Which explains exactly why Altair basic was so buggy, badly documented, and late, setting the pattern for all that followed. IIRC it was also bloated, needing 6k when it was supposed to run in 4k.
There have been no innovations whatsoever from M$, or Sir Bill in particular, except one, a new way to create an Illegal Monopoly.
It reminds me of the time I visited a nuclear research facility in the UK, which had some smallish reactors on site. I saw several mutant insects, including a very large bee (fortunately non-aggressive!), and some enormous spiders. People who had worked there previously told ne that this was not unusual, the spiders in particular were thought to live under one of the reactors.
BTW the site was not one particularly noted for accidental releases of radiation, quite the opposite in fact, it had, and AFAIK still has a good safety record, despite dating from the immediate post-war period. They had plenty of good monitoring systems on site, which I am told mainly detected things elsewhere such as Chernobyl, as the local site was generally very clean. So, there would not have been significant releases of contaminants, but I assume that underneath the research reactor there must have been some significant gamma or neutron flux, in a fairly confined space. There was some published info about the construction of the reactor, it is so long ago that I can't remember how it was constructed.
I can't remember why I was visiting there, as I did not work in that industry, my visit was nothing to do with nuclear issues, but they did other more interesting things on site. Somehow I suspect it might have been an electrical safety training course, or maybe something to do with minicomputers, but as it was about 1976 my memory is a bit volatile, except for the room I was sitting in when the giant bee appeared, not the sort of thing you forget. I think that was about half a mile from the nearest reactor, I did not see it fly, so it may have crawled a very long way.
But SuSE has not, in several years now, fixed the Nvidia configuration problem. If you do as they, or Nvidia, say, you are left with a non-working system, and SAX2 blows away any valid XF86Config file immediately it is invoked. Maybe it is finally fixed in 9.1, (still waiting for mine to arrive) but I doubt it somehow. There is not much else wrong with SuSE, but on this point they are confused by legal issues. They are allowed to distribute the Nvidia driver, according to Nvidia, but they don't, and when it is installed by the Nividia shell script, then attempting to set up the monitors with Yast/SAX2 ends in disaster. If they would supply it as part of the distro, and engineer SAX2 to take it into account, there would not be a problem. Easy for me, now, but a beginner could be left with an unusable system and not have the ability to get even a shell.
The only other thing I find wrong with SuSE, and all other distros that I have tried, is that if you only have a dial-up line, with a 56k modem, and a 2 hour limit per connection (and many people have even worse), it is impossible to do any major updates because either the update utility (YOU in the case of SuSE) can not recover from an interruption, or maybe the servers don't support resuming. Some of the updates come as huge binary RPMs, an incredibly ugly and inefficient way of doing it, anything up to 130MB. So, my systems are without certain security patches, a situation which is absolutely intolerable, because the updates can't be downloaded. No response from either SuSE or Xandros (who use apt-get) to this issue, although I do note that it bothers other people also. The fact that most of the world does not have broadband has apparently been overlooked by the testers working on every distro, a situation which should not be allowed to continue.
If they were sensible, it would all be done by source patching, with very much smaller downloads (diffs instead of a full binary), but in the case of Xandros that would not do any good, because you have to do a huge download to get the source first........
Yes, and as Fedora Core 1 was rubbish (unusual for Red Hat), I will not even bother to evaluate this one, as there are too many bad reports already.
Beginners might be better with Xandros, I find SuSE quite acceptable (still waiting for 9.1 to arrive, I think my supplier has messed up...), but no distro has as yet properly tackled the installation and configuration issues. There again, neither has the Criminal Monopoly, it is an area where, with a bit of interest from some of the top developers, Linux could do better. But, I get the impression that it is not the very best developers who are attending to these issues.....
IMHO some serious action is needed, and quickly, before the Monopolist gets anywhere with Longhorn. IIRC Bruce Perens had something to say about this not so long ago, when he found a stupid configuration issue, but no-one seemed to listen, and what is even worse, serious bug reports to certain distros are simply ignored.
It is time to give less attention to leading-edge issues and more to basic quality and consistency, maybe treating the installation and configuration utilities as seriously as, for example, the kernel or GCC would be a step forward. But, I can see why people are not so interested in doing that, it is less exciting. That may be the one weakness of the Open Source development methodology, boring bits don't get finished properly. It may help to attract more people to become developers, if they can be shown that they can make a very real difference here.
I think their continuing conduct is contrary to the court orders relating to the Monopoly trial, but as IANAL, and you seem to be, or know a lot more about it, I will defer to your opinion.
But I do think that they are making the entire legal system, if not the entire world, look like fools, and urgently need to be taught a very serious lesson.
Can't say that I noticed the fonts, quite possibly because my monitor was not the very finest quality, but I don't doubt what you say. But certainly, Truetype would not have been available to IBM, although it is widely cloned as Freetype or something similar now.
As to the three extra keys, I have never used them, they appeared round about the time of Windoze 95 IIRC, with no documentation as to their function. But I do understand what the Monopolist's marketing would have tried to make of the issue, in fact they are supported by most modern OSs if you know how to set up a key mapping to make them do something useful (easy under Linux or BSD) but I have not bothered. Same with all the extra buttons along the top of various keyboards nowadays, people are too busy to waste time finding out what they do, (often browsing in IE) or making them do something useful, so the lowest common denominator prevails, and the extra keys are just a waste of space. Come to think of it, a longer spacebar used to be the norm.....
IBM's agenda is legally required to be that which attempts to maximise their return to their shareholders, the same as any business anywhere. But, like the vast majority of businesses, they recognise that in that context, honesty pays.
They have found ways to combine furthering their own business by using free software, and to make it do what they want, they have to contribute to it, again same as many smaller entities. Of course, some of their programmers will have their own ideas of freedom, as we all do, and will welcome opportunities to get paid to improve free software, so they will not be lacking in motivation.
The fact that they have a corporate hatred of Sir Bill must inevitably have some subtle influence in motivating people, but their direct aim is simply to out-compete a competitor. They know that if Sir Bill gets that market, he will extend his monopoly yet again, and tey will be locked out.
Of course, as the Criminal Monopoly has no innovative ability whatsoever, if they get into web-linked software (whatever that might be) by buying or stealing something from some small company, it will simply be used to beat up IBM, then left to a slowly fester, like Inept Exploder, because they neither have the ability nor the motivation to continue development, as in tha case when IE had virtually wiped out Netscape.
Embrace, extend, extinguish...... The future for web-linked software is not good.
I think IBM learned their lesson, which is why they employ so many lawyers, to ensure that everything they do is squeaky clean. It happens to be convenient, when someone like the SCOundrel comes along, but most of their work is making sure that contracts are worded properly so that disputes will not arise. Any responsible business does the same.
Unfortunately Sir Bill demonstrates on a daily basis that he is incapable of learning anything, it will take at least a jail sentence before he mends his ways.
It is unfortunate that US law appears not to have the necessary power, if the Monopoly trial had been in the UK, Bill would never have become a Sir, because he, and several others, would have gone to jail for perjury and contempt of court, and maybe some conspiracy charges also.
OS/2 was not a failed OS. Far from it, in fact Win 3x and Win 9x were the failures, as every frustrated user will know. OS/2 as an OS was a geat success, certainly the best in its time as far as PCs were concerned. There again, as OSs go, BeOS was a success. The general public are so ill-informed, thanks to the Monopolist's marketing machine, and the lack of hard factual comparisons, even in most of the computer press, that they don't know what to buy, so they play safe (so they think) and buy the well-known brand, even though it is garbage. They are victims of FUD.
But, maybe the marketing was a failure, even IBM did not realise at first how ruthless Sir Bill can be. The same thing will of course happen to Sun, when the time is right. Anyone who does business with the Criminal Monopoly, bearing in mind their consistent past history, will get what they deserve for being so stupid. The Criminal Monopoly will turn on Sun, and attempt to destroy them, as part of their plan to destroy Unix. They will of course also turn on the SCOundrel when his task is complete, or more likely when he fails to complete it.
The only complaint I had about OS/2 was the installation, from a huge pile of floppies, but that was simply because most PCs did not have a CD-ROM drive at that time. It was rock solid, and noticeably faster than Windoze 3.1, DOS compatability excellent. I did notice that OS/2 appeared to know how to use a SCSI drive properly, Windoze never did, until maybe 2000.
But, the Monopolist, who already at that time was flouting the law, decided to sabotage IBM's efforts. I am surprised that there was no legal action they could take at the time, maybe breach of contract.
Ah, yes maybe you do have one place where Win98 is OK. No net connection, so no security problems..... In any case you have no choice for now.
I can visualise there being a market for a versatile device which might be ideal here, something like a PC, with small screen and keyboard, all built into a yellow unbreakable case like they use for other testgear, with a nice big CF card, so it can be a PC, PDA or something else, according to which OS you load. It would want to hang on a belt, round your neck, or have a nice big magnet in the base so you could stick it on the truck. It would also need to float in water, just in case, and as it would contain a decent battery, it might also have a lamp built in, so you can connect it in the dark. Someone should make one. There must be many other uses.
.... that Opera did not persue this one through the cours, as it would have alerted the courts to the fact that the Criminal Monopoly is continuing to ignore earlier judgments. That is contempt of court.
Nothing short of criminal prosecution, and jail sentences for Gates, Ballmer and a few others, will ever make these guys behave properly. They have a consistent track record.
Ah, the trap of proprietary software. In those instances, you may well have no choice, as I must agree. But if you had the choice, or the source, it would surely be better to use the native OS of whatever device you fancied using.
But, in other circumstances, it makes little sense to do anything with an unsupported OS that never was any good anyway, although if it is all you have got, it may be slightly better than nothing.
It sounds like your guys really need these ruggedised things the military used to use, IIRC Grid Compass was the brand, but I may be wrong as I have not seen one recently. Magnesium alloy casting, thick polycarbonate over the LCD (it was plasma the first time I saw one, with a Z80 running CP/M IIRC), you really could throw them around. It think they were made in the UK, I don't know if the manufacturer still exists. I have a very old, broken one at home somewhere, I think it might be a 286, with orange plasma screen, anyway the HDD or more likely the disc controller is faulty, last time I tried it would boot from floppy, but did not want to know about a replacement disk I tried. I think the controller chip is long obsolete, it probably was a semi-custom gate array anyway, so it is not worth fixing. But, mechanically it was as good as new.
I wish they built the smaller stuff, all the way down to the smallest PDA, like that today, plastics are all very well but there is simply no substitute for metal, maybe with a soft plastic coating, when things might be dropped.
Yes, it is incompetent, because he ended up with two kinds of trash instead of what might have been one good OS. And, merging diverse codebases is impossible, and/or results in lots and lots of bugs, which is why XP is so utterly useless. The high points of Wn=indoze development were NT 3.51 (before Bill's meddling), and maybe 2000, everything on teh 9x tres was buggy, unstable, incecure trash. XP is the ultimate in bloatware, and simply as a consequence of the bloat has more bugs than all the others combined. Bill's expertise in the development of proper software is zero.
Yes, we probably all agree with that, but unfortunately the average idiot who designs web pages knows of only one browser, and the Criminal Monopoly has consistently demonstrated that it does not understand the meaning of the word "standard".
As a result, businesses with bad web sites lose a percentage of their business, but they don't seem to be capable of realising that. If something does not conform to published standards to the extent that it will not work in Mozilla, that company can expect no money from me. I will not reboot into a vile, bug-infested OS, and then open a major security hole, just to to business with them, I will simply go elsewhere.
Marketing men beware. If you employ idiots (often at vast expense) to design your web site, you will immediately lose about 10% of your possible sales. Your job might follow. And in any case, why pander to the wishes of a Convicted Criminal Monopoly? Be independent, think for yourselves, and get it done properly. It should not cost any more than getting it done badly, your site will look more professional, and no-one will fail to buy something because of a stupid browser incompatability.
....emulate a piece of junk like any of the Win9x family on anything? That technology is best forgotten, it was a classic example of Sir Bill's gross incompetence that brought it into existence in the first place.
.... so with a large border, the chance of a smuggling operation being intercepted is zero. So why bother, or do they rely on the smugglers not knowing the limitations of the technology?
Implants like these generally need the scanner to be within feet or inches to be detected.
No, the browser is all-pervasive and bits of it are everywhere. It is illegally commingled.....
But, NT up to 3.51 was more like a microkernel, the device drivers and GUI were not in kernel space, and guess what, it was slow and stable.
It was said at the time that His Billness personally was unimpressed by the speed, so His Incompetence ordered that the GUI and drivers (including third-party drivers) were moved into kernel space, to avoid all the overhead of ring 0 to ring 3 transistions all the time. It then immediately became buggy and unstable. There is no denying that NT4 was much faster than 3.51, it just crashes 1000 times as often.
Yet another blatantly incompetent decision by the Guiding Light of the Criminal Monopoly.
Of course, in the most prolific versions of Windoze, 9X, everything runs in kernel space, an inexcusable situation since they were written for the 386 architecture.
IMHO the microkernel has much to commend it, but would be best if CPU architectures were optimised for it, giving attention primarily to how system calls work at machine level. It would be very handy to be able to lock the kernel into a portion of the cache, maybe a separate level 1 cache specifically for that purpose? After all, a microkernel would not be all that big, you could maybe on the top of the range CPUs have dedicated caches for other things too.
No, he was describing the colour after putting some of the pages to good use. I hope that the paper was satisfactorily soft, haemerrhoids can be quite nasty!
"It's like all those authors who write books on Noah's Ark, or the location of Atlantis."
I would have said more like those so-called professional historians, and the guy who allegedly perfected the Gas Chamber and the Electric Chair, who visited Auschwitz, saw with their own eyes, and then denied that the Holocaust ever happened. BTW I am not Jewish, I have no axe to grind, but well-established facts with overwhelming eyewitness and photographic evedence are exactly what they seem, the contrary opinion is highly offensive lies and deception.
They make me sick, the way they twist facts. I saw Mr. Electric Chair (no doubt/.ers will fill in the name) on TV taking a sample from the surface of the brickwork, which he sent to a lab, to test for Zyklon B, of which there of course was no trace. A gas would not be retained for minutes, far less over 50 years, yet his actions, and his self-confessed expertise in the field of so-called humane executions, might have given credibility to his claims to anyone without a proper scientific education.
Yet vile scum like that are believed by fanatics, and even apparently sensible people. I call him scum by the way, because both of the methods of execution in which he is allegedly an expert are in fact death by slow, agonising torture, yet some state legislatures, on his advice, believe that the electric chair is humane.
Fortunately human life does not figure in Brown's rantings, at least not on this occasion, but who knows what other vile and dangerous lies he may be capable of propagating.
Funnily enough, Mr. Electric Chair clearly had no competence in technical matters either, just like Brown.
People like that are a danger to society and should be locked up. I hope that Brown is the subject of so much legal action,when his book is published, that he is never listended to again, by anyone, anywhere.
I wonder about his politics, is he a Fascist like these other guys, or just a Bill-worshipper? Or is it the great god Mammon, meaning he has no principles at all, except to get rich quick?
I think you will find that CP/M 86 got more testing and debugging time than did MessyDOS, hence it was later. There is a lesson there, I think! The initial work of porting CP/M could not have neded more than a couple of weeks by a competent programmer. Even if it was all written in assembler (most of it was C IIRC), Intel had already worked out, and published, how to map each 8080 instruction to 8086, so a rough port would take very little time at all, but would not of course be terribly efficient.
Why IBM went to a bunch of hopeless, dishonest incompetents with a bad track record (buggy, bloated, late basic interpreters) and insatiable greed, for their OS, is well beyond my comprehension.
The flamefest is clearly over.....
on
More From Tanenbaum
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· Score: 3, Insightful
..... which must be a good thing for FOSS, Linux and the world at large. Brown may have, by accident, done everyone a big favour here, by forcing Prof. Tannenbaum to say what might otherwise have been left unsaid. We might otherwise imagine that animosity existed when in point of fact it did not.
All due respect to Linus and the Prof, none at all to Brown.
Well Ken, I see that it is obviously beyond your expertise to sign up properly to Slashdot and get a real username, which fits well with the other inabilities you have demonstrated, such as basic comprehension of facts.
If you can't handle signing up for a Slashdot account, I suggest that you ask your boss, Sir Bill, to get one of his few competent people to help you out.
Yes, the server kept running, but there was a bottleneck somewhere. I don't know how much bandwidth the connection has, but yesterday it took me hours see the article, but it was worth the wait. The second one is even better.
I hope that mainstream journalists and book reviewers can get their heads round this, and understand what is really going on here, and of course, that no-one buys the book! No doubt, there will be a bulk order from Redmond, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned, it is a total waste of rain-forest.
Yes, I saw that, and feared the worst. The project was simply under-funded, which is why things did not get done. It was not due to any lack of technical competence. I have seen projects like this before, not necessarily involving space exploration, where those who control the cash supply something less than the absolute minimum necessary to to the job, with the inevitable result. Partly it happens because, especially in the UK, those who control the money usually have no scientific or technical ability whatsoever, and they imagine that there is always some way of making economies, when in matters of hard fact such as equipment design, there usually is not.
Slashdot Mirror
There have been no innovations whatsoever from M$, or Sir Bill in particular, except one, a new way to create an Illegal Monopoly.
BTW the site was not one particularly noted for accidental releases of radiation, quite the opposite in fact, it had, and AFAIK still has a good safety record, despite dating from the immediate post-war period. They had plenty of good monitoring systems on site, which I am told mainly detected things elsewhere such as Chernobyl, as the local site was generally very clean. So, there would not have been significant releases of contaminants, but I assume that underneath the research reactor there must have been some significant gamma or neutron flux, in a fairly confined space. There was some published info about the construction of the reactor, it is so long ago that I can't remember how it was constructed.
I can't remember why I was visiting there, as I did not work in that industry, my visit was nothing to do with nuclear issues, but they did other more interesting things on site. Somehow I suspect it might have been an electrical safety training course, or maybe something to do with minicomputers, but as it was about 1976 my memory is a bit volatile, except for the room I was sitting in when the giant bee appeared, not the sort of thing you forget. I think that was about half a mile from the nearest reactor, I did not see it fly, so it may have crawled a very long way.
The only other thing I find wrong with SuSE, and all other distros that I have tried, is that if you only have a dial-up line, with a 56k modem, and a 2 hour limit per connection (and many people have even worse), it is impossible to do any major updates because either the update utility (YOU in the case of SuSE) can not recover from an interruption, or maybe the servers don't support resuming. Some of the updates come as huge binary RPMs, an incredibly ugly and inefficient way of doing it, anything up to 130MB. So, my systems are without certain security patches, a situation which is absolutely intolerable, because the updates can't be downloaded. No response from either SuSE or Xandros (who use apt-get) to this issue, although I do note that it bothers other people also. The fact that most of the world does not have broadband has apparently been overlooked by the testers working on every distro, a situation which should not be allowed to continue.
If they were sensible, it would all be done by source patching, with very much smaller downloads (diffs instead of a full binary), but in the case of Xandros that would not do any good, because you have to do a huge download to get the source first........
Someone really needs to fix this.
Beginners might be better with Xandros, I find SuSE quite acceptable (still waiting for 9.1 to arrive, I think my supplier has messed up...), but no distro has as yet properly tackled the installation and configuration issues. There again, neither has the Criminal Monopoly, it is an area where, with a bit of interest from some of the top developers, Linux could do better. But, I get the impression that it is not the very best developers who are attending to these issues.....
IMHO some serious action is needed, and quickly, before the Monopolist gets anywhere with Longhorn. IIRC Bruce Perens had something to say about this not so long ago, when he found a stupid configuration issue, but no-one seemed to listen, and what is even worse, serious bug reports to certain distros are simply ignored.
It is time to give less attention to leading-edge issues and more to basic quality and consistency, maybe treating the installation and configuration utilities as seriously as, for example, the kernel or GCC would be a step forward. But, I can see why people are not so interested in doing that, it is less exciting. That may be the one weakness of the Open Source development methodology, boring bits don't get finished properly. It may help to attract more people to become developers, if they can be shown that they can make a very real difference here.
But I do think that they are making the entire legal system, if not the entire world, look like fools, and urgently need to be taught a very serious lesson.
As to the three extra keys, I have never used them, they appeared round about the time of Windoze 95 IIRC, with no documentation as to their function. But I do understand what the Monopolist's marketing would have tried to make of the issue, in fact they are supported by most modern OSs if you know how to set up a key mapping to make them do something useful (easy under Linux or BSD) but I have not bothered. Same with all the extra buttons along the top of various keyboards nowadays, people are too busy to waste time finding out what they do, (often browsing in IE) or making them do something useful, so the lowest common denominator prevails, and the extra keys are just a waste of space. Come to think of it, a longer spacebar used to be the norm.....
They have found ways to combine furthering their own business by using free software, and to make it do what they want, they have to contribute to it, again same as many smaller entities. Of course, some of their programmers will have their own ideas of freedom, as we all do, and will welcome opportunities to get paid to improve free software, so they will not be lacking in motivation.
The fact that they have a corporate hatred of Sir Bill must inevitably have some subtle influence in motivating people, but their direct aim is simply to out-compete a competitor. They know that if Sir Bill gets that market, he will extend his monopoly yet again, and tey will be locked out.
Of course, as the Criminal Monopoly has no innovative ability whatsoever, if they get into web-linked software (whatever that might be) by buying or stealing something from some small company, it will simply be used to beat up IBM, then left to a slowly fester, like Inept Exploder, because they neither have the ability nor the motivation to continue development, as in tha case when IE had virtually wiped out Netscape.
Embrace, extend, extinguish...... The future for web-linked software is not good.
Unfortunately Sir Bill demonstrates on a daily basis that he is incapable of learning anything, it will take at least a jail sentence before he mends his ways.
It is unfortunate that US law appears not to have the necessary power, if the Monopoly trial had been in the UK, Bill would never have become a Sir, because he, and several others, would have gone to jail for perjury and contempt of court, and maybe some conspiracy charges also.
But, maybe the marketing was a failure, even IBM did not realise at first how ruthless Sir Bill can be. The same thing will of course happen to Sun, when the time is right. Anyone who does business with the Criminal Monopoly, bearing in mind their consistent past history, will get what they deserve for being so stupid. The Criminal Monopoly will turn on Sun, and attempt to destroy them, as part of their plan to destroy Unix. They will of course also turn on the SCOundrel when his task is complete, or more likely when he fails to complete it.
The only complaint I had about OS/2 was the installation, from a huge pile of floppies, but that was simply because most PCs did not have a CD-ROM drive at that time. It was rock solid, and noticeably faster than Windoze 3.1, DOS compatability excellent. I did notice that OS/2 appeared to know how to use a SCSI drive properly, Windoze never did, until maybe 2000.
But, the Monopolist, who already at that time was flouting the law, decided to sabotage IBM's efforts. I am surprised that there was no legal action they could take at the time, maybe breach of contract.
I can visualise there being a market for a versatile device which might be ideal here, something like a PC, with small screen and keyboard, all built into a yellow unbreakable case like they use for other testgear, with a nice big CF card, so it can be a PC, PDA or something else, according to which OS you load. It would want to hang on a belt, round your neck, or have a nice big magnet in the base so you could stick it on the truck. It would also need to float in water, just in case, and as it would contain a decent battery, it might also have a lamp built in, so you can connect it in the dark. Someone should make one. There must be many other uses.
Nothing short of criminal prosecution, and jail sentences for Gates, Ballmer and a few others, will ever make these guys behave properly. They have a consistent track record.
But, in other circumstances, it makes little sense to do anything with an unsupported OS that never was any good anyway, although if it is all you have got, it may be slightly better than nothing.
It sounds like your guys really need these ruggedised things the military used to use, IIRC Grid Compass was the brand, but I may be wrong as I have not seen one recently. Magnesium alloy casting, thick polycarbonate over the LCD (it was plasma the first time I saw one, with a Z80 running CP/M IIRC), you really could throw them around. It think they were made in the UK, I don't know if the manufacturer still exists. I have a very old, broken one at home somewhere, I think it might be a 286, with orange plasma screen, anyway the HDD or more likely the disc controller is faulty, last time I tried it would boot from floppy, but did not want to know about a replacement disk I tried. I think the controller chip is long obsolete, it probably was a semi-custom gate array anyway, so it is not worth fixing. But, mechanically it was as good as new.
I wish they built the smaller stuff, all the way down to the smallest PDA, like that today, plastics are all very well but there is simply no substitute for metal, maybe with a soft plastic coating, when things might be dropped.
Yes, it is incompetent, because he ended up with two kinds of trash instead of what might have been one good OS. And, merging diverse codebases is impossible, and/or results in lots and lots of bugs, which is why XP is so utterly useless. The high points of Wn=indoze development were NT 3.51 (before Bill's meddling), and maybe 2000, everything on teh 9x tres was buggy, unstable, incecure trash. XP is the ultimate in bloatware, and simply as a consequence of the bloat has more bugs than all the others combined. Bill's expertise in the development of proper software is zero.
As a result, businesses with bad web sites lose a percentage of their business, but they don't seem to be capable of realising that. If something does not conform to published standards to the extent that it will not work in Mozilla, that company can expect no money from me. I will not reboot into a vile, bug-infested OS, and then open a major security hole, just to to business with them, I will simply go elsewhere.
Marketing men beware. If you employ idiots (often at vast expense) to design your web site, you will immediately lose about 10% of your possible sales. Your job might follow. And in any case, why pander to the wishes of a Convicted Criminal Monopoly? Be independent, think for yourselves, and get it done properly. It should not cost any more than getting it done badly, your site will look more professional, and no-one will fail to buy something because of a stupid browser incompatability.
....emulate a piece of junk like any of the Win9x family on anything? That technology is best forgotten, it was a classic example of Sir Bill's gross incompetence that brought it into existence in the first place.
Implants like these generally need the scanner to be within feet or inches to be detected.
There has to be a better way of doing this.
But, NT up to 3.51 was more like a microkernel, the device drivers and GUI were not in kernel space, and guess what, it was slow and stable.
It was said at the time that His Billness personally was unimpressed by the speed, so His Incompetence ordered that the GUI and drivers (including third-party drivers) were moved into kernel space, to avoid all the overhead of ring 0 to ring 3 transistions all the time. It then immediately became buggy and unstable. There is no denying that NT4 was much faster than 3.51, it just crashes 1000 times as often.
Yet another blatantly incompetent decision by the Guiding Light of the Criminal Monopoly.
Of course, in the most prolific versions of Windoze, 9X, everything runs in kernel space, an inexcusable situation since they were written for the 386 architecture.
IMHO the microkernel has much to commend it, but would be best if CPU architectures were optimised for it, giving attention primarily to how system calls work at machine level. It would be very handy to be able to lock the kernel into a portion of the cache, maybe a separate level 1 cache specifically for that purpose? After all, a microkernel would not be all that big, you could maybe on the top of the range CPUs have dedicated caches for other things too.
No, he was describing the colour after putting some of the pages to good use. I hope that the paper was satisfactorily soft, haemerrhoids can be quite nasty!
I would have said more like those so-called professional historians, and the guy who allegedly perfected the Gas Chamber and the Electric Chair, who visited Auschwitz, saw with their own eyes, and then denied that the Holocaust ever happened. BTW I am not Jewish, I have no axe to grind, but well-established facts with overwhelming eyewitness and photographic evedence are exactly what they seem, the contrary opinion is highly offensive lies and deception.
They make me sick, the way they twist facts. I saw Mr. Electric Chair (no doubt /.ers will fill in the name) on TV taking a sample from the surface of the brickwork, which he sent to a lab, to test for Zyklon B, of which there of course was no trace. A gas would not be retained for minutes, far less over 50 years, yet his actions, and his self-confessed expertise in the field of so-called humane executions, might have given credibility to his claims to anyone without a proper scientific education.
Yet vile scum like that are believed by fanatics, and even apparently sensible people. I call him scum by the way, because both of the methods of execution in which he is allegedly an expert are in fact death by slow, agonising torture, yet some state legislatures, on his advice, believe that the electric chair is humane.
Fortunately human life does not figure in Brown's rantings, at least not on this occasion, but who knows what other vile and dangerous lies he may be capable of propagating.
Funnily enough, Mr. Electric Chair clearly had no competence in technical matters either, just like Brown.
People like that are a danger to society and should be locked up. I hope that Brown is the subject of so much legal action ,when his book is published, that he is never listended to again, by anyone, anywhere.
I wonder about his politics, is he a Fascist like these other guys, or just a Bill-worshipper? Or is it the great god Mammon, meaning he has no principles at all, except to get rich quick?
Why IBM went to a bunch of hopeless, dishonest incompetents with a bad track record (buggy, bloated, late basic interpreters) and insatiable greed, for their OS, is well beyond my comprehension.
All due respect to Linus and the Prof, none at all to Brown.
If you can't handle signing up for a Slashdot account, I suggest that you ask your boss, Sir Bill, to get one of his few competent people to help you out.
I hope that mainstream journalists and book reviewers can get their heads round this, and understand what is really going on here, and of course, that no-one buys the book! No doubt, there will be a bulk order from Redmond, but as far as the rest of the world is concerned, it is a total waste of rain-forest.
Yes, I saw that, and feared the worst. The project was simply under-funded, which is why things did not get done. It was not due to any lack of technical competence. I have seen projects like this before, not necessarily involving space exploration, where those who control the cash supply something less than the absolute minimum necessary to to the job, with the inevitable result. Partly it happens because, especially in the UK, those who control the money usually have no scientific or technical ability whatsoever, and they imagine that there is always some way of making economies, when in matters of hard fact such as equipment design, there usually is not.
So the judge anticipated Bill Gates in 1882! The legal system was obviously in good order in those days.