actually has to block the emission of fields, and is completely different. If it were possible to use a Faraday cage to do shielding, they would just to that to their conference rooms and computers, rather than using all the white noise to foil TEMPEST devices et al.
However, having the carpet grounded would in fact reduce, all though not eliminate the possibility of static electicity jumping. That's why I'm not sure the purpose really is to help static electricity. Consider the following two scenarios:
1. You walk around on a carpet, stealing electrons from it and giving it a charge of say, +x, and building up a negative charge on yourself of -x. You then touch the carpet, causing all those electrons to leap off you and arc back to the carpet. You could also touch a neutral piece of electronics (charge 0), which would accept half of your electrons (give or take) and fry itself.
2. You walk around on a grounded carpet, stealing electrons from it and building a charge on yourself. However, since it's grounded there is an unlimited number to steal. Furthermore, since the carpet isn't building up a huge negative charge, it has no problem giving up more electrons (say -2x). Thus, you could conceivably build up a *bigger* charge than before. This would result in more of a shock when transferring the charge back to a neutral piece of equipment.
Am I missing something here? Unless you're also wearing a conducting strap connected to your body and the bottoms of your feet, there's no benefit. In that case, you stay neutral because any electrons you steal are immediately returned to ground. Are the electronics that sensitive that the worker's can't just ground themselves when they're working on them?
Actually, we have seen it. It's called "AMD". They take the CISC instructions and translate them into RISC instructions that can be more highly optimized, especially in parallel. Read about it at this Byte article on the AMD K6 (nee Nexgen Nx586). For those who need to read about the latest and greatest, try this Althon architecture overview (about a third of the way down). Without RISC, AMD would never have been able to efficiently make use of all those "extra" logic units.
Sure, we'll probably never get to see how a mature RISC chip will perform, but even "CISC" chips are getting more RISCy. And maybe Compaq will really put some oomph behind the Alpha one of these days.
What's interesting is that another rather sophisticated software development book, Software Project Survival Guide by McConnell says that one or two person offices are much better than more open, less private cube farms. He cites "After 15 Years," an essay by Tom DeMArco and Timothy Lister, that was published in the book Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. They claim that workers who work in the top 25% of environments are 2.5 times more prodcutive than those in the bottom 25%. Maybe the addition of being in extremely close contact is enough to overcome the distractions.
I'd like to see more research. Take the same team, put them in cubes, offices, and war rooms, and see how they do. It strikes me as entirely possible that the practices they talk about in the article as only being possible in "extreme collocation" are in fact applicable to any development team. Thus, the real factor is the implementation of software development best practices, and not the work environment. And there's plenty of studies that show good software process to be helpful, so it's not surprising that there was a big jump in productivity.
Well, I'm off to do some software process, by myself in my office. Gotta get those requirements written down...
Walt
Re:Geeks need to make the effort
on
Gifts For Geeks
·
· Score: 1
Ahh, 'tis the season. Normally this would have been an easy "Overrated," since it's snippy and misses the obvious non-religious nature of the parent post. But seriously, I am an atheist and I still celebrate the togetherness of Christmas. Yes, there's a lot of commercialism, but it's fun to buy or make gifts that other people will enjoy.
If you still want to make the point that not everyone is from a cultural tradition that doesn't celebrate Christmas, fine. But then it wouldn't be an issue, would it?
Just think, I passed up the opportunity to mod the Dan Hayes troll account down to post this. What strange things Christmas does to us!
Anyone who works for the DOD stupid enough to respond to this? I don't work for them, but I know enough that anyone who does security for them isn't going to go out their way to tell the whole world about it. --Walt
Yesterday evening, the grid was under Level 3 emerngency which required manditory rolling blackouts.
Just so no one is mislead, there were no rolling blackouts last night. There's a white paper linked at the bottom of the other system status page at http://www2.caiso.com/awe/systemstatus.html that describes what really happens at each stage.
Stage three is when the CAISO predicts that operating reserves will drop below 1.5%, and unless resolved quickly will probably result in rolling blackouts of the various blocks around the state. But that did not happen last night, thank goodness. I've got a UPS for my two systems (bought a couple of weeks ago, before all the craziness), but it won't last through all of the blackout...
Yow. I have no hope of responding to the entiretity of this post, so I'll just adress the big error at the front. End-to-End does not refer to the same company providing all of the services along the way. If you read the first article, it has a link to a paper on the definition of End-to-End. Basically it's the principle that if you need certain guarantees about your data stream that are application specific, those guarantees should not be built in the lower levels of the system.
To use an example from the paper, when a file transfer completes, you want to check that the file got through with all the bits intact. However, in order to do that you need to get a checksum of the file and make sure the file has not been changed. If the application on the other end screwed up and sent an incorrect portion of the file, you need to detect that, and it must be done on the application level. Even if TCP/IP has perfect error checking and recovery, the application must perform an application specific check, and thus there is no point in making TCP/IP guarantee perfect transport.
The basic principle is "push as much intelligence as is needed at the edges of the network to the edges, and don't bother with making the intermediate network smart." Or even more concisely, "Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler". (einstein?)
I'd bet any amount that of those 16,000 subscribers, more than HALF got the machines home and immediately installed all sorts of useless crap and promptly trashed the system.
If your point is simply that the computer manufacturer is not at fault, fine, I agree that it is often a software problem. However, your statement seems to imply that you do regard software faults as normal. How could one conceivably install lots of software and "trash" a well-designed system?
The software the user is installing, or the software already installed is clearly unreliable. Regardless of how complex a computer is (and I agree with those who think a computer and its software are more complex than a car), not being able to use it without special training and temperment is, well, unique.
AOL's great success is allowing people who are not inclined to delve deep into the bowels of their systems to get online and, of all things, use the Internet. Now, they are not themselves very reliable, but if they can get a newbie online 50% of the time, that is infinitely better than the 1% that would succeed without AOL.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a computer geek and love what computers can do, even as I'm simultaneously disgusted with how poorly designed software is. That's why I am trying to move the team that I am on towards a higher CMM level, as a starting point. (CMM is the Software Engineering Institute's 0-5 scale for how good your software process is. I'm not sure if this was explained fully in the article)
I took a class on Software Project Management from Prof. Don Remer, and one of the things he talked about was how Sony has done Six Sigma for their manufacturing and design processes. They look at why and where things break, and fix them. It's a process of continuous improvement, not just some big push to get all the bugs out of a design. You're going to miss some bugs anyway, and if you fix them afterwards, the cost is huge. Anyway, according to him, Sony no longer turns on the TVs coming off the assembly line to see if they work. Believe it or not, this is a sign of good process.
The reason is that they have put a lot of effort into making sure their development process is good and it results in a refined manufacturing process. They don't turn on the TVs because they don't have to! The failure rate is so low that it costs more to test than to fix the one in a million (give or take an order of magnitude) that don't work. Software ain't got nothin' on that.
Well, unless you count all the times software is shipped without any testing, but that's for a different reason....
Isn't that about the funniest thing you've ever heard? I could barely believe that Gates wrote the game I was so nostalgic for. I certainly didn't know who he was back when I was playing it as a kid. I found that out in the very interesting interview that google popped up with Bill Gates. Unfortunately, getting dos 1.1 to run on modern hardware is apparently nontrivial, so I'll have to wait until I get my hands on an 8088 again...
Slashdot Mirror
I seriously doubt that this could be proved. If you look at the post below, it makes the very good point that you can probably prove any finite sequence appears. However, I think it depends on how random Pi is. If it's truly random than obviously if you wait long enough you get Shakespeare. I think you can say that it would have to repeat in some way to avoid hitting any specific sequence.
Walt
I'm not so sure about that. I know this is truly pathetic, but I remember when the Charlie's Angels show was on they talked about Farrah Fawcett's contract. She was signed up for three years, and wanted to leave, and somehow the studio didn't have a signed contract from her. However, they had been paying her according to the terms of the contract, and so the studio sued her for breach of contract. The studio won, and she had to come back and do guest appearances on the show. I'm not claiming this is relevant, but it's a clear case of a situation where there was no signed contract and yet a judge ruled there was a breach. All the posters who talked about tricking HR might think twice about that as a legal tactic.
Walt
I went to the talk as well, and took quite a lot of notes on the Q+A, since the (Win98 running) streaming guys left during the break after the talk. However, the problem is that if I go to the bother and type them up, no one will ever see them, since this page hasn't gotten any new comments for a while. Sigh. If anyone is interested in my highly paraphrased notes, let me know.
Walt
YHBT. Look at what is on his homepage: goatsex. Too bad my mod points just expired, or I would have been able to get rid of his stoopid posts.
Walt
I was thinking that it would be a good idea to do a distributed war against those who try to enforce patents that are worthless. We could bake special "Patent Pies" and fling them at the faces of David Wetherell et al whenever they appear in public. Maybe they could be made of my granny's patented pecan pie recipe.
/. reader is 14 years old with plenty of free time, so we could be really effective.
Would this be violent and childish? Sure. But I see two things working in our favor. First, it's pretty damn violent and childish to abuse a clearly fatally broken system to put your competitors out of business, all the while claiming that it was they who stole from you. Second, the average
Walt
>> Unfortunately there's so much suckage that is ingrained into current systems (and no, its not confined to Microsoft platforms)
>Part of the problem with the Windows API sucking so bad, is that once a bug is found in a kernel function - M$ can't go fixing it, lest they break all the old apps that code around for the bug!
Actually, they do break them from release to release. When writing enterprise software (not me, but an uncle of mine) one frequently has to work around different revisions' bugs. I remember him complaining about how there were four windows platforms, Windows 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, and WFWG!
Walt
I would argue that the state-of-the-art in software engineering has changed quite a bit since MMM (not Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing) but that it's still right because people haven't learned. Managers still do things like adding more people to a late software project. Customers still ask for everything they could possibly use, reducing the probability that they will get anything to use at all. It's still possible to get through a CS degree at even very presitigious institutions like Harvey Mudd without having read MMM!
All MMM does is prevent you from making some of the most common fatal mistakes, such as I've listed above. People still make them (I make them, when I'm not careful), and avoiding them helps your chances for successs a lot. However, as Steve McConnell points out in SW Project Survival Guide, merely avoiding the most common mistakes is not enough to ensure success, just that you won't fail because of that particular mistake.
It seems that the difficulty in teaching SW engineering comes from the reluctance of academics and SW companies alike to recognize proper development methods as being important. I took a semester of SW development at Harvey Mudd, and it was incredibly helpful. Now, at least I can shout out, "Wait! That's suicide!", but I have a lot more to learn about how to do things right.
Walt
Actually, you make an interesting point about the copyright clause in the constitution. I find it unlikely that we would have made it through 200 years without some form of protecting people's expression of ideas. In some ways, it's a good thing that we started out with a reasonable copyright law, because we got the benefits of idea protection without the problems of perpetual protection, at least for a while.
Does anyone have any ideas on what copyright might be like if it came about later? Or for that matter, what would have happened to the US if it didn't have copyright?
Walt
This solution is effectively the same as the one proposed by the big content companies that Mr. Gilmore is criticising. The problem still remains that companies would be able to remove fair use through technical means, and also that any transfer to analog would result in the potential for completely uncontrolled copies. You haven't added any features.
Walt
Don't mind me, I just got spam from emedemed1@libero.it.
As the other posters noted, the USPS does not lose money in the long term. You're not hurting them.
All you are doing is trying to reverse the currently favorable economics of sending out junk mail. Right now, you send out 1 million letters at some small amount each ($.30?) and get back a couple percent with orders. A customer acquisition cost of less than ten bucks. Not bad, and clearly quite profitable. I bought a wine cellar, and have been deluged with what I like to call "Rich idiot" catalogs for $100 dog food dispensers and $2500 suits of armor.
Returning the reply card and causing them to spend money handling it could conceivably reverse the profitability, which is why people do it. Okay, they do it because they are vindictive snots, but if they were rational this is why they would do it.
Walt
For those who haven't seen Plastic, it's at least worth a visit to see the new moderations. I think we need more posts with a (Score:0, Bullshit).
:(
Too bad Plastic requires your date of birth and zip code...
Walt
Even though this has been noted several times on /. before, it's important to remind people that in order to have full anonymity, one must pay cash. Using a credit card and the club card together links them in the database. For instance, notice what happens when you go into Wal-Mart with a new credit card. Usually the computer will ask the clerk to check your ID. After a few times, the computer will stop asking, because the card has not been used for any fradulent transactions.
Walt
Especially obvious given that in the article at the bottom of the page they talk about AOL being their biggest consumer competitor. How many "biggest competitors" can one software company have? See the AOL article.
Walt
A Faraday cage is only useful for keeping interference out. Shielding actually has to block the emission of fields, and is completely different. If it were possible to use a Faraday cage to do shielding, they would just to that to their conference rooms and computers, rather than using all the white noise to foil TEMPEST devices et al.
However, having the carpet grounded would in fact reduce, all though not eliminate the possibility of static electicity jumping. That's why I'm not sure the purpose really is to help static electricity. Consider the following two scenarios:
1. You walk around on a carpet, stealing electrons from it and giving it a charge of say, +x, and building up a negative charge on yourself of -x. You then touch the carpet, causing all those electrons to leap off you and arc back to the carpet. You could also touch a neutral piece of electronics (charge 0), which would accept half of your electrons (give or take) and fry itself.
2. You walk around on a grounded carpet, stealing electrons from it and building a charge on yourself. However, since it's grounded there is an unlimited number to steal. Furthermore, since the carpet isn't building up a huge negative charge, it has no problem giving up more electrons (say -2x). Thus, you could conceivably build up a *bigger* charge than before. This would result in more of a shock when transferring the charge back to a neutral piece of equipment.
Am I missing something here? Unless you're also wearing a conducting strap connected to your body and the bottoms of your feet, there's no benefit. In that case, you stay neutral because any electrons you steal are immediately returned to ground. Are the electronics that sensitive that the worker's can't just ground themselves when they're working on them?
Walt
Actually, we have seen it. It's called "AMD". They take the CISC instructions and translate them into RISC instructions that can be more highly optimized, especially in parallel. Read about it at this Byte article on the AMD K6 (nee Nexgen Nx586). For those who need to read about the latest and greatest, try this Althon architecture overview (about a third of the way down). Without RISC, AMD would never have been able to efficiently make use of all those "extra" logic units.
Sure, we'll probably never get to see how a mature RISC chip will perform, but even "CISC" chips are getting more RISCy. And maybe Compaq will really put some oomph behind the Alpha one of these days.
Walt
You're watching DVDs - you need a large screen (32" +) Widescreen set - Anything else isn't worth pumping DVDs through.
Because of course no one with a smaller TV would appreciate seeing movies in letterbox over Pan "N" Scan.
There are valid reasons for wanting a single, relatively inexpensive device to read all the major AV formats.
Walt
What's interesting is that another rather sophisticated software development book, Software Project Survival Guide by McConnell says that one or two person offices are much better than more open, less private cube farms. He cites "After 15 Years," an essay by Tom DeMArco and Timothy Lister, that was published in the book Peopleware: Productive Projects and Teams. They claim that workers who work in the top 25% of environments are 2.5 times more prodcutive than those in the bottom 25%. Maybe the addition of being in extremely close contact is enough to overcome the distractions.
I'd like to see more research. Take the same team, put them in cubes, offices, and war rooms, and see how they do. It strikes me as entirely possible that the practices they talk about in the article as only being possible in "extreme collocation" are in fact applicable to any development team. Thus, the real factor is the implementation of software development best practices, and not the work environment. And there's plenty of studies that show good software process to be helpful, so it's not surprising that there was a big jump in productivity.
Well, I'm off to do some software process, by myself in my office. Gotta get those requirements written down...
Walt
Ahh, 'tis the season. Normally this would have been an easy "Overrated," since it's snippy and misses the obvious non-religious nature of the parent post. But seriously, I am an atheist and I still celebrate the togetherness of Christmas. Yes, there's a lot of commercialism, but it's fun to buy or make gifts that other people will enjoy.
If you still want to make the point that not everyone is from a cultural tradition that doesn't celebrate Christmas, fine. But then it wouldn't be an issue, would it?
Just think, I passed up the opportunity to mod the Dan Hayes troll account down to post this. What strange things Christmas does to us!
Walt
Anyone who works for the DOD stupid enough to respond to this? I don't work for them, but I know enough that anyone who does security for them isn't going to go out their way to tell the whole world about it. --Walt
Yesterday evening, the grid was under Level 3 emerngency which required manditory rolling blackouts.
Just so no one is mislead, there were no rolling blackouts last night. There's a white paper linked at the bottom of the other system status page at http://www2.caiso.com/awe/systemstatus.html that describes what really happens at each stage.
Stage three is when the CAISO predicts that operating reserves will drop below 1.5%, and unless resolved quickly will probably result in rolling blackouts of the various blocks around the state. But that did not happen last night, thank goodness. I've got a UPS for my two systems (bought a couple of weeks ago, before all the craziness), but it won't last through all of the blackout...
Walt
Yow. I have no hope of responding to the entiretity of this post, so I'll just adress the big error at the front. End-to-End does not refer to the same company providing all of the services along the way. If you read the first article, it has a link to a paper on the definition of End-to-End. Basically it's the principle that if you need certain guarantees about your data stream that are application specific, those guarantees should not be built in the lower levels of the system.
To use an example from the paper, when a file transfer completes, you want to check that the file got through with all the bits intact. However, in order to do that you need to get a checksum of the file and make sure the file has not been changed. If the application on the other end screwed up and sent an incorrect portion of the file, you need to detect that, and it must be done on the application level. Even if TCP/IP has perfect error checking and recovery, the application must perform an application specific check, and thus there is no point in making TCP/IP guarantee perfect transport.
The basic principle is "push as much intelligence as is needed at the edges of the network to the edges, and don't bother with making the intermediate network smart." Or even more concisely, "Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler". (einstein?)
Walt
I'd bet any amount that of those 16,000 subscribers, more than HALF got the machines home and immediately installed all sorts of useless crap and promptly trashed the system.
If your point is simply that the computer manufacturer is not at fault, fine, I agree that it is often a software problem. However, your statement seems to imply that you do regard software faults as normal. How could one conceivably install lots of software and "trash" a well-designed system?
The software the user is installing, or the software already installed is clearly unreliable. Regardless of how complex a computer is (and I agree with those who think a computer and its software are more complex than a car), not being able to use it without special training and temperment is, well, unique.
AOL's great success is allowing people who are not inclined to delve deep into the bowels of their systems to get online and, of all things, use the Internet. Now, they are not themselves very reliable, but if they can get a newbie online 50% of the time, that is infinitely better than the 1% that would succeed without AOL.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a computer geek and love what computers can do, even as I'm simultaneously disgusted with how poorly designed software is. That's why I am trying to move the team that I am on towards a higher CMM level, as a starting point. (CMM is the Software Engineering Institute's 0-5 scale for how good your software process is. I'm not sure if this was explained fully in the article)
Walt
I took a class on Software Project Management from Prof. Don Remer, and one of the things he talked about was how Sony has done Six Sigma for their manufacturing and design processes. They look at why and where things break, and fix them. It's a process of continuous improvement, not just some big push to get all the bugs out of a design. You're going to miss some bugs anyway, and if you fix them afterwards, the cost is huge. Anyway, according to him, Sony no longer turns on the TVs coming off the assembly line to see if they work. Believe it or not, this is a sign of good process.
The reason is that they have put a lot of effort into making sure their development process is good and it results in a refined manufacturing process. They don't turn on the TVs because they don't have to! The failure rate is so low that it costs more to test than to fix the one in a million (give or take an order of magnitude) that don't work. Software ain't got nothin' on that.
Well, unless you count all the times software is shipped without any testing, but that's for a different reason....
Walt
Isn't that about the funniest thing you've ever heard? I could barely believe that Gates wrote the game I was so nostalgic for. I certainly didn't know who he was back when I was playing it as a kid. I found that out in the very interesting interview that google popped up with Bill Gates. Unfortunately, getting dos 1.1 to run on modern hardware is apparently nontrivial, so I'll have to wait until I get my hands on an 8088 again...
Walt
Goat sex, please mod down. URL does not match link.