But seriously, folks, I'd be real surprised if this IPO made any money. If you want to talk lawsuits, I think the real lawsuits might come after the IPO tanks. Don't underwriters have some responsibility to ensure that what they are underwriting isn't fraudulant?
Well, it was a question, not an assertion. But in any case, it is not a matter of origins but technology. Unix is over thirty years old, but it has been updated to more modern things like SMP and Transmeta chips. It is a modern OS. It is not that DOS is twenty years old. It is that DOS is still designed to run on twenty year old systems. It still doesn't even do 32-bit addresses. It still doesn't even take advantage of 80386 instructions.
(BTW: I suppose you could say that the DOS schedular is laughable, in that it has none... I used to work with a DOS add-on scheduler, which is a tale in itself. (Genre:horror))
Personally, I do see a future for DOS in the embedded world. But I see fewer reasons to bother with it on the desktop.
Yes, there was a lot of crap back then, but the general level of originality was much higher. How many good, original games do we get now days? Maybe one a year, at best?
Is it even possible to refuse to allow your books to be sold on Amazon? Authors don't typically have that sort of power, and Amazon lists literally everything in print (and more). For exmple, Richard Stallman has about twenty or so things listed. (Most "Special Order".) Obviously if anyone would refuse to sell through Amazon, he would. But how could he? He'd have to demand that his publisher not sell to Amazon. His publisher would likely laugh at him.
People tend to think authors have all this power over their work. They don't (unless their last name is Chrichton or King).
I don't know...I know that I stopped going to arcades about six years ago, mostly because of the stultifingly unoriginal sorts of games that began to fill them. Last I looked, every game was either something like "Mortal Combat" or some sort of racing game. Boring, boring, boring.
What happened to the truly original sorts of games, like "Tempest", or "Joust", or "Robotron"? Those are the sorts of things that will keep your interest.
Games used to have style. Games used to have Panache. It is hard to describe exactly how it was, but these days, most games are really just rehashes of other games. Nineteen different versions of "Doom". Thirty different versions of "Warcraft". Very, very few are really, truly original.
When I started gaming, back in 1983 or so, nearly all games were as original the Warcrafts or the Dooms. Or so it seemed.
Are there any newer games that use DOS? It seems as if MS has been successful at getting game makers to use Windows. I think XCom-Apocalypse was the last game I played that used DOS. (BTW: are you talking about Master of Orion, or Master of Orion II? Master of Orion II came with both DOS and Win32 versions on the same CD. (The DOS version performed better, but with the hardware advances since then, it doesn't really matter today.)
The thing with embedded Linux vs. DOS is that (it seems to me) there are many things that you just don't need in many embedded applications. A small, dedicated device usually doesn't need multiple users, security, or multitasking. Those things just become overhead. I worked for years on a cash register application on hardware with essentially no OS, at it was fine for the task at hand.
It's funny, I remember a number of places I used to work at in the late eighties had a standard "\bin" directory for DOS developement...
The one time I wish I had freedos was when I was installing Linux on an older Pentium machine. I had wanted to use nothing but open source tools to get it going, but the CD-ROM was not bootable. I had to boot the thing on something to get the drive partitioned.
I personally don't have much use for DOS emulation on my Linux box. Perhaps if I didn't have the old Windows thing for games... But I am somewhat interested in a DOS type thing for embedded systems, especially if it could be extended beyond what DOS itself does.
Funny, yes, but then, not all that silly when you think about it. Pretty impressive to predict in 1983 that a then small computer company would be a world-ruling monolith by 2019.
Their only mistake was in picking a hardware company instead of a software company. But then, who'd have thought that a little, podunk company called "Micro-soft" would be heading for world rule?
While it is very nice to have some sort of non-MS DOS available (at least for us gamers), it still basically 15-20 year old technology. How much longer do you think DOS, or DOS emulation, will be necessary?
What makes it even worse is that browsers have been asking "Do you want to make X your default browser?" for years. Up until now, it merely meant pretty much what it said, that the new browser would come up whenever html was referenced.
Had I had the misfortune of having to install this, I'm sure I would have just said yes, without though as well.
I had trouble with the NT command line version as well, but found that if you run the graphics version, but turn off the screensaver mode and minimize it, it runs pretty much at the same speed.
I run it constantly under NT. It seems to have no effect on anything else I run, which includes CPU intensive stuff like DevStudio.
The only thing it changes is the task manager performance display, which always shows a processor use of 100%. But given the amount of time I spend compiling, believe me, if it took even 1% of the CPU time I used, it'd be gone.
How odd... I have the exact same box, but running NT. It takes me 14 hours to run a block, but the odd thing is, with graphics turned on, it took only 25...
We also must have started around the same time, because I've down 342 units as of today.
The numbers are interesting. At three hundred or so blocks, we're at more than almost 98% of the people. As far as I can tell (and it is only an estimate, look at the charts), 5% of the people are responsible for something like 99% of the blocks processed. (My poor little Pentium, which runs under a different account, has only managed 56 blocks, and yet it is in the 86% percentile.)
Under Windows, running as a screen saver doubles the time it takes to process a block. On a PII 350 running Windows NT, turning all the graphics off took me from 25 hours a block to 14 hours a block.
I'd imagine that X would be worse, if anything, given the way Windows trades stability for graphics speed.
If your interest is throughput (either as a score whore, or because you want to donate as much as you can) I'd stay away from any X client.
It matters because the bandwidth is not there to make the students happy. It is there to satisfy the desires of those who pay for the university, which include taxpayers either directly, or through government research grants, scholarships, low interest loans, etc, etc. Those desires usually boil down to:
1) Educate students.
2) Conduct research.
Downloading linux or bsd could possibly satisfy either of those. Downloading music almost definitely does not.
Hell, try explaining to the average taxpayer why they need to pay more to the public universities so that students can download music instead of buying CDs.
Excuse me? Do you think that colleges do this out of the kindness of their hearts? What do you think that tuition is for? Technology Fees? Housing Fees?
You forgot tax money. Most colleges are partially funded by taxes. So it isn't just your dime we are talking about, but mine as well. (As an old-fart taxpayer.) I know that my old school (UCSD) got about 3/4s of its income from sources other than tuition and student fees.
Now personally, I don't mind if someone listens to music, plays half-life, downloads porn, whatever over those lines, however, I mind very much if those doing so clog the bandwidth so much that students trying to use the thing for real work, or others trying to use it for real research, can't get done what they need to get done. Remember, if you live in my state, it is my dime too.
On the other hand, if you are at a completely private school like Harvard or something, go wild.
Some things never change. Back in my day, it was talk and rn that got banned. Fortunately, they banned it by removing execute permission from the files. (We only had terminals in those days.) Fortunately, those of us in the know had made personal copies.
No one ever noticed that the execute bit was set on a couple of core files.:)
Unfortunately, I did not enjoy your post.
You'll hear from my lawyers in the morning...
But seriously, folks, I'd be real surprised if this IPO made any money. If you want to talk lawsuits, I think the real lawsuits might come after the IPO tanks. Don't underwriters have some responsibility to ensure that what they are underwriting isn't fraudulant?
(Or am I just being niave?)
Well, it was a question, not an assertion. But in any case, it is not a matter of origins but technology. Unix is over thirty years old, but it has been updated to more modern things like SMP and Transmeta chips. It is a modern OS. It is not that DOS is twenty years old. It is that DOS is still designed to run on twenty year old systems. It still doesn't even do 32-bit addresses. It still doesn't even take advantage of 80386 instructions.
(BTW: I suppose you could say that the DOS schedular is laughable, in that it has none... I used to work with a DOS add-on scheduler, which is a tale in itself. (Genre:horror))
Personally, I do see a future for DOS in the embedded world. But I see fewer reasons to bother with it on the desktop.
Yes, there was a lot of crap back then, but the general level of originality was much higher. How many good, original games do we get now days? Maybe one a year, at best?
Is it even possible to refuse to allow your books to be sold on Amazon? Authors don't typically have that sort of power, and Amazon lists literally everything in print (and more). For exmple, Richard Stallman has about twenty or so things listed. (Most "Special Order".) Obviously if anyone would refuse to sell through Amazon, he would. But how could he? He'd have to demand that his publisher not sell to Amazon. His publisher would likely laugh at him.
People tend to think authors have all this power over their work. They don't (unless their last name is Chrichton or King).
I don't know...I know that I stopped going to arcades about six years ago, mostly because of the stultifingly unoriginal sorts of games that began to fill them. Last I looked, every game was either something like "Mortal Combat" or some sort of racing game. Boring, boring, boring.
What happened to the truly original sorts of games, like "Tempest", or "Joust", or "Robotron"? Those are the sorts of things that will keep your interest.
Games used to have style. Games used to have Panache. It is hard to describe exactly how it was, but these days, most games are really just rehashes of other games. Nineteen different versions of "Doom". Thirty different versions of "Warcraft". Very, very few are really, truly original.
When I started gaming, back in 1983 or so, nearly all games were as original the Warcrafts or the Dooms. Or so it seemed.
Are there any newer games that use DOS? It seems as if MS has been successful at getting game makers to use Windows. I think XCom-Apocalypse was the last game I played that used DOS. (BTW: are you talking about Master of Orion, or Master of Orion II? Master of Orion II came with both DOS and Win32 versions on the same CD. (The DOS version performed better, but with the hardware advances since then, it doesn't really matter today.)
The thing with embedded Linux vs. DOS is that (it seems to me) there are many things that you just don't need in many embedded applications. A small, dedicated device usually doesn't need multiple users, security, or multitasking. Those things just become overhead. I worked for years on a cash register application on hardware with essentially no OS, at it was fine for the task at hand.
It's funny, I remember a number of places I used to work at in the late eighties had a standard "\bin" directory for DOS developement...
The one time I wish I had freedos was when I was installing Linux on an older Pentium machine. I had wanted to use nothing but open source tools to get it going, but the CD-ROM was not bootable. I had to boot the thing on something to get the drive partitioned.
I personally don't have much use for DOS emulation on my Linux box. Perhaps if I didn't have the old Windows thing for games... But I am somewhat interested in a DOS type thing for embedded systems, especially if it could be extended beyond what DOS itself does.
As in Unix, most DOS programmers seem determined to reinvent the wheel where things like options-parsing are concerned.
Funny, yes, but then, not all that silly when you think about it. Pretty impressive to predict in 1983 that a then small computer company would be a world-ruling monolith by 2019.
Their only mistake was in picking a hardware company instead of a software company. But then, who'd have thought that a little, podunk company called "Micro-soft" would be heading for world rule?
God, I wish....
But I suspect the problem here is the huge number of DOS command line programs that use '/' the way Unix uses '-'.
While it is very nice to have some sort of non-MS DOS available (at least for us gamers), it still basically 15-20 year old technology. How much longer do you think DOS, or DOS emulation, will be necessary?
What makes it even worse is that browsers have been asking "Do you want to make X your default browser?" for years. Up until now, it merely meant pretty much what it said, that the new browser would come up whenever html was referenced.
Had I had the misfortune of having to install this, I'm sure I would have just said yes, without though as well.
I had trouble with the NT command line version as well, but found that if you run the graphics version, but turn off the screensaver mode and minimize it, it runs pretty much at the same speed.
I run it constantly under NT. It seems to have no effect on anything else I run, which includes CPU intensive stuff like DevStudio.
The only thing it changes is the task manager performance display, which always shows a processor use of 100%. But given the amount of time I spend compiling, believe me, if it took even 1% of the CPU time I used, it'd be gone.
How odd... I have the exact same box, but running NT. It takes me 14 hours to run a block, but the odd thing is, with graphics turned on, it took only 25...
We also must have started around the same time, because I've down 342 units as of today.
The numbers are interesting. At three hundred or so blocks, we're at more than almost 98% of the people. As far as I can tell (and it is only an estimate, look at the charts), 5% of the people are responsible for something like 99% of the blocks processed. (My poor little Pentium, which runs under a different account, has only managed 56 blocks, and yet it is in the 86% percentile.)
Under Windows, running as a screen saver doubles the time it takes to process a block. On a PII 350 running Windows NT, turning all the graphics off took me from 25 hours a block to 14 hours a block.
I'd imagine that X would be worse, if anything, given the way Windows trades stability for graphics speed.
If your interest is throughput (either as a score whore, or because you want to donate as much as you can) I'd stay away from any X client.
Ah....forgive my ignorance. As a personal user on a NT system and a personal Linux box, I'd found it to be completely unobtrusive.
Obviously I'm not a network admin.
It matters because the bandwidth is not there to make the students happy. It is there to satisfy the desires of those who pay for the university, which include taxpayers either directly, or through government research grants, scholarships, low interest loans, etc, etc. Those desires usually boil down to:
1) Educate students.
2) Conduct research.
Downloading linux or bsd could possibly satisfy either of those. Downloading music almost definitely does not.
Hell, try explaining to the average taxpayer why they need to pay more to the public universities so that students can download music instead of buying CDs.
Uh....since Seti runs at a near idle priority, how can it be "wasting" cpu time?
Nothing that complex.
More like:
cp talk ~/core
chmod +x core
This worked until the ops started noticing running processes called 'core'.
(Prior to this, people had tried making local copies, but the ops had taken to searching the home directories for "talk" and "rn".)
After they caught on to the core thing, it was:
cp talk ~/a.out
chmod +x a.out
Step 1: Create "confessor" website.
Step 2: Collect data.
Step 3: Send out blackmail letters.
Step 4: Collect cash.
Excuse me? Do you think that colleges do this out of the kindness of their hearts? What do you think that tuition is for? Technology Fees? Housing Fees?
You forgot tax money. Most colleges are partially funded by taxes. So it isn't just your dime we are talking about, but mine as well. (As an old-fart taxpayer.) I know that my old school (UCSD) got about 3/4s of its income from sources other than tuition and student fees.
Now personally, I don't mind if someone listens to music, plays half-life, downloads porn, whatever over those lines, however, I mind very much if those doing so clog the bandwidth so much that students trying to use the thing for real work, or others trying to use it for real research, can't get done what they need to get done. Remember, if you live in my state, it is my dime too.
On the other hand, if you are at a completely private school like Harvard or something, go wild.
Some things never change. Back in my day, it was talk and rn that got banned. Fortunately, they banned it by removing execute permission from the files. (We only had terminals in those days.) Fortunately, those of us in the know had made personal copies.
:)
No one ever noticed that the execute bit was set on a couple of core files.