Actually DOS used to run on a variety of x86 machines, not just IBM PCs. E.g. RM Nimbus machines were x86 but not IBM PC compatible - they had different hardware and a different Bios.
NT based OSes don't require IBM PC compatibility either. 16 bit Windows also ran on the RM Nimbus and Japanese PC98, both of which were x86 based but not PC compatible. Still there Dos needed to be MSDOS because Windows patched great chunks of code when it took over. Dos would also patch Windows. Someone described this as 'burrowing' code - i.e. code which nominally runs on top of something else but actually rewrites it and takes over completely.
It's quick to release - you could run Windows on top of an old version of Dos which did not know about Windows and thus did not export interfaces Windows needed. Of course it was also good for Microsoft - rather than a well defined INT 21 API, any Dos that run Windows also needed to keep its data segment organised in a particular way and implement the API in the way the DOS patching functions in Windows expected.
It would be cool if someone wrote a C64 ROM which exploits a hole in the emulator to load native ARM code and thereby allowed people to run non App Store code. I.e. you'd load it into the emulator and then your phone would be jailbroken.
echo "http://www.vordweb.co.uk/standards/lynx_text_browser.htm" | mail -s "YOU ARE VIOLATING UK Disability Discrimination Act (Part III) YOU KNOW WHO ELSE DIDN'T LIKE THE DISABLED?!" webmaster@website.com
You could measure the average time from clicking a UI element to something happening. Actually I wish people would test things like this rather than how quickly the Javascript implementation can crack brute force crack DES or whatever benchmarks Google are pushing so their prototype stuff can finally be released without people mocking it for being bloatware that is worse than Vista.
It would also let me avoid Java applications - we have some horrible intranet ones at work that feel like your mouse has a dodgy button or something - you click stuff, assume it didn't notice it and click another couple of times before you see an hour glass cursor. If people tested for UI responsiveness at least I could avoid things that don't have it in situations were I have a choice.
And, as a bonus it would encourage people to stop doing things that could potentially take more than a few milliseconds in the UI thread of Windows applications. In a very real sense UIs are a real time system and it is time more people realised the implications of that.
Back in the old days we used to eat people who did that so that the knowledge they had gained unnaturally could be shared amongst the whole tribe. Now people have gone soft. Still one day the old ways will return.
I think he should write some NASM code for an expansion rom as follows.
Set up the serial port for 115200 baud. Hook the transmit and receive interrupts. When you receive characters stuff them into the keyboard buffer in the Bios data area. Hook INT 10 calls to stuff sequences of escape codes into the serial transmit buffer. Empty the serial rx buffer and fill the serial tx buffer as necessary in ISRs. Once all your ISRs are in place return back to the Bios.
Then he could flash it into EPROM and put it into the bootrom socket of an old network card. Then again, I like doing stuff like that so maybe this application is just an excuse.
If you do it, put the source code on your website and see if anyone offers to pay you to customise it. You'd be surprised - the world is a big place and there's always a few hundred people interested in something like this but unable to do it themselves from scratch.
It's okay to admit it. We should all admit that we're too goddamned terrified of the world to ever wear pants.
After all, the damn things look like giant scissors. And we all know what we're afraid that these scissors will cut off.
I'm not afraid to admit it: I love my dead, gay, son.
Kibo taught us all to be free of fear: forget the pants, he'd say, in his playful manner that endeared him to people like Joel Furr, Christopher Walken, Mr. Hooper from Sesame Street, John Wintson, the Scientologists, and the Grays. (Actually Kibo would phrase it differently: "Only bozoes wear pants around here.")
And that's why, today, 9 out of 10 Americans is a Kibologist and the tenth excessively multi-posts phone sex spams from Prodigy. And the eleventh is a Canadian. (Wednesday.) And 115% out of 11 Americans don't know ANYTHING about statistics.
I think that the damage has already been done. Amazon handled the situation poorly and when confronted about the situation took a lot more time to attempt to remedy the problem than was necessary to degrade their image.
I think it would have been cooler if they silently put the books back and denied it ever happened and then silently deleted them a bit later. Some people would assume they were evil/incompetent, others would assume the whole thing was a situationist prank.
It is commonly claimed that breaking of German Naval Enigma shortened the war by a year, but given its effects on the Second Battle of the Atlantic alone, that might be an underestimate.
An exhibit in 2003 on "Secret War" at the Imperial War Museum, in London, quoted British Prime Minister Winston Churchill telling King George VI, "It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war." Churchill's greatest fear, even after Hitler had suspended Operation Sealion and invaded the Soviet Union, was that the German submarine wolf packs would succeed in strangling sea-locked Britain. He would later write, in Their Finest Hour (1949), "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril." A major factor that averted Britain's defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic was her regained mastery of Naval Enigma decryption.
Funny - this very thing was being discussed around 1985 (I think), but using battery-backed RAM as a way to reduce boot time. The thinking was people wouldn't put up with a computer that took 30 seconds to start, and if we didn't have a 2-5 second boot time (equal to a TV), the personal computer would never fly. But since it took from 1985 (80386 chip) to 1995 (Windows 95) for a 32-bit OS to become popular, maybe 25 years is reasonable.
Or not. Man, this industry moves at a snails pace in a lot of areas. Why do we still live with the x86 instruction set. Is "the year of UNIX" here yet?
Anyway, three competitors will emerge:
- Someone will put NAND directly on the drive, and get an instant speed improvement. All the tech sites will rave about it and it will be an instant must-have item.
- Their competitor will figure out a way to put the OS files in NAND, for fast booting, via a utility or firmware. The marketing war begins.
- The third competitor will work with Microsoft or Apple to get OS support for fast boot. Apple will get there first and you'll see a commercial on TV with the Mac guy wondering why the PC guy takes the entire commercial to wake up.
Mac users with expensive new energy saving 'hybrid hard disk' laptops will act self righteous around people with 'energy guzzling' laptops. If you leave your old Dell lying around, they will scratch it with their car keys.
Maybe you're thinking of Kevin Warwick, cyborg from England. He gave a lot of interviews to the press about how cybernetic implants would give us telepathy and that cybernetically enhanced humans would eventually for a new and superior species, the threat or cyberdrugs and so on. Of course experimentally all he did was put an RFID in his arm.
I like the way if you're talking about something technical you can interleave say screenshots of oscilloscopes in with the text. So you can say
Executive summary - we have a fix.
With the old version we see this
Picture1
[Explain why picture 1 is bad in words]
With the new version we see this
Picture2
[Explain what has changed in picture 2 in words]
Actually the screenshots from a scope tend to be quite small as a gif or png.
If you get it right the plain text version is still completely comprehensible for people that read the text only version on their phones. Plus people that understand can see quickly from the pictures what is going on without having to read the explanation. And manager types can just give up after the executive summary. Last but not least sometimes you need to convince a skeptical customer that you really understand and then you can reuse the text and pictures.
Now without the image you'd end up with a mass of text that is much harder to read.
He then continued to say, "Also, I use it to hunt deer."
You really need an area denial weapon when fighting dear, like a JP233 or better an MLRS equipped with cluster bombs. Otherwise the dear will go right back in and repair their airfield after you bomb it.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually DOS used to run on a variety of x86 machines, not just IBM PCs. E.g. RM Nimbus machines were x86 but not IBM PC compatible - they had different hardware and a different Bios.
NT based OSes don't require IBM PC compatibility either. 16 bit Windows also ran on the RM Nimbus and Japanese PC98, both of which were x86 based but not PC compatible. Still there Dos needed to be MSDOS because Windows patched great chunks of code when it took over. Dos would also patch Windows. Someone described this as 'burrowing' code - i.e. code which nominally runs on top of something else but actually rewrites it and takes over completely.
It's quick to release - you could run Windows on top of an old version of Dos which did not know about Windows and thus did not export interfaces Windows needed. Of course it was also good for Microsoft - rather than a well defined INT 21 API, any Dos that run Windows also needed to keep its data segment organised in a particular way and implement the API in the way the DOS patching functions in Windows expected.
It would be cool if someone wrote a C64 ROM which exploits a hole in the emulator to load native ARM code and thereby allowed people to run non App Store code. I.e. you'd load it into the emulator and then your phone would be jailbroken.
Well Opera is immune from that sort of thing because only about 10 people use it so no one bothers to hack it.
Err.
I mean "You're totally right! Opera is a security nightmare! Don't ever use it!"
echo "http://www.vordweb.co.uk/standards/lynx_text_browser.htm" | mail -s "YOU ARE VIOLATING UK Disability Discrimination Act (Part III) YOU KNOW WHO ELSE DIDN'T LIKE THE DISABLED?!" webmaster@website.com
Problem solved.
Site preferences in Opera is a complete pain to use.
Firstly, there's no toolbar button to bring it up, it's buried under 3 levels of menu selection.
Right click, edit site preferences. Not admittedly that I use it much.
You could measure the average time from clicking a UI element to something happening. Actually I wish people would test things like this rather than how quickly the Javascript implementation can crack brute force crack DES or whatever benchmarks Google are pushing so their prototype stuff can finally be released without people mocking it for being bloatware that is worse than Vista.
It would also let me avoid Java applications - we have some horrible intranet ones at work that feel like your mouse has a dodgy button or something - you click stuff, assume it didn't notice it and click another couple of times before you see an hour glass cursor. If people tested for UI responsiveness at least I could avoid things that don't have it in situations were I have a choice.
And, as a bonus it would encourage people to stop doing things that could potentially take more than a few milliseconds in the UI thread of Windows applications. In a very real sense UIs are a real time system and it is time more people realised the implications of that.
Back in the old days we used to eat people who did that so that the knowledge they had gained unnaturally could be shared amongst the whole tribe. Now people have gone soft. Still one day the old ways will return.
I think he should write some NASM code for an expansion rom as follows.
Set up the serial port for 115200 baud. Hook the transmit and receive interrupts. When you receive characters stuff them into the keyboard buffer in the Bios data area. Hook INT 10 calls to stuff sequences of escape codes into the serial transmit buffer. Empty the serial rx buffer and fill the serial tx buffer as necessary in ISRs. Once all your ISRs are in place return back to the Bios.
Then he could flash it into EPROM and put it into the bootrom socket of an old network card. Then again, I like doing stuff like that so maybe this application is just an excuse.
If you do it, put the source code on your website and see if anyone offers to pay you to customise it. You'd be surprised - the world is a big place and there's always a few hundred people interested in something like this but unable to do it themselves from scratch.
At least Gmail can't tell whether or not I'm wearing pants.
http://www.42inc.com/~estephen/misc/posts/numbered/post0015.txt
> Wow. I'm really not wearing pants.
It's okay to admit it. We should all admit that we're too
goddamned terrified of the world to ever wear pants.
After all, the damn things look like giant scissors. And
we all know what we're afraid that these scissors will cut off.
I'm not afraid to admit it: I love my dead, gay, son.
Kibo taught us all to be free of fear: forget the pants, he'd say, in
his playful manner that endeared him to people like Joel Furr,
Christopher Walken, Mr. Hooper from Sesame Street, John Wintson, the
Scientologists, and the Grays. (Actually Kibo would phrase it
differently: "Only bozoes wear pants around here.")
And that's why, today, 9 out of 10 Americans is a Kibologist and the
tenth excessively multi-posts phone sex spams from Prodigy. And the
eleventh is a Canadian. (Wednesday.) And 115% out of 11 Americans
don't know ANYTHING about statistics.
God I miss Usenet.
I.e = id est = that is.
E.g. = exempli gratia = for example.
[sic] = this = when quoting an error.
And yes, i.e. was used correctly so no [sic] should be needed. Then again the editor probably just put it in to catch pedants.
I think that the damage has already been done. Amazon handled the situation poorly and when confronted about the situation took a lot more time to attempt to remedy the problem than was necessary to degrade their image.
I think it would have been cooler if they silently put the books back and denied it ever happened and then silently deleted them a bit later. Some people would assume they were evil/incompetent, others would assume the whole thing was a situationist prank.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra#Battle_of_the_Atlantic
It is commonly claimed that breaking of German Naval Enigma shortened the war by a year, but given its effects on the Second Battle of the Atlantic alone, that might be an underestimate.
An exhibit in 2003 on "Secret War" at the Imperial War Museum, in London, quoted British Prime Minister Winston Churchill telling King George VI, "It was thanks to Ultra that we won the war." Churchill's greatest fear, even after Hitler had suspended Operation Sealion and invaded the Soviet Union, was that the German submarine wolf packs would succeed in strangling sea-locked Britain. He would later write, in Their Finest Hour (1949), "The only thing that ever really frightened me during the war was the U-boat peril." A major factor that averted Britain's defeat in the Battle of the Atlantic was her regained mastery of Naval Enigma decryption.
Do you understand DRM? With a five digit UID I would think so. Your posts are a bit muddled, though, let me see if I can clarify.
Uhhhh dude. You're on his lawn!
I would have modded you up if you sent me the comment printed on high grade paper in Baskerville MT.
You could try installing a 32 bit version of flash with a 32 bit browser, that should probably work.
Maybe his browser needs more than 4GB of address space?
How do you feel about the casting of Tricia Helfer as Number 6?
Funny - this very thing was being discussed around 1985 (I think), but using battery-backed RAM as a way to reduce boot time. The thinking was people wouldn't put up with a computer that took 30 seconds to start, and if we didn't have a 2-5 second boot time (equal to a TV), the personal computer would never fly. But since it took from 1985 (80386 chip) to 1995 (Windows 95) for a 32-bit OS to become popular, maybe 25 years is reasonable.
Or not. Man, this industry moves at a snails pace in a lot of areas. Why do we still live with the x86 instruction set. Is "the year of UNIX" here yet?
Anyway, three competitors will emerge:
- Someone will put NAND directly on the drive, and get an instant speed improvement. All the tech sites will rave about it and it will be an instant must-have item.
- Their competitor will figure out a way to put the OS files in NAND, for fast booting, via a utility or firmware. The marketing war begins.
- The third competitor will work with Microsoft or Apple to get OS support for fast boot. Apple will get there first and you'll see a commercial on TV with the Mac guy wondering why the PC guy takes the entire commercial to wake up.
Mac users with expensive new energy saving 'hybrid hard disk' laptops will act self righteous around people with 'energy guzzling' laptops. If you leave your old Dell lying around, they will scratch it with their car keys.
I'm running 8 terrabytes of data
Man, that's a lot, but how many marsbytes are those?
SI-LENCE PUNY EARTH-MAN!
Actually if it's a cache the size could just reduce as the flash wears out.
Magnetic charges fired in a customised photon torpedo were used in Voyager S96E10 to defeat the dudes with forehead that looked like vulva.
Oh, crud. What will this mean at the ACME PHYSICS SUPPLY SHOPPE chain?
Have they got a price for Gnu Hurd?
Maybe you're thinking of Kevin Warwick, cyborg from England. He gave a lot of interviews to the press about how cybernetic implants would give us telepathy and that cybernetically enhanced humans would eventually for a new and superior species, the threat or cyberdrugs and so on. Of course experimentally all he did was put an RFID in his arm.
http://www.badscience.net/2004/04/the-return-of-captain-cyborg/
Oh sorry, that was a different piece of trivial "research" hyped as the road to transhumanism.
I like the way if you're talking about something technical you can interleave say screenshots of oscilloscopes in with the text. So you can say
Executive summary - we have a fix.
With the old version we see this
Picture1
[Explain why picture 1 is bad in words]
With the new version we see this
Picture2
[Explain what has changed in picture 2 in words]
Actually the screenshots from a scope tend to be quite small as a gif or png.
If you get it right the plain text version is still completely comprehensible for people that read the text only version on their phones. Plus people that understand can see quickly from the pictures what is going on without having to read the explanation. And manager types can just give up after the executive summary. Last but not least sometimes you need to convince a skeptical customer that you really understand and then you can reuse the text and pictures.
Now without the image you'd end up with a mass of text that is much harder to read.
He then continued to say, "Also, I use it to hunt deer."
You really need an area denial weapon when fighting dear, like a JP233 or better an MLRS equipped with cluster bombs. Otherwise the dear will go right back in and repair their airfield after you bomb it.
Apple doesn't cater to the thrift store shopping crowd
Mac fans demonstrate their people skills once again.