No, you mean slackware. My 386/33MHz still has just 4MiB of RAM and a Hercules card for video, not VGA, you insensitive clod! I hope I get the 387 chip for Christmas this year, though.
As entertaining as that is, I actually prefer Slackware over any other distribution. It was the first I ever tried over a decade ago (!), and in my occasionally humble opinion believe it beats the tar out of all the buntus and everything else.
Kids these days.. scared of pointers and memory allocation. Competent C coders hardly ever meet such problems. After a few years of C coding you know how to make sure you never refer to freed memory, or let something leek. Surely it may be nice not to have to worry about such things as that, but when the language won't catch your mistakes you learn how to not make any.
Leek? What does a vegetable have to do with C? Sure, some C programmers are very much like vegetables, but...
And you forgot to mention garbage collection. "Oh boo hoo, I don't want to have to free my allocations when I'm done with them."
Kids these days indeed. Uphill, both ways and all that.
On September 14, 2004, a vulnerability in GDI+ and other graphics APIs was discovered related to a defect in the standard JPEG library. It allowed arbitrary code execution on any system that displayed a malicious JPEG file using a tool that used the decoder in GDI+.[1][2] A patch was released to fix the issue on October 12, 2004. (from here)
Since one can use a JPEG for the folder icon, and presumably Windows uses GDI+ to decode them, placing a malformed folder.jpg in any directory could trigger it.
If you succeed in making programming not profitable, then I just start violating GPL. And luckily for me, a Russian citizen, no Russian court is going to do anything against that, because GPL status in Russia is still unclear (we're not bound to contracts that are not written on paper, and license agreements in foreign languages are invalid if signed between two Russian subjects).
They blew the special effects budget on the new Doctor Who story, "The Doctor's Daughter".
Thanks for reminding me it's time to check for the new episode. Time waits for no man, and this man waits not for the new season of Doctor Who to come to Canada, buddy.
A friend of mine got a call a few days ago from an old job of his doing some Access application development (*pukes*).
Apparently they didn't appreciate the fact that the code was littered with references to the Spanish Inquisition, Spam, Grail Shaped Beacons, and so on.
I guess one could say... (wait for it)...
THEY DON'T LIKE SPAM!
When I was farting around with something (I think it was a simple wget workalike) years ago, I had a pair of functions called HolyHandGrenade and KillerBunny. Not all that creative, but I still chuckle over it.
Both the BIOS and DOS mechanisms were slow and broken and did not follow the conventions of any programming language. For example terminating strings with the $ symbol, FFS.
This bit of trivia cannot really be attributed to the incompetence of Microsoft, and your assertion is not quite correct.
Originally, MS-DOS was modeled after CP/M, and the original version (of DOS) tried to make it as easy as possible to port CP/M software to DOS. $ was used as the string terminator in CP/M, and so DOS inherited it.
The other thing I'd like to point out is that when DOS showed up, there really were no programming languages, per se, for it. Everything was written in assembly language. So while it might have been nice to use NULL for the string terminator to ensure future compatibility with the eventual programming tools that would show up, at the time it really didn't matter. It was just as easy to db '$' as 0.
Vista is the 2nd most used OS in the world for desktop PCs and laptops; I wonder how you would quantify it being a disaster (the fact you might dislike it not counting of course). You could claim it's not the most popular Windows to have come out, but disaster it is not. Money talks, bullshit walks, as they say.
Unfortunately, in this case, I don't think "2nd most used OS" should win Microsoft any awards. How many vendors are choosing, or being forced, to shovel Vista down new computer buyer's throats?
My notebook, which I bought a month ago (an ASUS machine), only comes with Vista, and with no "downgrade" path to XP (no officially supported drivers).
When there's no choice of what operating system you use on your computer, and when the average computer user doesn't want to jump through hoops getting all his hardware that he paid for working under an alternative OS, of course it's going to inflate the numbers.
Most used by force, not desire.
As an aside, I am still running Vista on my notebook. I have shut off most of the crap I don't need, and it honestly does hum along nicely, but I'd still rather run XP Professional (best product to come out of Redmond in years), or Slackware.
The Gates set is more apt to give stuff to users (if there's a chance these users will end up buying stuff), do things the right way (for themselves, screw everyone else), and has been the underpinnings of things MS has gotten right (not much) or had done right by the IT world as a whole (lolwut?). They tend to take what they do (how much money they make) seriously, have pride in Microsoft and want it to continue to succeed for the right reasons (embrace, extend, extinguish), etc.
There, I've taken the liberty of fixing up this paragraph for you.
Seriously, I don't know what Microsoft/Gates history you've read, but MSFT has been a festering pit since its inception. I'd recommend "Undocumented DOS" by Andrew Schulman for a look at what went on in the DOS 6/Win 3.x days, but it's such an old and now irrelevant book, chances of finding it are slim.
In the 80's, Dungeons & Dragons was Evil (with a capital E), causing young malleable minds to turn to Satanism and murder.
In the 90's, Pokemon was Evil, and by proxy all other collectible card games. Pika-pi.
Now it's the 00's, and it's time for something new. Video games are just the latest target of all these Christian nutjobs trying to blame all the world's problems on something (anything) other than themselves.
When are buffoons like Thompson (and there's a whole lot of them, he's just this decade's most visible spokesperson) going to realize that the onus for ensuring our children are raised with healthy minds and morals belongs to no one but we parents.
Where were the parents of these kids who go out and shoot up their high school and then kill themselves after a couple hours training to master marksman levels on dust2?
I hacked up wicked bandits and took their gold in D&D, I jumped on mushrooms and turtle-things in Super Mario Brothers, blew up demons with a really big gun in Doom, shot rockets at cyborgs in Quake 2, blasted them damn terrorists in Counter-Strike, and killed a whole lot of people in the various Grand Theft Auto games. In a no-consequences environment where no one is hurt, it's fun. In the real world, life and liberty are sacred and I would never (except under extreme circumstances) harm another person.
As a gamer, this man offends me. As a human being, he disgusts me.
I have a copy of 'Beginning Linux Programming' from Wrox. Doesn't say UNIX anywhere. Hey guys, if you want me to testify I'd be happy to fly over. All expenses paid of course.
Oooh, me too, me too!
Somewhere around here (or rather there, since I am here and not there, where there is home), I have a copy of LINUX Programming by Patrick Volkerding and others, dated 1996.
It was a good book, although the content is mostly irrelevant now. I do miss the simplicity that was Linux way back then, y'know, back when it was feasible to fit an entire distribution on a dozen 1.44 MB floppies.
No, 32 bit OSes can address 4GB TOTAL memory, that's including graphics RAM and various caches. Thus, the total RAM addressable by a 32 bit OS is somewhere around 3-3.5GB depending on the configuration of the computer.
Splitting hairs, I know, but the bold text is in error. Regardless of how much hardware you install and how the system maps the memory, 4GB is still the total addressable memory. The system configuration only affects the accessible amount of memory.
Shouldn't that be a 640Kb memory stick? Because you'll never need more than 640Kb.
* 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Often attributed to Gates in 1981. Gates considered the IBM PC's 640kB program memory a significant breakthrough over 8-bit systems that were typically limited to 64kB, but he has denied making this remark.
"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."
And if the films of Lord of the Rings are a Tolkien Ring, anything by Uwe Boll is goatse.
I think of Uwe Boll more as an amalgamation of goatse, tubgirl, and all the festering rot that is prevalent in the *chan's, and even that doesn't really come close to the true horror of Boll.
Well, every version of Windows since 2000 has been a damn good OS...
... when compared to Microsoft's previous operating systems.
2000 and onwards indeed have been quite a bit better than the much maligned Windows ME, and 98SE. It's all relative.
Personally, I think that Linux is better than Windows for many tasks. Unfortunately, my choice of software (I'm a gamer) requires that I run Windows. With the proper tweaking and trimming of the fat, XP runs quite nice for me, and rarely barfs on the things I throw at it.
Slashdot Mirror
No, you mean slackware. My 386/33MHz still has just 4MiB of RAM and a Hercules card for video, not VGA, you insensitive clod! I hope I get the 387 chip for Christmas this year, though.
As entertaining as that is, I actually prefer Slackware over any other distribution. It was the first I ever tried over a decade ago (!), and in my occasionally humble opinion believe it beats the tar out of all the buntus and everything else.
Kids these days.. scared of pointers and memory allocation. Competent C coders hardly ever meet such problems. After a few years of C coding you know how to make sure you never refer to freed memory, or let something leek. Surely it may be nice not to have to worry about such things as that, but when the language won't catch your mistakes you learn how to not make any.
Leek? What does a vegetable have to do with C? Sure, some C programmers are very much like vegetables, but...
And you forgot to mention garbage collection. "Oh boo hoo, I don't want to have to free my allocations when I'm done with them."
Kids these days indeed. Uphill, both ways and all that.
Close. It was the GDI+ library.
On September 14, 2004, a vulnerability in GDI+ and other graphics APIs was discovered related to a defect in the standard JPEG library. It allowed arbitrary code execution on any system that displayed a malicious JPEG file using a tool that used the decoder in GDI+.[1][2] A patch was released to fix the issue on October 12, 2004. (from here)
Since one can use a JPEG for the folder icon, and presumably Windows uses GDI+ to decode them, placing a malformed folder.jpg in any directory could trigger it.
At least you read the headline. If you read the summary, you will see...
Obligatory "you must be new here", in spite of your low uid.
Put it in H!
I await the inevitable off-topic moderation fearlessly.
If you succeed in making programming not profitable, then I just start violating GPL. And luckily for me, a Russian citizen, no Russian court is going to do anything against that, because GPL status in Russia is still unclear (we're not bound to contracts that are not written on paper, and license agreements in foreign languages are invalid if signed between two Russian subjects).
In Soviet Russia, GPL violates you!
I don't see any reason to embiggen the dictionary.
Unless one wishes to enturbulate the masses.
Unless it swings around the sun, achieves a speed multiple times that of light, and travels back in time itself.
At least it won't have to save any whales.
Nitpicking follows.
X Window System, not X-windows. The only Windows around here are the Redmond variety.
Thanks for reminding me it's time to check for the new episode. Time waits for no man, and this man waits not for the new season of Doctor Who to come to Canada, buddy.
I guess one could say... (wait for it)...
THEY DON'T LIKE SPAM!
When I was farting around with something (I think it was a simple wget workalike) years ago, I had a pair of functions called HolyHandGrenade and KillerBunny. Not all that creative, but I still chuckle over it.
Both the BIOS and DOS mechanisms were slow and broken and did not follow the conventions of any programming language. For example terminating strings with the $ symbol, FFS.
This bit of trivia cannot really be attributed to the incompetence of Microsoft, and your assertion is not quite correct.
Originally, MS-DOS was modeled after CP/M, and the original version (of DOS) tried to make it as easy as possible to port CP/M software to DOS. $ was used as the string terminator in CP/M, and so DOS inherited it.
The other thing I'd like to point out is that when DOS showed up, there really were no programming languages, per se, for it. Everything was written in assembly language. So while it might have been nice to use NULL for the string terminator to ensure future compatibility with the eventual programming tools that would show up, at the time it really didn't matter. It was just as easy to db '$' as 0.
Wikipedia's entry on the $ sign.
Unfortunately, in this case, I don't think "2nd most used OS" should win Microsoft any awards. How many vendors are choosing, or being forced, to shovel Vista down new computer buyer's throats?
My notebook, which I bought a month ago (an ASUS machine), only comes with Vista, and with no "downgrade" path to XP (no officially supported drivers).
When there's no choice of what operating system you use on your computer, and when the average computer user doesn't want to jump through hoops getting all his hardware that he paid for working under an alternative OS, of course it's going to inflate the numbers.
Most used by force, not desire.
As an aside, I am still running Vista on my notebook. I have shut off most of the crap I don't need, and it honestly does hum along nicely, but I'd still rather run XP Professional (best product to come out of Redmond in years), or Slackware.
There, I've taken the liberty of fixing up this paragraph for you.
Seriously, I don't know what Microsoft/Gates history you've read, but MSFT has been a festering pit since its inception. I'd recommend "Undocumented DOS" by Andrew Schulman for a look at what went on in the DOS 6/Win 3.x days, but it's such an old and now irrelevant book, chances of finding it are slim.
In the 80's, Dungeons & Dragons was Evil (with a capital E), causing young malleable minds to turn to Satanism and murder.
In the 90's, Pokemon was Evil, and by proxy all other collectible card games. Pika-pi.
Now it's the 00's, and it's time for something new. Video games are just the latest target of all these Christian nutjobs trying to blame all the world's problems on something (anything) other than themselves.
When are buffoons like Thompson (and there's a whole lot of them, he's just this decade's most visible spokesperson) going to realize that the onus for ensuring our children are raised with healthy minds and morals belongs to no one but we parents.
Where were the parents of these kids who go out and shoot up their high school and then kill themselves after a couple hours training to master marksman levels on dust2?
I hacked up wicked bandits and took their gold in D&D, I jumped on mushrooms and turtle-things in Super Mario Brothers, blew up demons with a really big gun in Doom, shot rockets at cyborgs in Quake 2, blasted them damn terrorists in Counter-Strike, and killed a whole lot of people in the various Grand Theft Auto games. In a no-consequences environment where no one is hurt, it's fun. In the real world, life and liberty are sacred and I would never (except under extreme circumstances) harm another person.
As a gamer, this man offends me. As a human being, he disgusts me.
Oooh, me too, me too!
Somewhere around here (or rather there, since I am here and not there, where there is home), I have a copy of LINUX Programming by Patrick Volkerding and others, dated 1996.
It was a good book, although the content is mostly irrelevant now. I do miss the simplicity that was Linux way back then, y'know, back when it was feasible to fit an entire distribution on a dozen 1.44 MB floppies.
Ahh dammit, as soon as I read GP's comment, I immediately thought of the infamous monkey boy's flying chair. You beat me to it.
Although since you're posting as an AC, I'm replying instead of moderating you funny. :P
Splitting hairs, I know, but the bold text is in error. Regardless of how much hardware you install and how the system maps the memory, 4GB is still the total addressable memory. The system configuration only affects the accessible amount of memory.
tl;dr: s/addressable/accessible/
Why isn't this a news article by itself?
Why is Windows revenue down? What was the official reason, and official response?
Is this a normal dip that happens this time of year? Are they blaming the recession? Are they expecting an upswing in the next quarter?
Are you serious? Or have you missed the many articles ridiculing Windows Vista?
This ain't news, it's common knowledge.
Protip: Google Search.
* 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
Often attributed to Gates in 1981. Gates considered the IBM PC's 640kB program memory a significant breakthrough over 8-bit systems that were typically limited to 64kB, but he has denied making this remark.
"I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time... I keep bumping into that silly quotation attributed to me that says 640K of memory is enough. There's never a citation; the quotation just floats like a rumor, repeated again and again."
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates, scroll on down to the Misattributed section.
Not a fucking chance.
Metallica are a bunch of wankers. Their music is shit, the way they've treated their fans is shit. They are shit.
Besides, even if Dave can be a giant asshat, Megadeth's better.
What, then, do you consider to be first rate fantasy?
I think of Uwe Boll more as an amalgamation of goatse, tubgirl, and all the festering rot that is prevalent in the *chan's, and even that doesn't really come close to the true horror of Boll.
I agree with bigstrat here, more or less.
Well, every version of Windows since 2000 has been a damn good OS...... when compared to Microsoft's previous operating systems.
2000 and onwards indeed have been quite a bit better than the much maligned Windows ME, and 98SE. It's all relative.
Personally, I think that Linux is better than Windows for many tasks. Unfortunately, my choice of software (I'm a gamer) requires that I run Windows. With the proper tweaking and trimming of the fat, XP runs quite nice for me, and rarely barfs on the things I throw at it.
It's Godwin. Lucky for you, Wikipedia knows when you're wrong, even if you don't.