Just for sheer novelty value, I still have a working Intellec 8, with the 8080 UPGRADE card (from an 8008!) installed. It's connected to an ASR-33 teletype printer with perf-tape punch and reader (for those backups), and a pair of iCOM Frugal Floppy 8" drives in a case with power supply.
18 slot machine, 16 Kb of RAM, 16 Kb of ROM. Dozens of red LEDs, monitoring the state of every signal line. Rocker switches to load in every address and data bit, and a momentary rocker to single-step the processor.
Does some spokesperson appear in an exciting new commercial and make a speech along the lines of:
Today, we celebrate the first glorious anniversary of the Information Purification Directives. We have created, for the first time in all history, a garden of pure ideology where each worker may bloom secure from the pests of contradictory and confusing truths. Our Unification of Thoughts is more powerful a weapon than any fleet or army on earth. We are one people, with one will, one resolve, one cause. Our enemies shall talk themselves to death and we will bury them with their own confusion. We shall prevail!
> So how would Microsoft channel all that money into SCO > to keep them going?
Buy a UNIX software licence, in spite of not shipping a UNIX or Linux product. License some patent for an 'undisclosed fee'. (One leaked report put this at an initial payment of 10 million US dollars.) Done as of May 19. 2003.
Transponder, not reciever. A transponder device typically both receives data, and transmits re-encoded data, either continuously or in response to a received signal.
Good examples applicible here include the Followit GPS transponder, a gadget the size of a large cell phone that includes a GPS receiver, and a GSM modem for two-way communication.
The Safe-ID system, used for harbor craft, receives GPS data and transmits the vessel's position over a UHF or maritime VHF radio link. These are used in high traffic ports as part of the port control system.
Apple actually evaluated what trying to 'embrace and extend' X to do what was needed.
What Apple is providing is an Apple-original window system that is graphics model agnostic, as well as a vector drawing system that maps very well to PDF, which is a sort of PostScript without the non-graphical operators. This is packaged under the name 'Quartz' for easy reference by Marketing types.
The window system is designed to support both buffered (like an offscreen PixMap) and unbuffered windows, and is graphics model agnostic, working equally well with QuickDraw, OpenGL, the Quartz drawing engine, X11, and third party solutions, and managing window geometry for the Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa environments. The server portion is a hybridization of screen arbiter and compositor models (and if that's all Geek to you, don't worry about it).
The Quartz drawing engine supports drawing primitives similar to the graphics primitives that might be found in the DPSClient single-operator primitives library for X and NeXTSTEP. There are no math and flow control primitives, as these can be done more efficiently in the native
compiled code. There are no DPS or PS wrappers, as this optimization for server-side graphics is not needed in the Quartz client-side graphics model.
The operations provide imaging and path construction and filling operations as well as some interesting other bits that map well into the direction that 2D drawing is headed. (See Longhorn, or the X raster projects like Render.) The drawing engine can output to rasters (like a window!), as well as PS and PDF streams to feed printers. The Mac OS X printing system takes advantage of the capabilities of Quartz to support all sorts of printers, and make the life of printer driver developers much, much easier.
Things we'd need to add/extend in X Window software (protocol+server+manager+fonts+...):
1) Extend font server and services to vend outlines and antialiased masks, support more font types, handle font subsetting.
2) Extend drawing primitives to include PS-like path operations.
3) Add dithering and phase controls.
4) Add ColorSync support for drawing and imaging operations, display calibration
5) Add broad alpha channel support and Porter-Duff compositing, both for drawing in a window and for interactions between windows.
6) Add support for general affine transforms of windows
7) Add support for mesh-warps of windows
8) Make sure that OpenGL and special video playback hardware support is integrated, and behaves well with all above changes.
9) We find that we typically stream several hundred megabytes/second of commands and textures for interactive OpenGL use, so transport efficiency could be an issue.
So, yes, it looks like we can use X for Quartz. All we need do is define extensions for and upgrade the font server, add dithering with phase controls to the X marking engine, add a transparency model to X imaging with Porter-Duff compositing support, make sure GLX gets in, upgrade the window buffering to include transparency, mesh warps, and really good resampling, and maybe augment the transport layer a bit.
Ummm... There doesn't appear to be much code left from the original X server in the drawing path or windowing machinery, and it doesn't appear that apps relying on these extensions can work with any other X server. Just what did we gain from this?
It turns out that what Apple has in place actually makes a pretty good foundation for a X11 server. An X server would not be such a good foundation for what Apple needs.
My favorite bit: > Microsoft spokesman Sean Sundwall said AtStake > contacted Microsoft Tuesday night to express > disappointment in the report and to say it did not > reflect AtStake's position.
So, if AtStake has all this integrity and independence, why do they contact someone at Microsoft to do the old "No! No, Master, it wasn't us! It was the tricksy CTO. But we fires him, yes! Is Master pleased with us?" routine?
> "Microsoft had absolutely nothing to do with > AtStake's internal personnel decision," Sundwall said.... pleased that he had maintained plausible deniability.
I've got one out in the garage, along with a pair of 8" Frugal Floppy drives in a case with controller and power supply. It still boots, but the PROM programmer is fried.
Please remember the cable is under TENSION, from the anchor mass. A break in the atmosphere or low earth orbit (from that plane or low orbital junk) will result in most of the mass moving away from the Earth, rather than toward it.
Second, the energy from whatever part of the cable is 'crashing down' will be dissapated over the length of the cable, and over a period of time as the cable fragment strikes the atmosphere. That is very different from the near instantaneous point release of energy of a weapon.
> I guess that if you unplug power supply in any power > plant, it stops to produce electricity quite quickly.
So, when we disconnect shore power from a nuclear sub, take it out to sea, and dive, the nuclear power plant is shut down? Or is there a Top Secret Invisible Extension Cord?
Technology? Hah! They already have all the customer's data. All the documents. All the databases. That should be sufficient to make the customer do their part and fork over more cash.
> If I was an IT Manager, I wouldn't personally be happy > that having signed up to a subscription programme, I was > now being told that the three-year contract wouldn't > cover the next upgrade of the Operating System.
Heh. Happiness is is irrelevent. The check cleared...
That's the nice thing about being a de-facto industry standard. MSFT doesn't need to spend any money on this. Float some papers, announce some programs as a sop to the press and IS weenies, sure, but they need not actually spend money on anything. They'll still have the subscription contracts, and they'll still get all those sales from their PC VARs. The money keeps right on rolling in.
You don't seriously think any business or government IT buyer would consider switching to another OS, do you? Oh, sure, there's the odd European city government, but they'll come crawling back. Momentum, retraining costs, and the transient drop in productivity during a switchover would get that buyer fired pronto. All the worms and security bugs in the world (which they do seem to have:-) won't affect this.
All their computers, all their disks, all their data is locked into Microsoft. They're hostages. You don't bother to do favors to hostages. You just squeeze them dry.
They'll pay for Longhorn. They'll pay for subscription access to patches. (Just wait a few months...)
Is he sure about that? With so many satisfied customers, perhaps Mrs Spammer resented his spending all that time with the computer and found a little solace elsewhere?
What Apple is providing is an Apple-original window system that is graphics model agnostic, as well as a vector drawing system that maps very well to PDF, which is a sort of PostScript without the non-graphical operators. This is packaged under the name 'Quartz' for easy reference by Marketing types.
The window system is designed to support both buffered (like an offscreen PixMap) and unbuffered windows, and is graphics model agnostic, working equally well with QuickDraw, OpenGL, the Quartz drawing engine, X11, and third party solutions, and managing window geometry for the Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa environments. The server portion is a hybridization of screen arbiter and compositor models (and if that's all Geek to you, don't worry about it).
The Quartz drawing engine supports drawing primitives similar to the graphics primitives that might be found in the DPSClient single-operator primitives library for X and NeXTSTEP. There are no math and flow control primitives, as these can be done more efficiently in the native compiled code. There are no DPS or PS wrappers, as this optimization for server-side graphics is not needed in the Quartz client-side graphics model.
The operations provide imaging and path construction and filling operations as well as some interesting other bits that map well into the direction that 2D drawing is headed. (See Longhorn, or the X raster projects.) The drawing engine can output to rasters (like a window!), as well as PS and PDF streams to feed printers. The Mac OS X printing system takes advantage of the capabilities of Quartz to support all sorts of printers, and make the life of printer driver developers much, much easier.
Things we'd need to add/extend in X Window software (protocol+server+manager+fonts+...):
1) Extend font server and services to vend outlines and antialiased masks, support more font types, handle font subsetting. 2) Extend drawing primitives to include PS-like path operations. 3) Add dithering and phase controls. 4) Add ColorSync support for drawing and imaging operations, display calibration 5) Add broad alpha channel support and Porter-Duff compositing, both for drawing in a window and for interactions between windows. 6) Add support for general affine transforms of windows 7) Add support for mesh-warps of windows 8) Make sure that OpenGL and special video playback hardware support is integrated, and behaves well with all above changes. 9) We find that we typically stream 200 Mb/sec of commands and textures for interactive OpenGL use, so transport efficiency could be an issue.
So, yes, it looks like we can use X for Quartz. All we need do is define extensions for and upgrade the font server, add dithering with phase controls to the X marking engine, add a transparency model to X imaging with Porter-Duff compositing support, make sure GLX gets in, upgrade the window buffering to include transparency, mesh warps, and really good resampling, and maybe augment the transport layer a bit.
Ummm... There doesn't appear to be much code left from the original X server in the drawing path or windowing machinery, and it doesn't appear that apps relying on these extensions can work with any other X server. Just what did we gain from this?
Oh, yeah. My mom can run an xterm session on her desktop now without downloading the Apple X11 package, a shareware X server or buying a software package.
>> That's _thee_ key feature Apple needed to do the fully >> OpenGL desktop, > > But there have always been tools to circumvent the > power-of-two limitation. You can always use only part > of a texture on a primitive (triangle, quad, etc.).
The gotcha here is that Apple needs to take a window backing store, a buffer, and apply that as a texture to the quad. Doing this by the old slice-n-dice into assorted power-of-two tiles is a pain, and an intermediate copy that just slows things down.
It particularly gets in the way if the non-square content happens to be a video DMA stream.
Non-power-of-two textures, buffer as texture, and a few other details are all needed for Apple's Quartz Extreme trick. The Longhorn guys will figure this out eventually...
On a small dish satellite receiver (DirectTV or Dish Network) there's a bit in the antenna (the LNB) that's switched between even and odd transponders by feeding a DC (one of tw voltage levels) signal from the reciever back to the antenna. The signal switches the LNB between clockwise and counterclockwise circular polarization. Even transponders use one polarization, and odd transponders use the other.
When you ran the switch test, you caused control signals to be sent to the relays that switch between two LNBs in your antenna (these are usually low frequency tone controls). The test repeatedly cycled the relays, which tends to clean the contacts. This then allowed the differetn DC signal levels to reach the antenna to switch the LNB to get odd transponders.
Odds are pretty good that you have one or more connectors in the coax running to the antenna that are not sealed and have a little corrosion in them, weakening the DC control signal. Less likely but possible causes include a marginal switch, or a long run of lower quality cable such as RG/59.
It wouldn't surprise me at all to see Microsoft product marketing folks at the Appel developer conference, busily taking notes on what they should tell Windows developers at their October conference.
Don't act surprised when you see design and invention patents beign filed by Apple. That's a reasonable path to eventually get compensation for all that 'free' R&D.
Patents may be viewed as evil and wrong, but swiping someone else's work for one's own benefit doesn't strike me as a way to build good karma.
Slashdot Mirror
> Congratulations China, welcome to the 1960's!
Uh huh.
Care to guess how the next crew is getting to the "International Space Station"?
Hint: It involves a big ole multi-stage rocket of proven reliability, and a capsule remarkably similar to what China just put in orbit.
Just for sheer novelty value, I still have a working Intellec 8, with the 8080 UPGRADE card (from an 8008!) installed. It's connected to an ASR-33 teletype printer with perf-tape punch and reader (for those backups), and a pair of iCOM Frugal Floppy 8" drives in a case with power supply.
18 slot machine, 16 Kb of RAM, 16 Kb of ROM. Dozens of red LEDs, monitoring the state of every signal line. Rocker switches to load in every address and data bit, and a momentary rocker to single-step the processor.
Wheeee!
> So how would Microsoft channel all that money into SCO
r ch ives.asp?ArticleID=43532
> to keep them going?
Buy a UNIX software licence, in spite of not shipping a UNIX or Linux product. License some patent for an 'undisclosed fee'. (One leaked report put this at an initial payment of 10 million US dollars.) Done as of May 19. 2003.
The hand in the sock puppet:
http://www.crn.com/sections/BreakingNews/dailya
Transponder, not reciever. A transponder device typically both receives data, and transmits re-encoded data, either continuously or in response to a received signal.
Good examples applicible here include the Followit GPS transponder, a gadget the size of a large cell phone that includes a GPS receiver, and a GSM modem for two-way communication.
The Safe-ID system, used for harbor craft, receives GPS data and transmits the vessel's position over a UHF or maritime VHF radio link. These are used in high traffic ports as part of the port control system.
Apple actually evaluated what trying to 'embrace and extend' X to do what was needed. What Apple is providing is an Apple-original window system that is graphics model agnostic, as well as a vector drawing system that maps very well to PDF, which is a sort of PostScript without the non-graphical operators. This is packaged under the name 'Quartz' for easy reference by Marketing types. The window system is designed to support both buffered (like an offscreen PixMap) and unbuffered windows, and is graphics model agnostic, working equally well with QuickDraw, OpenGL, the Quartz drawing engine, X11, and third party solutions, and managing window geometry for the Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa environments. The server portion is a hybridization of screen arbiter and compositor models (and if that's all Geek to you, don't worry about it). The Quartz drawing engine supports drawing primitives similar to the graphics primitives that might be found in the DPSClient single-operator primitives library for X and NeXTSTEP. There are no math and flow control primitives, as these can be done more efficiently in the native compiled code. There are no DPS or PS wrappers, as this optimization for server-side graphics is not needed in the Quartz client-side graphics model. The operations provide imaging and path construction and filling operations as well as some interesting other bits that map well into the direction that 2D drawing is headed. (See Longhorn, or the X raster projects like Render.) The drawing engine can output to rasters (like a window!), as well as PS and PDF streams to feed printers. The Mac OS X printing system takes advantage of the capabilities of Quartz to support all sorts of printers, and make the life of printer driver developers much, much easier. Things we'd need to add/extend in X Window software (protocol+server+manager+fonts+...): 1) Extend font server and services to vend outlines and antialiased masks, support more font types, handle font subsetting. 2) Extend drawing primitives to include PS-like path operations. 3) Add dithering and phase controls. 4) Add ColorSync support for drawing and imaging operations, display calibration 5) Add broad alpha channel support and Porter-Duff compositing, both for drawing in a window and for interactions between windows. 6) Add support for general affine transforms of windows 7) Add support for mesh-warps of windows 8) Make sure that OpenGL and special video playback hardware support is integrated, and behaves well with all above changes. 9) We find that we typically stream several hundred megabytes/second of commands and textures for interactive OpenGL use, so transport efficiency could be an issue. So, yes, it looks like we can use X for Quartz. All we need do is define extensions for and upgrade the font server, add dithering with phase controls to the X marking engine, add a transparency model to X imaging with Porter-Duff compositing support, make sure GLX gets in, upgrade the window buffering to include transparency, mesh warps, and really good resampling, and maybe augment the transport layer a bit. Ummm... There doesn't appear to be much code left from the original X server in the drawing path or windowing machinery, and it doesn't appear that apps relying on these extensions can work with any other X server. Just what did we gain from this? It turns out that what Apple has in place actually makes a pretty good foundation for a X11 server. An X server would not be such a good foundation for what Apple needs.
My favorite bit:
... pleased that he had maintained plausible deniability.
> Microsoft spokesman Sean Sundwall said AtStake
> contacted Microsoft Tuesday night to express
> disappointment in the report and to say it did not
> reflect AtStake's position.
So, if AtStake has all this integrity and independence, why do they contact someone at Microsoft to do the old "No! No, Master, it wasn't us! It was the tricksy CTO. But we fires him, yes! Is Master pleased with us?" routine?
> "Microsoft had absolutely nothing to do with
> AtStake's internal personnel decision," Sundwall said.
Just another day at the weasel ranch...
The Intellec 8:
http://online.sfsu.edu/~hl/c.Intellec8.html
I've got one out in the garage, along with a pair of 8" Frugal Floppy drives in a case with controller and power supply. It still boots, but the PROM programmer is fried.
Please remember the cable is under TENSION, from the anchor mass. A break in the atmosphere or low earth orbit (from that plane or low orbital junk) will result in most of the mass moving away from the Earth, rather than toward it.
Second, the energy from whatever part of the cable is 'crashing down' will be dissapated over the length of the cable, and over a period of time as the cable fragment strikes the atmosphere. That is very different from the near instantaneous point release of energy of a weapon.
Sounds like a perfectly normal SNOBOL deck. (Each card does in fact end with the next card in the program, the sequence number.)
> I think it would be great if Apple would provide this facility.
Sure they could. There might be a nominal handling fee involved to cover their costs, but that's perfectly reasonable.
Say, oh, 99 cents...
> I guess that if you unplug power supply in any power
> plant, it stops to produce electricity quite quickly.
So, when we disconnect shore power from a nuclear sub, take it out to sea, and dive, the nuclear power plant is shut down? Or is there a Top Secret Invisible Extension Cord?
Technology? Hah! They already have all the customer's data. All the documents. All the databases. That should be sufficient to make the customer do their part and fork over more cash.
> If I was an IT Manager, I wouldn't personally be happy
:-) won't affect this.
> that having signed up to a subscription programme, I was
> now being told that the three-year contract wouldn't
> cover the next upgrade of the Operating System.
Heh. Happiness is is irrelevent. The check cleared...
That's the nice thing about being a de-facto industry standard. MSFT doesn't need to spend any money on this. Float some papers, announce some programs as a sop to the press and IS weenies, sure, but they need not actually spend money on anything. They'll still have the subscription contracts, and they'll still get all those sales from their PC VARs. The money keeps right on rolling in.
You don't seriously think any business or government IT buyer would consider switching to another OS, do you? Oh, sure, there's the odd European city government, but they'll come crawling back. Momentum, retraining costs, and the transient drop in productivity during a switchover would get that buyer fired pronto. All the worms and security bugs in the world (which they do seem to have
All their computers, all their disks, all their data is locked into Microsoft. They're hostages. You don't bother to do favors to hostages. You just squeeze them dry.
They'll pay for Longhorn. They'll pay for subscription access to patches. (Just wait a few months...)
http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20030828. html
That's why.
> Yeah, but these are *his* kids.
Is he sure about that? With so many satisfied customers, perhaps Mrs Spammer resented his spending all that time with the computer and found a little solace elsewhere?
Nice to see they finally got the OPENSTEP 4.0 tabbed dock/shelf in the UI.
> they don't even use X at all!
What Apple is providing is an Apple-original window system that is graphics model agnostic, as well as a vector drawing system that maps very well to PDF, which is a sort of PostScript without the non-graphical operators. This is packaged under the name 'Quartz' for easy reference by Marketing types.
The window system is designed to support both buffered (like an offscreen PixMap) and unbuffered windows, and is graphics model agnostic, working equally well with QuickDraw, OpenGL, the Quartz drawing engine, X11, and third party solutions, and managing window geometry for the Classic, Carbon, and Cocoa environments. The server portion is a hybridization of screen arbiter and compositor models (and if that's all Geek to you, don't worry about it).
The Quartz drawing engine supports drawing primitives similar to the graphics primitives that might be found in the DPSClient single-operator primitives library for X and NeXTSTEP. There are no math and flow control primitives, as these can be done more efficiently in the native
compiled code. There are no DPS or PS wrappers, as this optimization for server-side graphics is not needed in the Quartz client-side graphics model.
The operations provide imaging and path construction and filling operations as well as some interesting other bits that map well into the direction that 2D drawing is headed. (See Longhorn, or the X raster projects.) The drawing engine can output to rasters (like a window!), as well as PS and PDF streams to feed printers. The Mac OS X printing system takes advantage of the capabilities of Quartz to support all sorts of printers, and make the life of printer driver developers much, much easier.
Things we'd need to add/extend in X Window software (protocol+server+manager+fonts+...):
1) Extend font server and services to vend outlines and antialiased masks, support more font types, handle font subsetting.
2) Extend drawing primitives to include PS-like path operations.
3) Add dithering and phase controls.
4) Add ColorSync support for drawing and imaging operations, display calibration
5) Add broad alpha channel support and Porter-Duff compositing, both for drawing in a window and for interactions between windows.
6) Add support for general affine transforms of windows
7) Add support for mesh-warps of windows
8) Make sure that OpenGL and special video playback hardware support is integrated, and behaves well with all above changes.
9) We find that we typically stream 200 Mb/sec of commands and textures for interactive OpenGL use, so transport efficiency could be an issue.
So, yes, it looks like we can use X for Quartz. All we need do is define extensions for and upgrade the font server, add dithering with phase controls to the X marking engine, add a transparency model to X imaging with Porter-Duff compositing support, make sure GLX gets in, upgrade the window buffering to include transparency, mesh warps, and really good resampling, and maybe augment the transport layer a bit.
Ummm... There doesn't appear to be much code left from the original X server in the drawing path or windowing machinery, and it doesn't appear that apps relying on these extensions can work with any other X server. Just what did we gain from this?
Oh, yeah. My mom can run an xterm session on her desktop now without downloading the Apple X11 package, a shareware X server or buying a software package.
Been there, evaluated that.
>> That's _thee_ key feature Apple needed to do the fully
>> OpenGL desktop,
>
> But there have always been tools to circumvent the
> power-of-two limitation. You can always use only part
> of a texture on a primitive (triangle, quad, etc.).
The gotcha here is that Apple needs to take a window backing store, a buffer, and apply that as a texture to the quad. Doing this by the old slice-n-dice into assorted power-of-two tiles is a pain, and an intermediate copy that just slows things down.
It particularly gets in the way if the non-square content happens to be a video DMA stream.
Non-power-of-two textures, buffer as texture, and a few other details are all needed for Apple's Quartz Extreme trick. The Longhorn guys will figure this out eventually...
On a small dish satellite receiver (DirectTV or Dish Network) there's a bit in the antenna (the LNB) that's switched between even and odd transponders by feeding a DC (one of tw voltage levels) signal from the reciever back to the antenna. The signal switches the LNB between clockwise and counterclockwise circular polarization. Even transponders use one polarization, and odd transponders use the other.
When you ran the switch test, you caused control signals to be sent to the relays that switch between two LNBs in your antenna (these are usually low frequency tone controls). The test repeatedly cycled the relays, which tends to clean the contacts. This then allowed the differetn DC signal levels to reach the antenna to switch the LNB to get odd transponders.
Odds are pretty good that you have one or more connectors in the coax running to the antenna that are not sealed and have a little corrosion in them, weakening the DC control signal. Less likely but possible causes include a marginal switch, or a long run of lower quality cable such as RG/59.
From a package of peanuts I got on Southwest Air:
"Caution: Contains peanuts"
AND
"This product processed in a facility which also processes peanuts."
*SIGH*
DELL's own comments on SPEC benchmarks and turning off hyperthreading for best results:
0 2- khalid.htm
http://www.dell.com/us/en/biz/topics/power_ps3q
It wouldn't surprise me at all to see Microsoft product marketing folks at the Appel developer conference, busily taking notes on what they should tell Windows developers at their October conference.
I suspect that Apple has noticed this.
Don't act surprised when you see design and invention patents beign filed by Apple. That's a reasonable path to eventually get compensation for all that 'free' R&D.
Patents may be viewed as evil and wrong, but swiping someone else's work for one's own benefit doesn't strike me as a way to build good karma.
Dagnabit. Nobody's writing options on SCOX. Which probably means the options folks aren't stupid.
Ah, well. A naked short will do. Not a lot of upside risk left on this one. Cover at 1.54.