Two example to prove my point: How consistent was the control panel from Win 3.1, Win95, Win NT, Win 2K, WinXP, Vista, and Win 7 ? Microsoft does not understand how having a consistent UI across its versions of Windows is a good thing.
How consistent was the home directory across Win95, Win NT, Win2K, WinXP, and Vista ? Get it right the *first* time instead of constantly fucking it up almost every version of windows.
It sums up "Why Microsoft Just. Doesn't. Get it." (With apologies to Shatner's / Kirk's stutter.)
Ironically it was made by Microsoft! Googleï for these words: "Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla on Tuesday confirmed with iPod Observer that his company initiated the creation of the iPod packaging parody"
> Franklin did come out with their version of the drive II. I'm sure the low part count made the task relatively simple. Yup, I remember using a clone drive as well. I still got spare parts for them.;-) The disk drives were half the size of Apple's. It wasn't Franklin though.
> I remember people moving the speed control to the front panel of the drive II. . They would adjust it to circumvent some copy protection schemes that looked for unformatted or bad sectors. I never heard about that mod but it makes sense. Usually it was simpler to just trace the boot-code (since track 0 sector HAD to be readable by the CX00 PROM and the boot sector was ALWAYS placed at $0800 in memory) and then remove the offending copy protection checking code. Simple protections were a 1-byte "$60 RTS" patch. Later, hardware such as the Replay and Wildcard would just take a snapshot of memory and you could save that to disk. "Kracking games" was one of the reasons I became a programmer -- wanted to learn how the protection worked and how to defeat it, so I could study the game's algorithms. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I moved onto graphics & optimization programmer.
The one mod I did hear about was the one where you could flip a switch to force "write-protection" on the disk and/or "force writeable" even though the write-protect notch was covered.
> Like doubling the Atari ST RAM by piggy-backing the RAM chips and wire wrapping an additional address line. Ah neat. That's a cool hack. Over in Apple ][//e//c land we were stuck with bank-switched RAM / ROM. Total PITA;-(
> Disney also twists propaganda into stories to indoctrinate children politically
I've heard this claim before a couple of times but have never seen any (direct) evidence of this...
Note: I haven't spent much analyzing Disney movies, but from what little I do recall this *seems* to be true; I would just love to see a full blown analysis confirming it, is all.
> Apple has always gained value from controlling the software and the hardware.
Yup, they learnt this lesson back in the late '70's with the Apple ][ floppy disc drive / controller. Summarizing the fascinating read: http://apple2history.org/history/ah05/
IBM engineers had invented the 8-inch floppy disk in 1971, and over the next two years gradually increased its capacity from 80K to nearly 240K. Alan Shugart, an IBM manager, left that company and formed his own in 1973.... The company went on to design and market the SA400 âoeminifloppyâ drive that same year, with a formatted capacity of 90K
Steve Jobs had been visiting the Shugart offices regularly, insisting that he needed a cheap $100 disk drive. After Wozniak figured out the details of how to control a disk drive, Jobs came back and said that not only did he want a cheap disk drive, he wanted just the mechanism; no read/write electronics, no head load solenoid, no track zero sensor and no index hole sensor.
Following the Consumer Electronics Show, Wozniak set out to complete the design of the Disk II. His original task on the disk controller was to reduce the chip count from the 40 chips used on the controllers for S-100 machines.... Beyond that, he made additional design changes that reduced the total chip count to only nine. This eventually reduced further to eight, since two 555 timers were replaced by a single 556 timer.
The Disk II was finally available in July 1978 with the first full version of DOS, 3.1. It had an introductory price of $495 (including the controller card) if you ordered them before Apple had them in stock; otherwise, the price would be $595. Even at that price, however, it was the least expensive floppy disk drive ever sold by a computer company.... Because of the custom hardware and software Apple created to manage and access the disks, they had a formatted capacity of 113K, 23K more than the capacity offered by Shugart.
The resulting product, the Disk II, was almost obscenely profitable: For about $140 in parts ($80 after the shift to Alps) [not counting labor costs], Apple could package a disk drive and a disk controller in a single box that sold at retail for upwards of $495.
> Microsoft was on of the first to the party. It is just that they sucked.
Sort-of correct. Microsoft had a tablet ("WinPad" in 1996 and a "MS Tablet PC" in 2000 at Comdex ) and phone ("Pocket PC" in 2000) long before Apple (2010 iPad and 2007 iPhone, respectively; technically Apple had the Newton in 1987 so they were first but we all know how that turned out), yet sales of Apple's hardware blows Microsoft's out of the water? Why is that? (i.e. Why do non-geeks prefer a iPhone / iPad?. Where is the MS Zune now?)
You mentioned "It is just that they sucked." In business it is ok "to suck", you just have to "suck less then the competition."
Microsoft continues to fail for the most part (with notable exceptions such as the ones you mentioned) because Microsoft doesn't have a fucking clue about consistent & responsive Hardware+Software+User Experience. Apple mastered "good enough" ages ago. Microsoft's "good enough" means inconsistency. It's attention to the details.
That's one thing OSX does right. It *shows* you if you need to reboot for EACH package. Microsoft _still_ can't get this right after how many years?? "This update may require to reboot." WTF you don't know?? Either it modifies kernel files or it doesn't? Either the resources provided by a.dll are in use or they are not. It's not fucking rocket science.
This might actually have a unintended benefit if this was an active law.
We could all write programs that output source code. Since the program and its decision (output) would be considered "free speech" we could then legally give a big F.U. to patents! (Almost any code of practical value infringes on (useless) patents.)
The fact that is is illegal to copy numbers (aka data) is already stupid, but no one said we couldn't use the law to make more idiotic conclusions and cognitive dissonance!
-- Why are corporations taxed on "profits", but individuals taxed on "income" ??
> the largest electronics manufacturer in the world does not have a household name
I presume you are talking about Foxconn? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn) Ah, thanks for the dollar figures between them and Apple.
Sad to see how at one time Americans took pride in quality and "Made in America"; now they just wanted the cheapest quantity possible.:-/
-- "The Big Bang is our modern scientific creation myth. It comes from the same human need to solve the cosmological riddle [Where did the universe come from?]" - Carl Sagan, Cosmos episode 10 "The Edge of Forever"
The OP was referring to WinXP 32-bit, and rounded 3,145,728 bytes to 3.2GB.
"By default Windows apps get 2 GB of address space for user data and 2 GB is reserved for mapping to the kernel's memory. You can change that by putting/3GB in your boot.ini , and you must also set the LARGEADDRESSAWARE option in your linker. " http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2009/01/01-16-09-virtual-memory.html
My guess is that it is probably the EDG C++ front end (Edison Design Group.) Aside from GCC and Microsoft's C/C++ compiler the EDG front end seems to be used by all the major C++ compilers (to manage the clusterfuck of C++ parsing.)
Note: While I love C++ from a programmer's point of view, having worked on a professional C++ compiler, C++ makes we want to puke at the hack grammar and language design.
> Before the invention of copyright culture was a shared commodity. Correct.
> Copyright was invented as a way for the artist to recoup his labor with money,
Um, NO, it was invented for publishers to maintain control by _preventing_ other publishers from making a profit!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law "The history of copyright law starts with early privileges and monopolies granted to printers of books. The British Statute of Anne 1710, full title "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned", was the first copyright statute. Initially copyright law only applied to the copying of books."
and
"Pope Alexander VI issued a bull in 1501 against the unlicensed printing of books and in 1559 the Index Expurgatorius, or List of Prohibited Books, was issued for the first time."
and
"The first copyright privilege in England bears date 1518 and was issued to Richard Pynson, King's Printer, the successor to William Caxton. The privilege gives a monopoly for the term of two years. The date is 15 years later than that of the first privilege issued in France. Early copyright privileges were called "monopolies,"...
and
"In England the printers, known as stationers, formed a collective organisation, known as the Stationers' Company. In the 16th century the Stationers' Company was given the power to require all lawfully printed books to be entered into its register. Only members of the Stationers' Company could enter books into the register. This meant that the Stationers' Company achieved a dominant position over publishing in 17th century England"
- - -
With the history lesson out of the way, here is my commentary:
What most people seem to forget is that Copyright is a compromise between two diametrically opposed idealogies. That is, All ideas, discoveries, inventions, expressions, or representations:
* should be FREELY available and shared amongst the public for the greater good of EVERYONE.
versus * should ONLY be available for those that are willing to pay ONE for it
Said another way, copyright is a balance between "needs of the many vs the greed of the one" with TIME used a means to control the balance between the shift of individual profit to society gaining the benefits.
Keep in mind, anytime you take any ideology to an extreme, it is never beneficial.
'The printing press changed the artificial "ownership" of ideas by disseminating knowledge (which provides control which is ultimately power -- the power to control your own destiny.) Certain people / organizations would duplicate books off a "master copy/original" and sell them. Since anyone could copy and sell, this would cut into your sales as a publisher. As a result Publishers saw that this competition would threaten their profits so they banded together to petition the government to grant them an exclusive license so that only they could reproduce books. That is, ONLY they had the "right" to "copy", NOT the author !
Copyright has _always_ been about control, and greed.
The foundation of civilization is built upon SHARING ideas. What value does "art" have if the artist has no one to appreciate it?? What do you think "Culture" is? A sharing of perspectives, values, morals, art, science. It is not unreasonable for a creator to want compensation for the time and effort he used to create their work; but to _demand_ that kind of respect from everyone shows a total lack of understanding what culture is. Since now-a-days text, video, audio, can all be represented digitally and copied without the original artist "losing" anything (except _potential_ future profits) it is MUCH harder to gauge what the true "cost" is when society enjoys
> Back in the days of CRT monitors I played with refresh rate a lot to figure out what I could notice and what bothered me. 60Hz was tolerable, but above 80 was best.
Hear! Hear!
Back in the day I used to have a Zenith monitor that could do 100 Hz that I absolutely _loved_; the image was _rock_ solid. I hated 60 Hz as unfortunately the lower the refresh rate the brighter the colors.:-/
To tell if a CRT image was stable or not I used to do this trick:
a) set monitor refresh rate,
b) look at the edge of the monitor. Your peripheral will pick up the flickering of the CRT if the refresh rate is too low.
It would be very interesting to nail down what is the absolute minimum frame rate needed for a rock solid image on CRT, LCD, Plasma, etc.! Is it? - 72 Hz ? - 80 Hz ? - 96 Hz ? - 100 Hz ?
Nice to see someone else understands the relationship of FOV (Field of View) and stuttery 24 fps!
Honest question: So what were the BSDs (Open,Free,Net) using to compile and run on x86 and amd64 before llvm/clang was around? GCC ?
GCC had its share of problems but this sounds a little ungrateful for what GCC has allowed hackers to do. An open source "good enough" compiler is better then a high priced closed source compiler that may or may not be available for your hardware.
Uhm, no. I have had a pair of the Sony 7506's for about 10 years now.
I just replaced them with the Sennheiser 38o pro. There is no contest. The senns sound clear, clean, with an excellent soundstage. The 7506 sound mushy / boomy.
Go read other people's reviews / rankings at head-fi.org for confirmation.
>> Software always has defects, this is simply a fact of life. > You absolutely can and should write fully functional, properly-tested, bug-free software. Maybe in the perfect fantasy world you live in, sure.
Back in reality, some of us devs *do* try to write as-much-as-humanly-possible bug-free software. Unfortunately, specs change, and to guarantee 100% code coverage of ALL possible paths would mean you never shipped.
Don't toss the baby out with the bath water just because we *grudgingly* accept the fact, that yes, all software unfortunately has bugs.;-(
Slashdot Mirror
I was not referring across devices.
Two example to prove my point:
How consistent was the control panel from Win 3.1, Win95, Win NT, Win 2K, WinXP, Vista, and Win 7 ?
Microsoft does not understand how having a consistent UI across its versions of Windows is a good thing.
How consistent was the home directory across Win95, Win NT, Win2K, WinXP, and Vista ? Get it right the *first* time instead of constantly fucking it up almost every version of windows.
Speaking of Zune and iPod ... have you seen this parody that was created internally by Microsoft?
Microsoft Designs the IPOD package
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9HfdSp2E2A
It sums up "Why Microsoft Just. Doesn't. Get it." (With apologies to Shatner's / Kirk's stutter.)
Ironically it was made by Microsoft! Googleï for these words: "Microsoft spokesman Tom Pilla on Tuesday confirmed with iPod Observer that his company initiated the creation of the iPod packaging parody"
> Franklin did come out with their version of the drive II. I'm sure the low part count made the task relatively simple. ;-) The disk drives were half the size of Apple's. It wasn't Franklin though.
Yup, I remember using a clone drive as well. I still got spare parts for them.
> I remember people moving the speed control to the front panel of the drive II. . They would adjust it to circumvent some copy protection schemes that looked for unformatted or bad sectors.
I never heard about that mod but it makes sense. Usually it was simpler to just trace the boot-code (since track 0 sector HAD to be readable by the CX00 PROM and the boot sector was ALWAYS placed at $0800 in memory) and then remove the offending copy protection checking code. Simple protections were a 1-byte "$60 RTS" patch. Later, hardware such as the Replay and Wildcard would just take a snapshot of memory and you could save that to disk. "Kracking games" was one of the reasons I became a programmer -- wanted to learn how the protection worked and how to defeat it, so I could study the game's algorithms. Fortunately (or unfortunately) I moved onto graphics & optimization programmer.
The one mod I did hear about was the one where you could flip a switch to force "write-protection" on the disk and/or "force writeable" even though the write-protect notch was covered.
> Like doubling the Atari ST RAM by piggy-backing the RAM chips and wire wrapping an additional address line. //e //c land we were stuck with bank-switched RAM / ROM. Total PITA ;-(
Ah neat. That's a cool hack. Over in Apple ][
> Disney also twists propaganda into stories to indoctrinate children politically
I've heard this claim before a couple of times but have never seen any (direct) evidence of this ...
Note: I haven't spent much analyzing Disney movies, but from what little I do recall this *seems* to be true; I would just love to see a full blown analysis confirming it, is all.
> Apple has always gained value from controlling the software and the hardware.
Yup, they learnt this lesson back in the late '70's with the Apple ][ floppy disc drive / controller. Summarizing the fascinating read:
http://apple2history.org/history/ah05/
> Yeah, what a failure the 360 has been for Microsoft.
You seem to conveniently forget ... :-)
1) the 2 billion investment MS has made into the XBox platform
http://www.unet.univie.ac.at/~a0025537/php/ABWLs/FK-Marketing/store1/Case_XBOXlive.pdf
2) and the $1 billion expense from the RROD
http://venturebeat.com/2012/05/13/1-billion-dollar-pain/
I am neither a XBox nor PS3 fanboy (I have both consoles), just pointing out some basic facts you left out.
> Microsoft was on of the first to the party. It is just that they sucked.
Sort-of correct. Microsoft had a tablet ("WinPad" in 1996 and a "MS Tablet PC" in 2000 at Comdex ) and phone ("Pocket PC" in 2000) long before Apple (2010 iPad and 2007 iPhone, respectively; technically Apple had the Newton in 1987 so they were first but we all know how that turned out), yet sales of Apple's hardware blows Microsoft's out of the water? Why is that? (i.e. Why do non-geeks prefer a iPhone / iPad?. Where is the MS Zune now?)
You mentioned "It is just that they sucked." In business it is ok "to suck", you just have to "suck less then the competition."
Microsoft continues to fail for the most part (with notable exceptions such as the ones you mentioned) because Microsoft doesn't have a fucking clue about consistent & responsive Hardware+Software+User Experience. Apple mastered "good enough" ages ago. Microsoft's "good enough" means inconsistency. It's attention to the details.
References:
* http://www.pcworld.com/article/187062/microsofts_history_with_the_tablet_pc.html
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Tablet_PC
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Mobile
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tablet_computer
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone
* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zune
That's one thing OSX does right. It *shows* you if you need to reboot for EACH package. Microsoft _still_ can't get this right after how many years?? "This update may require to reboot." WTF you don't know?? Either it modifies kernel files or it doesn't? Either the resources provided by a .dll are in use or they are not. It's not fucking rocket science.
> Been to r/circlejerk, lately? :)
You mean there is a difference from reddit? ;-) /me ducks
This might actually have a unintended benefit if this was an active law.
We could all write programs that output source code. Since the program and its decision (output) would be considered "free speech" we could then legally give a big F.U. to patents! (Almost any code of practical value infringes on (useless) patents.)
The fact that is is illegal to copy numbers (aka data) is already stupid, but no one said we couldn't use the law to make more idiotic conclusions and cognitive dissonance!
--
Why are corporations taxed on "profits", but individuals taxed on "income" ??
> the largest electronics manufacturer in the world does not have a household name
I presume you are talking about Foxconn? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foxconn) Ah, thanks for the dollar figures between them and Apple.
Sad to see how at one time Americans took pride in quality and "Made in America"; now they just wanted the cheapest quantity possible. :-/
--
"The Big Bang is our modern scientific creation myth. It comes from the same human need to solve the cosmological riddle [Where did the universe come from?]"
- Carl Sagan, Cosmos episode 10 "The Edge of Forever"
The OP was referring to WinXP 32-bit, and rounded 3,145,728 bytes to 3.2GB.
"By default Windows apps get 2 GB of address space for user data and 2 GB is reserved for mapping to the kernel's memory. You can change that by putting /3GB in your boot.ini , and you must also set the LARGEADDRESSAWARE option in your linker. "
http://cbloomrants.blogspot.com/2009/01/01-16-09-virtual-memory.html
Also see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_Address_Extension
But it's for SCIENCE! ;-)
Sorry, Valve / Portal article reference / joke.
My guess is that it is probably the EDG C++ front end (Edison Design Group.) Aside from GCC and Microsoft's C/C++ compiler the EDG front end seems to be used by all the major C++ compilers (to manage the clusterfuck of C++ parsing.)
Note: While I love C++ from a programmer's point of view, having worked on a professional C++ compiler, C++ makes we want to puke at the hack grammar and language design.
> Before the invention of copyright culture was a shared commodity.
Correct.
> Copyright was invented as a way for the artist to recoup his labor with money,
Um, NO, it was invented for publishers to maintain control by _preventing_ other publishers from making a profit!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_copyright_law
"The history of copyright law starts with early privileges and monopolies granted to printers of books. The British Statute of Anne 1710, full title "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning, by vesting the Copies of Printed Books in the Authors or purchasers of such Copies, during the Times therein mentioned", was the first copyright statute. Initially copyright law only applied to the copying of books."
and
"Pope Alexander VI issued a bull in 1501 against the unlicensed printing of books and in 1559 the Index Expurgatorius, or List of Prohibited Books, was issued for the first time."
and
"The first copyright privilege in England bears date 1518 and was issued to Richard Pynson, King's Printer, the successor to William Caxton. The privilege gives a monopoly for the term of two years. The date is 15 years later than that of the first privilege issued in France. Early copyright privileges were called "monopolies," ...
and
"In England the printers, known as stationers, formed a collective organisation, known as the Stationers' Company. In the 16th century the Stationers' Company was given the power to require all lawfully printed books to be entered into its register. Only members of the Stationers' Company could enter books into the register. This meant that the Stationers' Company achieved a dominant position over publishing in 17th century England"
- - -
With the history lesson out of the way, here is my commentary:
What most people seem to forget is that Copyright is a compromise between two diametrically opposed idealogies. That is, All ideas, discoveries, inventions, expressions, or representations:
* should be FREELY available and shared amongst the public for the greater good of EVERYONE.
versus
* should ONLY be available for those that are willing to pay ONE for it
Said another way, copyright is a balance between "needs of the many vs the greed of the one" with TIME used a means to control the balance between the shift of individual profit to society gaining the benefits.
Keep in mind, anytime you take any ideology to an extreme, it is never beneficial.
'The printing press changed the artificial "ownership" of ideas by disseminating knowledge (which provides control which is ultimately power -- the power to control your own destiny.) Certain people / organizations would duplicate books off a "master copy /original" and sell them. Since anyone could copy and sell, this would cut into your sales as a publisher. As a result Publishers saw that this competition would threaten their profits so they banded together to petition the government to grant them an exclusive license so that only they could reproduce books. That is, ONLY they had the "right" to "copy", NOT the author !
Copyright has _always_ been about control, and greed.
The foundation of civilization is built upon SHARING ideas. What value does "art" have if the artist has no one to appreciate it?? What do you think "Culture" is? A sharing of perspectives, values, morals, art, science. It is not unreasonable for a creator to want compensation for the time and effort he used to create their work; but to _demand_ that kind of respect from everyone shows a total lack of understanding what culture is. Since now-a-days text, video, audio, can all be represented digitally and copied without the original artist "losing" anything (except _potential_ future profits) it is MUCH harder to gauge what the true "cost" is when society enjoys
> Or maybe $1 per speaker in the theatre.
You may laugh but Dolby is already pushing the next generation of audio by using 64 speaker channels; quite a significant boost up from 7.1 ;-)
http://www.dolby.com/us/en/professional/technology/cinema/dolby-atmos.html#Theatre_Setup
http://www.hometheater.com/content/dolby-atmos-demo
> Besides Planck length and time are not the physical limits of the universe.
How do we *know* this if we can't measure anything smaller then the Planck length?
> Back in the days of CRT monitors I played with refresh rate a lot to figure out what I could notice and what bothered me. 60Hz was tolerable, but above 80 was best.
Hear! Hear!
Back in the day I used to have a Zenith monitor that could do 100 Hz that I absolutely _loved_; the image was _rock_ solid. I hated 60 Hz as unfortunately the lower the refresh rate the brighter the colors. :-/
To tell if a CRT image was stable or not I used to do this trick:
a) set monitor refresh rate,
b) look at the edge of the monitor. Your peripheral will pick up the flickering of the CRT if the refresh rate is too low.
It would be very interesting to nail down what is the absolute minimum frame rate needed for a rock solid image on CRT, LCD, Plasma, etc.! Is it?
- 72 Hz ?
- 80 Hz ?
- 96 Hz ?
- 100 Hz ?
Nice to see someone else understands the relationship of FOV (Field of View) and stuttery 24 fps!
On a related note: I hate gaming at 30 FPS on an LCD. The motion looks too choppy compared to 60 Hz. If only 120 Hz LCD monitors would drop in price ... i.e. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824009222
> Not good for business when nobody can find your contact info.
Seems to work for Google though ...
That's OK you are still an ass :)
I jest, I jest.
Honest question: So what were the BSDs (Open,Free,Net) using to compile and run on x86 and amd64 before llvm/clang was around? GCC ?
GCC had its share of problems but this sounds a little ungrateful for what GCC has allowed hackers to do. An open source "good enough" compiler is better then a high priced closed source compiler that may or may not be available for your hardware.
Please mod parent up +5 !
Why? Because you can sort by -user- reviews, you know people who actually _have_ the cans you are interested in. :)
It is not an accident that Sennheiser is consistently ranked best overall compared to other brands. Great German design.
Uhm, no. I have had a pair of the Sony 7506's for about 10 years now.
I just replaced them with the Sennheiser 38o pro. There is no contest. The senns sound clear, clean, with an excellent soundstage. The 7506 sound mushy / boomy.
Go read other people's reviews / rankings at head-fi.org for confirmation.
> Perhaps Firefox could handle shitty plugins in a better way. But you can't blame Firefox for a Flash memory leak.
When I close all tabs ALL memory used by the plugins should be released (once the next GC has run), so it is BOTH a FF and Flash problem.
FF needs redirect the plugin's ::new() to use its own version, so that it can properly track plugin memory usage. And catch plugin leaks.
So yeah it is a FF problem.
>> Software always has defects, this is simply a fact of life.
> You absolutely can and should write fully functional, properly-tested, bug-free software.
Maybe in the perfect fantasy world you live in, sure.
Back in reality, some of us devs *do* try to write as-much-as-humanly-possible bug-free software. Unfortunately, specs change, and to guarantee 100% code coverage of ALL possible paths would mean you never shipped.
Don't toss the baby out with the bath water just because we *grudgingly* accept the fact, that yes, all software unfortunately has bugs. ;-(