Posts by IvyKing

The equivalent of what MS did with windows would have been for Apple to say to the various telcos that if you want the discount price on iPhones, you can only sell iPhones to your customer. Since iMessage makes use of Apple's servers, I don't see a problem with Apple to require use of Apple hardware to use the full functionality of iMessage. The "monopoly" with iMessage is pretty much a US thing.

Where Apple does face anti-trust issues is requiring that web browsers on iOS use Webkit along with requiring apps running on iOS to be purchased through the Apple Store.

As for "makes it tough to dump iOS for rivals", isn't that pretty much how MS operates with their Office suite?

Re: First hit is always free-ish.

That's where I think MS went astray when transitioning from Word for DOS to Word for Windows. Word for DOS had a rather decent approach to style sheets and MS went to the effort of creating a book about how to create and use style sheets. As long as one was consistent with naming and using styles, changing font size and typeface would be attaching a style sheet with the appropriate font size and typeface.

The "downside" of style sheets is that one needed to have an existing style sheet prior to writing the document and one also needed to use the style sheet as the only method for formatting the document.

Re: I'll wait for it

Have you ever been in eastern Montana? Or any very rural area in the western US? While not as sparsely populated as the Australian Outback, there can be quite a bit of distance between customers, so it often doesn't make economic sense to string fiber on speculation. The rollout of fiber optic service in my city was base in part on how many people in a neighborhood were willing to put down a very nominal sum to pre-order service. Keep in mind the city I live in probably has as many people as the State of Montana wast of Billings.

As far as the reimbursement, I've known people who had to pay to have utility lines extended to their homes, but did get a partial reimbursement every time a new home was built in their area.

Re: Versions of MS-DOS did support more than 32MB partitions

And to top it off, MS updates of Windows included code that prevented Windows from running on top of DR-DOS. FWIW, I had experience with DR-DOS at work and was impressed - also impressed at how the arrogant DR of CP/M days morphed into a more costumer friendly company, while MS outshone DR on how to be arrogant bastards (no relation to the Stone Brewery product).

Another memory from the mid-90's was chatting with our company marketing officer and his comment that just about everybody who did business with MS felt like they got shafted. Sublogic and Lattice are a couple of examples from the 1980's.

Re: Maybe not as easy as it seems

I'm very aware that "if" was doing some VERY heaving lifting, though I suspect many recently built apartments are set up properly.

Re: You can never be too thin

The last version of HP-UX for the 68040 would run in 8MB, though it would probably be swapping like crazy. This included the GUI and some applications, though I think 16MB would make it considerably less painful.

While I've had a fair amount of experience running QNX v4 and v6, I don't recall trying out the demo floppy. QNX was generally easy to use and it was a bit of a hoot that Vedit was the standard editor for version 4 - having previously using it in the mid 1980's on an SCP 8086 machine.

Re: Hit-and-Miss [CDC Big Iron]

I know CLDR was part of SCOPE or at least CalidoSCOPE (Cal Improved Design Of SCOPE), but the KRONOS machine had been gone three months when I started the Assembly Language class. I do remember warning of making sure the "IDENT" card followed immediately after an END statement card, otherwise SCOPE would get confused. On a related note, a while back I downloaded the COMPASS code for SNOBOL. I still like the way setting registers A1 - A5 triggered a read to the corresponding X register and A6 and A7 triggered a write from the corresponding X registers, along with A0 and X0 being used for ECS reads and writes. On a 6600, the ECS could transfer a 60 bit word every 100 nsec, though my fiber internet connection does 940Mbps up and 930Mbps down.

It was impressive watching the 6400 handle dozens of TTY connections, two card readers with one being a CDC 405, four line printers and at least a couple of tape drives. The CC had an Extended Core Storage cabinet that was originally shared between the SCOPE machine and the Kronos machine. Ten years later, the CC was running networked VAX's running an updated version of the OS the CS department wrote for the PDP-11, though they had to kludge a terminal driver system that would handle the variety of terminals that had been used with the 6400 as well as an SDS machine.

I remember the CDC La Jolla facility having a CDC 3200 in 1971 (along with a bunch of CDC1700s), and the Smithsonian Museum near Dulles has a 3800. The 3000 series machines were basically the CDC 1604 implemented with silicon planar transistors as opposed to the original germanium junction transistors, though the 3200 was to the 3600 as the 6200 was to the 6600.

Re: Sweating assets

My 1973 HP45 is still working, though the batteries died decades ago. Single digit LaserJets also had the reputation of lasting forever.

I bought a HP tank printer for the wife, part of the paper feed crapped out on the original unit, being under warranty HP shipped a new printer. The wife has printed out thousands of pages, and so far I've oly spent $19 for a refill of black ink.

Re: Remember 'The Last One'?

I remember seeing it demonstrated at a computer show/fair. Main take away was that it took a long time to generate and compile the code.

Then again, I remember attending the First West Coast Computer Faire, which was a mind blowing experience.

Re: What the hell?

In a typical steam locomotive boiler explosion, the boiler shell usually ends a good distance away from the engine - engine being the cylinders, rods, wheels and frame. Locomotive boiler explosions are almost always caused by low/no water on the crown sheet over the firebox.

Re: Well, duh.. Time for DC?

FWIW, Anderson specifically makes plugs/sockets for DC circuits. They have on line for the ~380VDC used in modern data centers, with the plugs designed to shield the arc caused by pulling the plug out of the socket.

Back in the 1920 to 1950 time frame, there were a large number of houses in the US where the electric power was 32VDC from battery banks. The batteries where kept charged by small gasoline generators or windmill driven generators. There were a number of appliances made that would run off of 32VDC and the plugs and outlets were usually the same used for 110VAC.

Re: Is it naive to suggest ...

The highest frequencies that can be refracted (not reflected) by the ionosphere is a bit north of 200MHz when there is heavy ionization in the E-layer. This known as sporadic E-skip and appears to be caused very large thunderstorms sending charge up to the ionosphere (sprites, jets, etc). The worst that happens at 1+ GHz is that the ionosphere causes the velocity of propagation to slow down a bit and shifting apparent location.

Using a directional antenna to verify that the signal supposedly coming from a particular satellite really is coming from that satellite should be able to detect spoofing and may be able to null out the interfering signal.

Re: Proprietary

To make things even more interesting, Tim Paterson was planning to develop a multi-user version of 86-DOS.

Re: Thanks for the Microsoft Word for DOS

One neat trick for Word for DOS was putting different default stylesheets in different different directories, so one could have differing formatting for different recipients. The other nice thing was that it was very easy to attach a different stylesheet provided that one was consistent in setting up the style sheets.

The "escape" fr triggering menus was very easy to work, as it rarely required a two key (e.g. ctrl-C) combination. Certainly much faster than having to use a mouse.

Re: iPhone 7+ here

I finally replaced my iPhone 6 the middle of last year when the battery finally gave out. Got a new SE because I wanted the Touch ID instead of the Face ID. Going from 16GB to 128GB was a nice improvement.

Lotus Manuscript

In the early days of my former company, Manuscript was yje primary word processor used for any serious documentation. One co-worker even used it asa programming editor with the outline handling very useful for the different modules of the Forth based environment he was using. What impresses me in retrospect is that Manuscript could handle 100+ page documents and run on a PC-XT.

Re: 9/9/99 bug too

That would be 9/13/99 in m/d/y format or 13/9/99 in d/m/y format as the date of interest for Space 1999 as October 16, 1997 is for Lost in Space.

California's DMV had a foretaste of the Y2K bug when a 103 year old woman had her driver's license rejected because the DMV software just looked at the last two years of her birth date. IIRC, this occurred about 1970.

"Those CDs maybe 30 years old"???

I've got some CDs bought in spring 1985 that play as well as new.

Re: Shift left, people.

Compared to the 8-bit CP/M systems available at the time, segmented addressing and 12-bit FAT's were a distinct improvement. Segmented addressing was less painful than bank switching and the FAT file system provided file size in bytes, thus eliminating the need for a ^Z to denote the end of a text file. Compared to a 32 bit address space and a more advanced disk format (e.g. various flavors of UNIX file systems), segmented addressing and 12 bit FAT's are a pain.

Re: Apple is in its rights to block Beeper

My comment about bundling wasn't so much thinking Apple was going to get hot for bundling, as thinking that filing suit against Apple for "bundling" iMessage had a much better chance in court than Beeper's threats. The word "bundling" was in reference to IBM getting dinged in the late 60's and early 70's for bundling software with their mainframes. I am not sure if any company would have a standing to file suit over iMessage, and especially not Beeper.

Consumer's who don't use iMessage might have a standing with the argument that they are being forced to pay for a service that they don't use.

Anyway, I don't think Apple is being malicious with their treatment of Beeper trying to hack into iMessage.

Re: GUIs were and are intended to demystify the computer

Back when I was a freshman at Cal, the UI consisted of the white "CDC 6400" punch card with the account number and job name punched in followed a couple of job cards (lgo, cldr, etc), followed the program data cards and finally the reddish 6789 card. Editing was punching a new to card to replace an old card. A couple of years later, I was hearing about something from Bell Labs provoking comments like "If Bell Labs hadn't invented the transistor the Phone Company would still be using vauum tubes" and their programming language being an abomination in the eyes of the Lord".

Re: 100256.1230@compuserve.com signing in…

My first experience being online was also Compuserve in December 1990. I really liked the ASCII interface as access wasn't limited to PC's and Macs. The moderated forums were nice, had a great time meeting members of the ADD forum IRL and generally good experiences on other forums. IMHO, things started going downhill when the computing base was switched over from the DEC-10 clones to NT boxes with the resulting ending of the ASCII interface.

"Workshop of the telescopes", "Astronomy", "Come and take me away" also come to mind.

Given the delays in the Blue Origin launch vehicle, perhaps "Deadline" may be most appropriate.

The RL-10 engine is still in production, with first items made in 1962-63.

The RS-25 was noted for having a high Isp, don't think a new engine would be significantly better. IIRC, the plans for new engines are to use 3-D printing of some of the critical parts to reduce cost of manufacture.

Re: sudo apt install slrn

I remember when Rob Dickens showed up on alt.music.enya - maybe half of the folks replying thought he was an impostor. Other usenet memories included correcting Henry Spencer, an interchange with George M. Scithers (one time editor of Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine) and perusing through alt.destroy.microsoft.

Re: Outline View?

Back in the 1990's, Lotus Manuscript was the go to choice for long documents in the company that I was working for. It was impressive how fast it could switch between outline view and normal view when running on a 4.77MHz 8088 PC. One co-worker used Manuscript for editing Assyst, a FORTH based laboratory software package. The company had a bit of a scare when notified of an upcoming software audit, scrambling to buy the remaining copies of Manuscript still sitting on store shelves.

On a different tack, having been exposed to Island Write, Draw and Paint, I find the insertion of graphics to be a royal pain in MS-Word and similar word processing software. In IWD&P, the first task is to create a container for the graphic, and then plopping the graphic into the container with options for proportional or non proportional scaling as opposed to treating the graphic like some funny paragraph style.