I watched a video of the replacement procedure for the hard disk in my MacBook Pro 17" machine (2.4GHz). After seeing that I decided that it is unwise to do the upgrade. Not only are there about 96 screws of different types and sizes involved, there is the removal of tape, unplugging of little bitty wires, and pulling on things that resist.
If Apple offered to do upgrades, it would be worth it to let them do it right. There is no way I am trying this myself, and I am fairly confident.
I just had a dangerous thought. The Windows operating system can be used to store copyrighted material, such as music. Software that allows the transfer of CD music into the computer has traditionally written into visible storage an mp3 file the user could use. What if it didn't. Microsoft could develop a new file system, and claim the purpose of it is to protect their data. Then any attempts to write Linux file system drivers for that file system could be interpreted as an attempt to go around protection measures, That of course would be against the law. I think it is only a matter of time before Microsoft plays this card and Windows becomes even more of a closed operating system.
The purpose of the operating system is to expose the capabilities of the hardware and make them available for use. Then the application software comes along and puts it to work for the user.
For many years the operating system struggled to provide that capability and tyhe hardware vendors struggled to put enough power in the hardware.
As Windows developed version by version, we used to hate the limitations that were based on features not yet implemented.
Competition between operating systems was based on features more than price. The OS vendor wanted to provide as many features as possible so as to make the product more desirable.
If this were a normal competitive environment,, Microsoft would want to make the OS the best it could be so they would be more competitive. However this is not the situation and they are more interested in being in bed with special interests than providing the best product for the users who buy the product.
Now we are in a time where the operating system says no, not because it can't, but because it won't. This is intolerable, and when the people truly understand exactly what is happening to their expensive computers, being sold out behind their backs, they will become interested in operating systems that provide more instead of less capability.
I am really glad TFA made these issues visible for discussion.
I can tell from your story you were right there in the same head space I was. Only some of us knew enough to red the track in one revolution. That was quite a trick and made the difference between a great driver and a lousy one. I worked with multiprocessor CP/M guys also. We may have known each other. Were you in silicon valley? Your posting really took me back.
In 1976 I was programming pdp-8s in assembler (with the switches as I remember) and in 1974 I had a consulting gig programming in MIIS (mumps) for the Hospital Data Center of Virginia. The PDP-10 had those cute little tapes, remember? Just after that I used PDP-11's under RSX-11M and RSTS at Turpin Systems. It wasn't until a few years later I found out about Unix. Meanwhile the Dec Minicomputers were what was being used at UC Berkeley for the development of the BSD Extensions to Unix Version 7, and later System V. Many years later I did buy a PDP-11 which I had briefly in my apartment in San Francisco. Unfortunately the system took more power than my apartment had, and the hard disk (size of a washing machine) shook the apartment and bothered my neighbors. I never did like the Vax and VMS though. There was a time when Dec ruled.
Whether it is apple or at&t, someone decided that tethering was not ok with iPhones. If you jailbrake the phone, you can tether, then you can do something apple and/or at&t don't want you doing on the network. Is that all right or not? It would be unfortunate if AT&T decided to charge more for iPhone contracts because jailbroken iPhones were dragging down the network. Personally, I wish I could tether my disabled dad's iPhone to his Powerbook. He is stuck in the hospital and it would be good for him. But I am a law abiding kind of guy, and I won't jailbrake my phones.
I can't account for what a salesman might have said but I worked with the product at source level and Concurrent was derived from mpm-86.
cp/m-80 -> cp/m-86 -> cp/m86 plus -> dos plus -> drdos
mp/m-80 -> mpm-86 -> ccp/m-86 = dos emul -> cdos86
Eventually they just folded it all together when DRI was bought by Novell, then they just gave it away when it was sold to Caldera.
For what it is worth, I am very sure about this. Please take my word for it.
Respectfully, Doug
I really miss those days. Porting Concurrent to non-ibm compatible machines was some of the most challenging work I did in my whole life. Every system was a major debugging challenge and those several years were the hardest and the most satisfying. The best of all was the port I did in japan for the IBM 5550. I did the whole port in one month despite hostile conditions. On day 30 I demonstrated the 5550 with four quadrants each running a different GSX application. Also four copies of wordstar running at once. Debugging interrupt code with paperclip soldered to the irq pin of the interrupt controller and watching it with a logic probe.
I really miss those challenges. Taking a lifeless heap of hardware and making it stand up and perform was the life.
http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/os/ has a compupro.zip with a ccpm86 directory with a v2-0 directory with a d3 directory containing the XIOS code I wrote for the Olympia People machine and that contained the code that screen switched the virtual consoles. Does that help?
I was surprised when I stumbled across this code with my name in it. I was the first person to write XIOS using rasm and link instead of asm86 and gencmd. the Olympia XIOS was my first commercial effort with Concurrent after I went to work for DRI.
It was a seperate product based on mpm. I took the source code of Concurrent and CP/m plus to england and the engineers there created a dos-like version with an int e0 emulator. Later it was renamed DR-dos. Many years ofter that they folded concurrent into DR-dos and it became DR Multiuser dos.
The first versions of concurrent switched the whole screen. LAter there was a version that could detect if the consoles were in graphics mode and do the right thing. After that a version came out with sizeable moveable windows, that was about the time it changed to concurrent DOS.
Funny you would mention that. After Gary left digital research with tom, they started a company to do the grolier encyclopedia. I worked on that software briefly. They used a vax to master the CD and it took two washing machine sized hard drives to model a CD.
Concurrent CP/M-86 had the ability to run four windows of gem concurrently. I was the World Troubleshooter for that product and the four Gem display did knock everybodies eyes out.
Right around the time of Gem, IBM was doing presentation manager too. Gem was able to run on lots of OSs. there was a CPM version, a Concurrent version,... I think there was even a Dos version.
I hired on at DRI the day Concurrent was releases and David August went from OEM Systems to Graphics to work on GSX and Gem. Gary's influence was very visible with BIOSs GIOS, XIOS...
DRI almost took over the computer world... They had OS, graphics and languages. Too bad.
Many legitimate forms of art have been appreciated over centuries by all sorts of people all over the world and of many ages. For computer games to compete with classic art,, they would have to stay around for centuries, so that their universal appeal could be evaluated. Computer games seem to last months or years, and not decades or centuries. I see no way to compare them on that basis.
People I have known who were big on comics, focused mostly on the artistic aspect of the graphics. They talk about how a particular artist changed over time in the way they rendered a character. I don't think comic book were ever intended to embody in a few dozen pages as much literary content as a five hundred page book. Some plot, some character development, and intriguing artistic rendering of the scenes is where the artistic value seems to be. Comparing them to book makes no sense to me.
I cannot see how anything in its twentieth iteration can be called, "Final" anything. Is it just me or has the love of money caused the Final Fantasy to live on like the television serial character who has just a year to live, year after year after year...
The text to speech engine is used primarily by vision limited people that have a hard time reading text on the screen. This is a common facility built into many operating systems for the sake of the handicapped. Is it their intention to punish the handicapped now? As a person with a visual handicap, I am very sensitive to this issue. What is it the Author's Guild really wants here? We have only just arrived at the point where technology can improve the quality of life for the less fortunate.
Maybe we turn turn the tables and make the work an audio only one, and restrict the ability to read the text?
For the last few years, the memory manufacturers have been having strong sales because of the evolution of the multitasking computer user. Open a mail client, and web links pop out at you. Click on one and now you have a browser up. Email with embedded multimedia files cause audio and video players to spawn. The very Internet we love is the central driver for multiple open programs. Power users know how much memory they need from experience. Using too many programs without enough physical ram causes swapping and things run slowly. When the GUI is sluggish and the hard disk light stays on, most of us know what that means.
Microsoft lives for us to use IE, exchange, Office... This move my Microsoft does not surprise me. What normally happens is that OEMs such as HP and Sony only support the lowest and the largest of the configurations, so that users purchasing smaller machines will only be able to obtain the Home Basic version and will not be able to upgrade unless the OEM supports all the versions. In my recent observations, they don't and therefore people will have to live with the application limits and they will hate it every day. This will increase the resentment against Microsoft but this will not hurt Microsoft much because of their monopoly position. Despite decades of behavior hurting the users, they have no reason to change their attitude or behavior, and I expect they will continue to profit at our expense for quite some time.
I sincerely hope Apple doesn't follow their example and do the same to MacOS. That would be very depressing, although Apple would support all their own versions, and upgrading would be possible. HP and Sony users (all OEMs actually) should beware and should probably not buy machine that come with Home Basic. This will depress the netbook market just as economy of scale was just about to do something nice for us after all these years.
I know bridges and roads and stuff are important, but our electronic highways are critical to our ability to compete in the world, and are lagging well behind other nations. Between the high percentage of tax cuts, and these last few bad decisions, I have the feeling the middle class got the short end of the stick again.
Oh boy, I forgot about the taxes. Depending on the country and the circumstances, you might have to pay taxes in both countries. To avoid the taxes, you would have to revoke your citizenship, and that puts you even further away from coming home.
I have worked abroad as a salaried employee of a US company, and it was very lonely and I suffered from homesickness each time after about three months away. My employer disliked having to send me home every three months for a week . Even at that, while home I knew the clock was ticking and I would be leaving soon.
Each time after returning home, I was reminded what I liked about home. I am not saying that America is better than everywhere. I am saying that having been born here, I feel a very strong attachment and a feeling of being ungrounded would result from extended periods away.
First hardware will come with a sticker saying XBox 3 Capable. After they sell millions of these, new hardware will arrive that can run the new firmware with the desirable GUI. This new hardware will be marked Xbox Premium Ready. Millions of users will feel ripped off having paid for the first wave of Xbox 3 hardware, but it won't matter. Microsoft has learned from history and this is the new MO for them.
The idea of working outside the US for a while until you can come back home leads me to the conclusion that somehow you are still a US citizen, but you are wishing you could have a job in the US and wish you could move there. How is that different than being a foreigner and wishing you could get a US job, and wishing you could move here. Gee, what happened to Fred? Oh, he had to work offshore last year, and couldn't come back. Now he is stuck in India. Suddenly being unemployed in the US with the possibility of being employed soon sounds better than trying to make a life in a foreign country and dream of coming home somehow. That sounds like some kind of nightmare.
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If Apple offered to do upgrades, it would be worth it to let them do it right. There is no way I am trying this myself, and I am fairly confident.
I just had a dangerous thought. The Windows operating system can be used to store copyrighted material, such as music. Software that allows the transfer of CD music into the computer has traditionally written into visible storage an mp3 file the user could use. What if it didn't. Microsoft could develop a new file system, and claim the purpose of it is to protect their data. Then any attempts to write Linux file system drivers for that file system could be interpreted as an attempt to go around protection measures, That of course would be against the law. I think it is only a matter of time before Microsoft plays this card and Windows becomes even more of a closed operating system.
For many years the operating system struggled to provide that capability and tyhe hardware vendors struggled to put enough power in the hardware.
As Windows developed version by version, we used to hate the limitations that were based on features not yet implemented.
Competition between operating systems was based on features more than price. The OS vendor wanted to provide as many features as possible so as to make the product more desirable.
If this were a normal competitive environment,, Microsoft would want to make the OS the best it could be so they would be more competitive. However this is not the situation and they are more interested in being in bed with special interests than providing the best product for the users who buy the product.
Now we are in a time where the operating system says no, not because it can't, but because it won't. This is intolerable, and when the people truly understand exactly what is happening to their expensive computers, being sold out behind their backs, they will become interested in operating systems that provide more instead of less capability.
I am really glad TFA made these issues visible for discussion.
I can tell from your story you were right there in the same head space I was. Only some of us knew enough to red the track in one revolution. That was quite a trick and made the difference between a great driver and a lousy one. I worked with multiprocessor CP/M guys also. We may have known each other. Were you in silicon valley? Your posting really took me back.
In 1976 I was programming pdp-8s in assembler (with the switches as I remember) and in 1974 I had a consulting gig programming in MIIS (mumps) for the Hospital Data Center of Virginia. The PDP-10 had those cute little tapes, remember? Just after that I used PDP-11's under RSX-11M and RSTS at Turpin Systems. It wasn't until a few years later I found out about Unix. Meanwhile the Dec Minicomputers were what was being used at UC Berkeley for the development of the BSD Extensions to Unix Version 7, and later System V. Many years later I did buy a PDP-11 which I had briefly in my apartment in San Francisco. Unfortunately the system took more power than my apartment had, and the hard disk (size of a washing machine) shook the apartment and bothered my neighbors. I never did like the Vax and VMS though. There was a time when Dec ruled.
Whether it is apple or at&t, someone decided that tethering was not ok with iPhones. If you jailbrake the phone, you can tether, then you can do something apple and/or at&t don't want you doing on the network. Is that all right or not? It would be unfortunate if AT&T decided to charge more for iPhone contracts because jailbroken iPhones were dragging down the network. Personally, I wish I could tether my disabled dad's iPhone to his Powerbook. He is stuck in the hospital and it would be good for him. But I am a law abiding kind of guy, and I won't jailbrake my phones.
cp/m-80 -> cp/m-86 -> cp/m86 plus -> dos plus -> drdos
mp/m-80 -> mpm-86 -> ccp/m-86 = dos emul -> cdos86
Eventually they just folded it all together when DRI was bought by Novell, then they just gave it away when it was sold to Caldera. For what it is worth, I am very sure about this. Please take my word for it. Respectfully, Doug
I really miss those days. Porting Concurrent to non-ibm compatible machines was some of the most challenging work I did in my whole life. Every system was a major debugging challenge and those several years were the hardest and the most satisfying. The best of all was the port I did in japan for the IBM 5550. I did the whole port in one month despite hostile conditions. On day 30 I demonstrated the 5550 with four quadrants each running a different GSX application. Also four copies of wordstar running at once. Debugging interrupt code with paperclip soldered to the irq pin of the interrupt controller and watching it with a logic probe. I really miss those challenges. Taking a lifeless heap of hardware and making it stand up and perform was the life.
http://www.retroarchive.org/cpm/os/ has a compupro.zip with a ccpm86 directory with a v2-0 directory with a d3 directory containing the XIOS code I wrote for the Olympia People machine and that contained the code that screen switched the virtual consoles. Does that help? I was surprised when I stumbled across this code with my name in it. I was the first person to write XIOS using rasm and link instead of asm86 and gencmd. the Olympia XIOS was my first commercial effort with Concurrent after I went to work for DRI.
CCP/M-86 version 1.0 for the IBM PC did that much. I believe that was about 1984.
It was a seperate product based on mpm. I took the source code of Concurrent and CP/m plus to england and the engineers there created a dos-like version with an int e0 emulator. Later it was renamed DR-dos. Many years ofter that they folded concurrent into DR-dos and it became DR Multiuser dos.
The first versions of concurrent switched the whole screen. LAter there was a version that could detect if the consoles were in graphics mode and do the right thing. After that a version came out with sizeable moveable windows, that was about the time it changed to concurrent DOS.
Didn't curses have viewports you could switch between?
Funny you would mention that. After Gary left digital research with tom, they started a company to do the grolier encyclopedia. I worked on that software briefly. They used a vax to master the CD and it took two washing machine sized hard drives to model a CD.
Concurrent CP/M-86 had the ability to run four windows of gem concurrently. I was the World Troubleshooter for that product and the four Gem display did knock everybodies eyes out. Right around the time of Gem, IBM was doing presentation manager too. Gem was able to run on lots of OSs. there was a CPM version, a Concurrent version, ... I think there was even a Dos version.
I hired on at DRI the day Concurrent was releases and David August went from OEM Systems to Graphics to work on GSX and Gem. Gary's influence was very visible with BIOSs GIOS, XIOS...
DRI almost took over the computer world... They had OS, graphics and languages. Too bad.
Many legitimate forms of art have been appreciated over centuries by all sorts of people all over the world and of many ages. For computer games to compete with classic art,, they would have to stay around for centuries, so that their universal appeal could be evaluated. Computer games seem to last months or years, and not decades or centuries. I see no way to compare them on that basis.
People I have known who were big on comics, focused mostly on the artistic aspect of the graphics. They talk about how a particular artist changed over time in the way they rendered a character. I don't think comic book were ever intended to embody in a few dozen pages as much literary content as a five hundred page book. Some plot, some character development, and intriguing artistic rendering of the scenes is where the artistic value seems to be. Comparing them to book makes no sense to me.
I cannot see how anything in its twentieth iteration can be called, "Final" anything. Is it just me or has the love of money caused the Final Fantasy to live on like the television serial character who has just a year to live, year after year after year...
Maybe we turn turn the tables and make the work an audio only one, and restrict the ability to read the text?
I meant to say people should avoid buying OEM version coming with Starter Edition, not Home Basic. My bad.
Microsoft lives for us to use IE, exchange, Office... This move my Microsoft does not surprise me. What normally happens is that OEMs such as HP and Sony only support the lowest and the largest of the configurations, so that users purchasing smaller machines will only be able to obtain the Home Basic version and will not be able to upgrade unless the OEM supports all the versions. In my recent observations, they don't and therefore people will have to live with the application limits and they will hate it every day. This will increase the resentment against Microsoft but this will not hurt Microsoft much because of their monopoly position. Despite decades of behavior hurting the users, they have no reason to change their attitude or behavior, and I expect they will continue to profit at our expense for quite some time.
I sincerely hope Apple doesn't follow their example and do the same to MacOS. That would be very depressing, although Apple would support all their own versions, and upgrading would be possible. HP and Sony users (all OEMs actually) should beware and should probably not buy machine that come with Home Basic. This will depress the netbook market just as economy of scale was just about to do something nice for us after all these years.
I know bridges and roads and stuff are important, but our electronic highways are critical to our ability to compete in the world, and are lagging well behind other nations. Between the high percentage of tax cuts, and these last few bad decisions, I have the feeling the middle class got the short end of the stick again.
I have worked abroad as a salaried employee of a US company, and it was very lonely and I suffered from homesickness each time after about three months away. My employer disliked having to send me home every three months for a week . Even at that, while home I knew the clock was ticking and I would be leaving soon.
Each time after returning home, I was reminded what I liked about home. I am not saying that America is better than everywhere. I am saying that having been born here, I feel a very strong attachment and a feeling of being ungrounded would result from extended periods away.
First hardware will come with a sticker saying XBox 3 Capable. After they sell millions of these, new hardware will arrive that can run the new firmware with the desirable GUI. This new hardware will be marked Xbox Premium Ready. Millions of users will feel ripped off having paid for the first wave of Xbox 3 hardware, but it won't matter. Microsoft has learned from history and this is the new MO for them.
The idea of working outside the US for a while until you can come back home leads me to the conclusion that somehow you are still a US citizen, but you are wishing you could have a job in the US and wish you could move there. How is that different than being a foreigner and wishing you could get a US job, and wishing you could move here. Gee, what happened to Fred? Oh, he had to work offshore last year, and couldn't come back. Now he is stuck in India. Suddenly being unemployed in the US with the possibility of being employed soon sounds better than trying to make a life in a foreign country and dream of coming home somehow. That sounds like some kind of nightmare.