* Posts by Richard Plinston

2608 publicly visible posts • joined 27 Apr 2009

Incoming... Trump! Notebook makers ramp production to avoid next tidal wave of US trade tariffs

Richard Plinston

Re: Aren't you forgetting...

> The gains long term are in [local] manufacturing.

No. They just move the manufacturing to Vietnam or Taiwan (or ship there to re-brand).

The problem in your argument is the "long term". With Trump being so unstable no one knows what he will do tomorrow, there is no 'long term', all plans are dealing with what happened today.

Richard Plinston

Re: Aren't you forgetting...

> it is more in the range of half that at retail,

You don't understand how retail price is set.

It may be that the tariff that had been paid was a smaller fraction of the retail price but retailers don't care about that, they just add their margin (up to 100%) to whatever cost price they have to pay.

Richard Plinston

Re: Aren't you forgetting...

> but less of it will come from internal taxation.

Yes, there may be less income tax when employees are laid off due to decreased sales, less company tax when businesses have less sales revenue, extra costs and thus less profits or go bust.

Is that a good thing?

Richard Plinston

Re: Aren't you forgetting...

> and offsets other taxes

It doesn't offset the taxes paid by the consumer, they still pay taxes _and_ pay more for their goods.

As these tariffs are likely to reduce corporate profits then it may reduce the tax on profit paid by companies and the very very wealthy.

Richard Plinston

Re: I hope they impeach his ass.

> It doesn't hurt the business so much as they just pass along the costs to us

Price increases -> reduced sales -> reduction in production -> employee layoffs. This leads to fixed costs being supported by reduced gross profit. Loss of experienced employees means that if/when the tariffs are reduced/removed it takes longer/costs more to build up production again.

The consequence is that manufacturers will try to absorb the extra costs in order to keep production up and keep employees expecting that the trade war will end. If it doesn't then the business may fold completely.

I am not sure why you think that this "doesn't hurt the businesses".

Windows on Arm keeps low profile at IFA as Intel takes swipe at platform's compatibility problems

Richard Plinston

Re: I can't see what the fuss is all about

> An incompatible change in either may spoil your day.

Actually I see it the other way. The cross-platform layer will cope with changes in the OS layers better than application code using that directly. Given that Microsoft has dead-ended or re-implemented several of its toolkits over the years some isolation from this may be appropriate.

Richard Plinston

Re: I can't see what the fuss is all about

> There's little reason not to move applications to x64

Now there is one: WoA, which Microsoft is pushing against ChromeOS, will only run 32 bit x86.

Richard Plinston

Re: I can't see what the fuss is all about

> Sure, and you can do the same with Java and some other cross-platform languages or toolkits.

Exactly. There are many GUIs for Linux and most are cross platform.

> versioning and deployment issues.

Just like Windows has.

Richard Plinston

Re: I can't see what the fuss is all about

> It has pretty much always been multi platform

NT yes. Windows 1 to 3 was 8086, 80286 and 80386. NT was written on MIPS because the contemporary 20MHz 80386 was not up to doing the job.

But it is the applications that have not been multi-platform. Office had to run in a form of emulation mode on Alpha and the RT version was very cut down and still needed Win32 libraries that were unavailable to other applications.

Most applications can't or won't be ported to other CPUs making it pointless to run Windows on anything but Intel/AMD.

Even though this WoA will run x86 (32bit only and slowly) many applications are 64bit only now. I recall when MS was trying to force everyone to 64bit by announcing that Windows 7 was the 'last 32bit version'.

Richard Plinston

Re: I can't see what the fuss is all about

> Yes, it is the GUI that spoils portability.

In the past I have written Python/Glade GUI applications that ran on Linux, Windows and Nokia N800 (small ARM tablet) with no code changes and no recompiles. Just make sure that the GTK libraries are installed, load and run.

Richard Plinston

Re: "Almost 40 years ago I ported applications"

> Today it's difficult even to achieve good GUI application portability across Linux distros

Complete nonsense - is that you, RICHTO/TheVogan? still churning out uninformed dogma for 30 years?

Richard Plinston

Re: An answer in search of a question

> Maybe Windows on Arm is just a big stick for Microsoft to beat Intel with.

Previous iterations of WoA, which became Windows RT, was a big stick to beat OEMs with: "Make your ARM devices run WoA or lose your 'loyalty' discounts on _all_ devices and computers."

This worked for HP and WebOS.

Actually i think that this iteration of WoA is to beat OEMs who think they can make ChromeBooks and still keep their discounts. It would be a shame if they had to pay retail prices for Windows 10 and Office to install on their PCs and laptops they wanted to sell.

Similarly they revived XP to beat netbook making OEMs who thought they could get away with running Linux.

Microsoft's only gone and published the exFAT spec, now supports popping it in the Linux kernel

Richard Plinston

Re: My uninformed comment

> The other issue IINM is that FAT32 use beyond 32GB is discouraged

I recall when FAT was limited to 32 megabytes. This was FAT16 of MS-DOS 3.x and limited to 16,000 (or so) clusters of 2,048bytes. Several manufacturers, such as Compaq and Gateway raised the limit in various incompatible ways. This made IBM uncompetitive because they stuck with the 32Mb limit until they rewrote the code to give a 128Mb limit and handed it back to MS to be MS-DOS 4.01.

The main problem with FAT though is that it is awful in handling large random access files, such as ISAM or databases. To access a particular sector it must start at the directory entry and read every FAT entry for that file until it gets to the required sector. This is very, very slow. Fortunately DR-DOS 3.x could format a disk with larger clusters. 8K clusters gave a 3x performance improvement on standard 2K clusters on ISAM files randomly read simply due to less FAT entries needing to be read for every step.

Richard Plinston

Re: Bring compatibility problems to Window, not the other way around

> OS/2 never supported ...

There were other Microsoft tricks that were done to break OS/2:

* OS/2 required about 22 diskettes. When a new release of OS/2 was due Microsoft went to the few diskette manufacturers and bought the next six month's supply of diskettes. These were loaded with 'Windows for Workgroups 3.11' and stored in several warehouses awaiting sale as it was around a year's supply. Then MS announced Windows 95 and sales of WFW dropped. Eventually this became known as 'Windows for Warehouses' and millions of diskettes were dumped. It did kill OS/2 sales though which is what was intended.

* IBM was allowed to use any _current_ version of Windows. When Windows was originally to be included in OS/2 the current version was 3.1. Microsoft announced that 3.11 would be released 'soon' so IBM built the new OS/2 with 3.11 and announced it. The anti-monopoly ruling required that IBM could not pre-announce products more than 3 months ahead so there was a date that they had to release by. Microsoft held off the release of 3.11 until after that date so that OS/2 had to be released with the old 3.1.

Richard Plinston

Re: Bring compatibility problems to Window, not the other way around

> Anyway, OS/2 never supported 32 bit applications,

OS/2 supported OS/2 32 bit applications.

Windows 3.11 on OS/2 could run 32 bit applications when the win32s add-on was installed, exactly like the usual Windows 3.x. However, Microsoft added a particular feature in a later version of win32s that did a memory access beyond the 2Gb virtual memory limit of the OS/2. The only purpose of that was to stop the latest version running on OS/2.

"The job ain't done 'til Lotus won't run!"

Richard Plinston

Re: What if ...

> Wasn't FAT based on one of the hundreds of CP/M formats.

No. There were not "hundreds of CP/M formats". There was one file system implemented on many different capabilities of hardware. For example drives may have been hard sectored or soft sectored, FM or MFM, single density, double density, quad density, 40 or 80 track. 8, 9 or 10 sectored, with various skew factors. These different types of hardware were chosen for various cost, performance and availability reasons. For example particular controllers were slower and required a longer time between sector reads and thus a particular skew factor and/or inter-sector gap.

Even with [MS-]DOS there were still 'dozens of formats'. The original diskettes on an IBM PC were 160Kb. Other companies used different controllers and drives and could not directly exchange data with different machines. PC-Alien could read and write many 'alien' CP/M formats _and_ many 'alien' MS-DOS formats.

It was only when all manufacturers started building IBM clones that they (mostly) used the same drives and controllers and became compatible with IBM PC diskettes.

But, no, FAT file system in the way it allocates and records file sectors is completely different from CP/M's. The only similarity is part of the directory entry so that the FCBs can be compatible for converted software.

> As DOS itself was a rip off of CPM/86.

No. It was a rip off of CP/M converted to 16bit 8086/8088. It was probably CP/M 1.3 because PC-DOS 1.0 had a bug in the FCB handling on a close that existed in that version of CP/M. Both Microsoft and SCP were OEMs for DRI CP/M (MS for their Z80 softcard) and had all the code that DRI gave to OEMs.

Richard Plinston

The original FAT

> The original FAT was used by DOS in the late 1970s.

There wasn't a "[MS-]DOS in the late 1970s". Even QDOS was 1980 at its earliest.

However, "The original FAT" was used by Microsoft's 'Stand Alone BASIC' and that was the late 1970s. FAT was originally written by Marc McDonald.

Microsoft Chrom... Edge hits beta as new browser prepped for biz testing

Richard Plinston

Statcounter

Statcounter works by loading some Javascript with the web page and this then talks directly to the Statcounter site. This means that the websites that are included in the stats are self-selected and also that users that are recorded are those that don't block scripts.

I use Firefox (mostly) because I can block all those trackers with various plug-ins. I would suggest that many others do as well, resulting in the stats for some of the browsers being much lower than the actual usage.

We checked and yup, it's no longer 2001. And yet you can pwn a Windows box via Notepad.exe

Richard Plinston

Re: "buried in Windows since the days of WinXP"

> Multiuser support may have been removed from userland

Granted. It was removed from userland for the reason given, and then added back into userland by Citrix.

Richard Plinston

Re: "buried in Windows since the days of WinXP"

> when the OS was designed for use on machines which could physically only be operated by one user at a time

In the late 1970s I used, and programmed for, multiuser MP/M machines that were 8085 based with bank switching 256Kb memory with two or three serial terminals. I still have one of these here (but not switched on for may years). I also have a couple of multiuser Polymorhic 8813 64Kb machines from the mid 70s that had two or three monitors running off a multi-port video card.

There were many multiuser/multitasking OSes that ran on 8080, 8085, 8086 or 680x0 machines at the end of the 1970s. These even ran on the IBM PC/XT such as DRI's Concurrent-DOS that had one user on the monitor and two on serial terminals (preferably with an EEMS memory card).

> The NT kernel was designed to be, and is, multiuser,

It certainly was designed to be, but Bill had them remove this feature because he wanted to sell a copy of Windows NT to each and every user and not one copy to be shared by several. Citrix brought multiuser operation (concurrent) to OS/2 (again with serial terminals) and then to NT. MS had to obtain Citrix's code to make TSE (Terminal Server Edition) to make NT multiuser concurrently.

Donald Trump blinks in his one-man trade war with China: US govt stalls import tariff hike on Chinese phones, laptops, electronics

Richard Plinston

Re: Yet another smoke screen - and now the reality

> You better start leaning Chinese.

The pessimists are learning Chinese, the optimists are learning Russian.

Richard Plinston

> If they would still buy it, the price would already have been raised anyways

No. If the price is raised then sales would fall. ie if the price goes up then there will be fewer buyers. Companies that use components from China need to maintain output and revenue otherwise they would need to cut back on production, lay off workers and support their fixed costs on less revenue. This is a problem when Trump can change his mind on a whim: tariffs would be dropped, the company would have to ramp up production back to previous levels and recruit new employees with all the attendant training costs.

Companies are trying to survive these random changes by absorbing the extra costs of the tariffs, keeping the products being sold and hoping that sense will prevail. With Trump flailing around he could do anything next week and cause the whole economy to collapse as companies give up trying to keep afloat.

Bit of a time-saver: LibreOffice emits 6.3 with new features, loading and UI boosts

Richard Plinston

Re: Nah

> Oops! Apologies for creating a passionate discussion.

I am not sure why you think it was "a passionate discussion".

> One of the things I liked about WordPerfect ...

So, you were confused between WS and WP in respect of the function keys!

Do you know what Alt= does in WordPerfect 5.x?

Richard Plinston

Re: Nah

> "Standard QWERTY" keyboards didn't have control keys.

Not on mechanical typewriters, no, but terminals since the early 1970s certainly did. The reference to QWERTY was, of course, to English keyboards rather than other languages where the various letters are not in the same place and the mnemonic meaning of the control codes are not so obvious.

I made no points at all about the IBM PC keyboard other than it had no place in the design of Wordstar controls because the design was completed years before there was an IBM 5150 PC*. The positioning of the function keys was irrelevant as Wordstar functioned perfectly without them (perhaps you were thinking of WordPerfect in this respect).

> This made the WordStar (on CPM) shortcut keys natural to type.

Whatever is felt to be 'natural' depends _entirely_ on what you are used to. I used Wordstar on CP/M with terminals having the Ctrl key next to the 'A' key and currently use Wordstar controls (on a different editor) with the Ctrl key on the lowest row. Both are entirely 'natural' to me. You obviously found it difficult to adapt and blamed the keyboard.

> when the keyboard got dedicated arrow keys,

Wordstar does not need arrow keys at all, neither on the numeric block nor as a separate block. That is what the 'diamond' is for.

* actually there were IBM 5100 Series machines in the mid 1970s which were intended as 'personal computers' but not named as such.

Richard Plinston

Re: Nah

> The WordStar shortcut keys were designed for the IBM PC keyboard

Wordstar and its command key combinations predated the IBM PC and its keyboard by several years. It was released for CP/M in 1978 following on from previous editors written by the same group.

> WordStar added the ^K prefix.

The ^K was for blocK commands. ^KB ^KK marked the start and end of a BlocK. ^KCopy, ^KmoVe, ^KHide, ...

> Sadly, since they were designed to match the keyboard layout,

They were designed to match a standard Qwerty keyboard years before your assertion.

Richard Plinston

> The origins of the project go right back to the '80s, when it was a commercial office suite called Star Office.

Before that, Star Division were selling a cross platform GUI library called StarView. As a demonstration of how useful that library was they included a word processor and a spreadsheet written using the library. Later, these were sold separately for various machines.

Another rewrite for 737 Max software as cosmic bit-flipping tests glitch out systems – report

Richard Plinston

Re: Designed by toddlers?

> big discount from Boeing, and placed a large order.

It was a 'Letter of Intent' which may, or may not, result in an actual order or sale. This can be used as leverage against Airbus or may simply be a marketing ploy by Boeing that they would not fulfil.

https://simpleflying.com/iag-airbus-captivity/

Richard Plinston

Re: You've got to be kidding! Indeed - as it is TOTALLY untrue

> automatics can all be switched off in the 737 and it can them be flown just like any manual aircraft.

No. The 737 MAX is unstable in that it is divergent in pitch due to the engines, and in particular the cowlings, being too far forward aerodynamically, and the engines producing more power (required because of extra weight compared to old 737). Manual control in many situations can not be done fast enough to keep the aircraft from pitching up and stalling. Recovering from a stall leads to another pitch up. This is not a matter of training.

Richard Plinston

> Tragically, their bribery exercise of monetary free speech killed almost 400 innocent people.

Thanks to Trump, the same is happening in many other industries, with many more people dying, such as coal, oil, gas fracking, ... It makes one wonder who is 'listening' to all the monetary free speech.

Microsoft hikes cost of licensing its software on rival public clouds, introduces Azure 'Dedicated' Hosts

Richard Plinston

Re: $106k over three years

4) Kickbacks to the decision makers.

Time to Ryzen shine, Intel: AMD has started shipping 7nm desktop CPUs like it's no big deal

Richard Plinston

Re: On Waking Up

> behind with too little, too late, once again.

It seems to me that you are saying that AMD is still "behind with too little, too late, once again" if we ignore the inconvenient fact that Intel is not delivering yet.

ReactOS 'a ripoff of the Windows Research Kernel', claims Microsoft kernel engineer

Richard Plinston

Re: Is there any reason to suppose this latest accusation is any more plausible?

> There is no indication that the threat made by Digital and the funding provided by Microsoft for work to be performed by Digital were linked.

There is no indication that DEC did any work for Microsoft for that money.

"""DEC also believed he brought Mica's code to Microsoft and sued. Microsoft eventually paid US$150 million and agreed to support DEC's Alpha CPU chip in NT. """

https://microsoft.fandom.com/wiki/History_of_Microsoft_Windows

Richard Plinston

Re: Is there any reason to suppose this latest accusation is any more plausible?

> Digital did not sue

Quite right, DEC threatened to sue and MS settled.

Richard Plinston

Re: @heyrick - Sounds like a bored dev is trying to make a name for himself

> IBM thought the PC was a dirty little thing to get customers hooked on computers,

No. At the time users in IBM mainframe sites were buying Apple IIs with Z80 Softcards to run BASIC, Visicalc and Wordstar (and others). The PC was merely to keep the sites pure IBM and stop other brands infiltrating. This is why it was just a small improvement* on Apple II but also had versions that were 3270 terminals, 360 emulators (with two added boards running 68000s) and was only intended to be sold to IBM sites, not the general public. The PC itself was 'quick and dirty' being based initially on the System 23 (a word processor) planar and using already obsolete parts, such as the serial ports. IBM originally planned to build only 50,000 of them in total because that was the potential market within IBM sites.

* There were internal fights with the Series 1 division who felt threatened by a competing product inside IBM.

Richard Plinston

Re: Shades of SCO saga

> when Windows was the more familiar system.

The original Microsoft PDAs and phones used a GUI that was like Windows itself. These had 40% of the US smartphone market at one point (prior to iPhone). Windows Phone 7 was entirely different from the contemporary Windows and from Windows Mobile 6.x. Consultants told MS that the low acceptance of WP7 was because the UI was UNfamiliar. The advice was to make Windows 8 use the WP7 UI so that it would become familiar be forced down everyones' throats until they demanded it on their phones.

Richard Plinston

Re: @heyrick - Sounds like a bored dev is trying to make a name for himself

> In what Universe did a main frame computer company that was a market leader base a large scale product with an OS evolved from "Quick and Dirty Operating System"?

This one, though they didn't know that. They thought they were getting a 'version' of CP/M.

The IBM PC (5150) was intended to compete against Apple II with Z80 Softcard running CP/M and to be slightly better: more RAM (up to 256Kb for model A), larger disks (160Kb vs 120Kb), same software: BASIC, Visicalc, dBase II, ... and also act as a terminal*.

* The IBM PC serial ports are DTE (Data Terminal Equipment) while most micro computers were DCE (Data Comms Equipment). This indicates that the IBM PC would act as a terminal to larger machines. Also there was a 3270 emulation available.

Richard Plinston

Re: Is there any reason to suppose this latest accusation is any more plausible?

> Just like with the SCO crap.

There were two major obsticles that The SCO Group (TSG) had. The first was that Novel did not sell the copyrights of the code* to SCO or TSG, these were specifically excluded from the bill of sale. The second was that much code from BSD may have been legally included in both Unix and Linux so identical blocks of code did not necessarily make a case.

* In order to include the copyrights in the sale Novell would have to track down all the contributors and get their approval for transferring their copyright to SCO. As this had been done by thousands of companies and individuals it was an impossible task, so no copyright transfer. This did not mean that Novell retained the copyrights, there may not have been any that were protectable.

Richard Plinston

Re: @heyrick - Sounds like a bored dev is trying to make a name for himself

> I'm thinking De Dion, MacPherson, Hotchkiss etc.

Those are patents not copyright.

Richard Plinston

Re: Is there any reason to suppose this latest accusation is any more plausible?

> The NT kernel was written from scratch by a team that was substantially the former engineering team that worked on the next version of VMS

And when DEC sued over the design of that new version being stolen MS settled for an alleged $100million plus various other items such as supporting Alpha processors and joint marketing of NT on Alpha.

https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/death-alpha-nt

https://www.itprotoday.com/compute-engines/windows-nt-and-vms-rest-story

Richard Plinston

Re: Shades of SCO saga

> reformat the drives to another file-system without patent limitations.

Part of the reason for having an SD card slot is to exchange data with computers and cameras and these, most likely, would use some form of FAT.

Richard Plinston

> NT 2k compatible kernel on L4 with the BSD network stack

I thought that Windows NT already used the BSD network stack.

Richard Plinston

Re: It's an opinion.

> buying a reverse engineered CP/M 86 relabelled MS DOS and porting Dartmouth BASIC.

Actually it was a reverse engineered CP/M 1.3. Apparently PC-DOS 1.x still had a bug in FCB handling on a file close that was fixed in later CP/Ms.

> and porting Dartmouth BASIC.

It is much more likely that Altair BASIC was derived from a DEC BASIC interpreter used at Harvard for which source code was available. All development for Altair (and for MS-DOS) was done on DEC machines with cross compilers. While Bill promised to release source code for Altair BASIC this was never done (just like Trump's taxes).

Microsoft has Windows 1.0 retrogasm: Remember when Windows ran in kilobytes, not gigabytes?

Richard Plinston

Re: ICL Personal Computers

> Cedric Dickens was my manager ... admirable mildness

I met him when he came out to New Zealand, he had a handshake like a dead fish.

Richard Plinston

> IBM even went onto to release its own version of DOS

PC-DOS 1.1 was the IBM rewrite to eliminate DRI's code which was a requirement of the settlement with DRI. This was passed back to MS who released it as MS-DOS 1.25.

IBM also did PC-DOS 4.0. MS-DOS 3.x had a limit of 32MB partition size. Various OEMs (Wyse, Compaq, ...) had modified the code in various incompatible ways to give larger disk sizes. IBM was still stuck with the limit so they rewrote parts of DOS to do this properly. They also added a menu front end which was widely disliked. This was passed back to MS who released it as MS-DOS 4.01*.

* not to be confused with the earlier MS-DOS 4.0 and 4.1 which were completely different multitasking versions based on 3.1 and 3.2 and were known as European DOS.

Richard Plinston

Re: 16 bit

> You'll only be able to see 16 MB RAM.

Windows 1 and 2.0 ran in real (8086) mode and could not address or use more than 1MB of RAM - actually 640KB on a PC. Windows 2.1 could run in protected mode on a 80286 and could get 16MB.

The 80286 was a broken CPU, it had a limit of 8000 or so selectors so techniques of memory addressing commonly used in DOS programs could not be used. This limited Windows to a single DOS box and many Windows programs had to be recoded or at least recompiled on newer compilers to run.

Richard Plinston

Re: I used an excellent Microsoft OS back then.

> but never actually coded anything in the Xenix world.

Not true. While Unix was ported to 8086 as Xenix and later to 80286 by a father and son team calling themselves SCO they were contracted to do so and paid by MS. MS also added unique code into Xenix such as record locking. In addition many MS applications were developed by MS to run on Xenix, such as BASIC, Word and Multiplan (I have Byte adverts for these here).

Richard Plinston

Re: Overlaps

> I am fairly sure most, possibly all 286 PC:s had at least a minimal hard drive.

Diskless workstations (thin clients) were a thing back then*. Booting over the network (PXE) and accessing Netware, Citrix, LTSP or other servers.

* and may become a thing again with Microsoft pushing cloud computing.

Richard Plinston

Re: Win3.0

> even came with Windows bundled.

Both GEM and early Windows versions were available as libraries that could be linked into a program so that they would run directly on DOS, or on the GUI if that was installed.

Richard Plinston

Re: Win3.0

> Win 3.0 was first more usable than DOS.

Windows in 386 mode could run multiple DOS boxes and so was bought just to run Lotus and Word Perfect at the same time.

Richard Plinston

> jumping wholesale to GEM

DRI sold around a million copies of GEM for MS/PC-DOS before Windows 1 was released.