Posts by david 12 2376 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Jul 2009
We've got a DOS app that communicates with 8-bit ISA cards (digital IO and ADC) to control a high current/high voltage test box and device-under-test.
The app can run on Win98, (which, unlike Win2K+, virtualizes the '86 IO port address space). But Win98 messes up the timing.
So, DOS.
I can understand the theory of boycotting stuff they benefit from. I can understand boycotting sending them anything -- money or goods.
But I don't immediately see that 'boycotting' myself by not using 7-zip is a good idea.
Off hand, it seems like the idea is Russian social-media trolling.
A problem with the cognitive load lying test is that politicians who are too honest fail it.
Most top-level politicians have two methods for success.
1) Never know what you are talking about. As long as you can avoid knowing the truth, you can believe whatever you make up.
2) Always stick to the talking points. Once you realize that political journalists and publishers are all liars, you don't have any problem just talking rubbish and ignoring the questions.
My Doctor pointed out that he didn't care about the laptop, but the case included a prescription pad (which could be used to obtain drugs), and his home address (which would make his home a target for drug-seeking crime), and that if there was a home invasion, his family would be very unhappy.
That was sufficient to get the police interested in his small crime. They watched the footage, recognized the person involved, went around to his house, recovered some of the material, and warned him off.
The problem is the cost of getting driver signing from MS. Also just the inconvenience of getting the developer account, but mostly the straight out cost of doing so.
Windows 10 and 11 just don't allow ordinary users to use unsigned drivers, and if you want signed drivers, there has to be enough paying customers.
Their high-staff-turnover model and matching management model is also highly inefficient. It is (intentionally) the opposite of common memes "work smarter not harder" and "do it once, do it right".
I'm not a warehouse manager, and it seems to have worked ok for them so far, but it's clear that they could get 10% more efficiency by worker training and by control of their internal processes.
Possibly at the expense of higher wages and slower workers.
6 months ago, in response to the question "why do people work for Amazon", I wrote that
"One of the reasons they continue to get new workers is that it's easy to get a job there."
"It's possible that the USA will eventually run out of new casual workers who have never worked at Amazon, but unlikely. There are more who leave school every year."
All (??) of MS compilers (pre .NET) were based on the same engine: c, pascal, basic, FORTRAN, COBOL etc. Much to my disappointment they dropped most of the language front ends to concentrate on where the money was, and it seems to have worked for them.
AMD's concentration of the '86 family seems to have worked for them at present. What Might Have Been if they had spent resources on an ARM front end is one of those open questions which will never be answered.
Is in fact completely portable: the limitation is the loaders, not the PE format.
The author has only seen executables in which the 'DOS' program is only "This program requires Windows" (The 'Hello World' program of PE), but that was a choice that individual developers made: to provide an executable linked to MS Windows, and only one other executable, and that a stub.
Programs developed to replace existing DOS programs could and did sometimes include both programs. The Win98SE installer is an example. But more commonly limitations of Windows disk space, and DOS floppy disk space made that a stupid idea.
The container format can contain multiple binaries (and multiple resources). It's not just limited to two. The requirement is that the OS doing the Load-and-GO operation has to recognize it's own executables in the PE file.
I think that many/most/ linux systems don't have any default support for the PE format outside of it's mandated use to contain EFI (boot) information. However, they do have support for script files, and as I understand it, the APE format leverages that by embedding a binary structure that can alternately be interpreted as a script loader or as an executable container. Someone who is more familiar with shell scripts may comment.
Windows NTFS still has support for that kind of file identification, and there were abortive attempts to do so.
It's just that for 20+ years, users have found that having clearly named files is more useful than having hidden file-system information.
This is for enterprise roll-outs. Not only is it for enterprise roll-outs, it's restricted to enterprise versions.
This is for people who already test patches before applying them, who now want to do a graduated roll-out of the update.
There already exist methods of doing graduated roll-outs, but this a management-by-exception system. You block updates you don't want, and the rest is automatic.
As long as you can become famous by killing people, people will kill to avert their own powerlessness. America can't fix this, because in their hearts they don't and can't separate 'Free Speech' and 'publicizing mass murder'.
Free Speech and the Free Press permeate American society in a way that is measurably different than other societies. It's not just the guns: it's what they use them for.
For reasons, conference rooms generally have very high air refresh rates.
--- and the people who attend or run bars and restaurants feel the same way about COVID as the Portuguese shore fishermen and the Great Banks fishing fleet felt about the 'myth of overfishing'. Can't be us. Must be everything else.
"What happens in 'Frisco stays in 'Frisco" ???
San Francisco (city government area) has a population of 874,000, most of whom are unmasked, and it's not a super-spreader event. Attending large well-ventilated conference halls unmasked like everyone else isn't a superspreader event.
it's a superspreader event among those who came and get hammered in bars.
If you use the %temp% variable, you leave yourself open yourself to the kinds of malware problems unix/linux has with environment variables (for example, shellshock).
Native Windows programs use the Windows API to identify the temp folder. %temp% is for .BAT and .CMD scripts.
There was, and still is, an enormous amount of cross-platform software that installed in c:\, and expected to be there, or couldn't handle spaces in the path, or (on servers) ran very poorly when in a deep directory tree.
For native Windows programs, the problem was programs that stored configuration data in the 'machine' branch of the registry, requiring either 'machine' privilege to do so (rather than 'user' privilege'), or someone sophisticated enough to identify individual leaves of the 'machine' registry which could be given write permissions for 'authenticated users' as well as 'admins'.
Seriously?
This is a Diagnostic / Debug API for desktop support. The API doesn't 'talk to MS' and it's a 'protocol' only in the loosest sense.
The problem is that it's a generic support API that allows use of generic OS functions to report generic applications, for use by generic support organizations.
Unfortunately, 'generic support organizations' includes criminals as well as your support desk, 'generic OS functions' include downloading and executing malware as well as debug and repair objects, and 'generic support API' supports Outlook, Office, Edge and any other private or open-source application that chooses to use the API.
The reason there are decent ... unions in the UK is that the strictly hierarchical and class-based society required them.
My father worked as an Engineer in the USA and in Australia. He never understood unions until he worked with Australian management. But the UK migrants (and Aussie emigrants) regarded Australian management as enlightened, responsive, and light-handed compared to UK management.
>The US - the country with the best government that money can buy!!!<
I realized that Americans regard that as a description rather than as a joke, when my professional association shut down their lobby group, with the explanation that it wasn't funded well enough to be effective.
I've seen reports of exoskeletons in use in Japan -- a couple of companies providing models with different features. For example, actually helpful for old small-scale farmers (a protected species in Japan as elsewhere) doing manual labor around the farm, lifting and placing.
Since I haven't seen reports outside of Japan, I can only assume that the cost is too great for general commercialization
>The RAD form designer looks too technical for the target audience.<
They dropped VB6, and replaced it with something that had parts of the old name "Visual" c++, "Visual" studio, "Visual Basic".NET.
If they had a working RAD form designer, they wouldn't need this. But if they had a working RAD form designer, people wouldn't need Azure.
All of my important stuff is in the cloud already. The only reason I have a fixed IPV4 address is for IOT demor servers and legacy systems that could be turned off today. -- although the VOIP phones are IPV4 and don't work with some versions of CGNAT, they work perfectly well with the IPV6 backbone and stable NAT used by our provider.
Actually, Microsoft Equation Editor was dropped from Office years ago, and the 'security updates' for the old versions of Office just disable it.
Long before that, Office also had the Word equation editor, and eventually MS just told people that the old stand-alone Microsoft Equation Editor was not included in new versions of Office or Windows.
In the end, the courts recognized that MS was right about IE -- and wrong about exerting monopoly control over the inclusion of Windows on new PC's. That was the era when you had to pay extra to get a PC without Windows pre-installed.
People were, and are, fixated on the 'new shiny', but the actual anti-trust judgement was based on something else.
> Is it too much to ask that these self-proclaimed experts just give an answer? <
Not at all. For a couple of years I hung out in the microsoft.public newsgroups, which were supported by a number of knowledgeable people who politely and helpfully answered guestions, including simple, ignorant, repetitive questions.
I only answered interesting difficult questions, and there was one short-tempered character who, it turned out, was suffering from a chronic disease condition which eventually killed him, but you could turn up and ask a question like 'it's a bug when i divide 1 by zero it doesn't give 1' and get a polite helpful reply.
Microsoft eventually killed the microsoft.public usenet, and the volunteer community which supported it, but while it lasted it was a pointed contrast to the comp. newsgroups, demonstrating that it was possible to be technical, while also helpful and adult.
The expected life span of Voyager is, and was, 70-80 years -- the period over which it will have enough power to signal earth. After that the golden plate is expected to last billions of years. The plate is part of the original mission, so you could say that is it's 'expected lifespan', but since this is an IT/computer article, I think that the 70~80 year figure is fair enough.
For some scientists, V1 has already hit it's expected lifespan, since they turned off one of the instruments last year, at around about the expected time.
Some parts of the original mission happened long ago, but it's fanciful to suggest that NASA 'expected' V1 or V2 to suddenly fail after the first part of the mission. They would have been seriously disappointed if one of them had failed early, and they are understandably chuffed that they have lasted so well, but that's not to say that they expected them to fail before the power runs out -- if that had been true, they would have saved weight and money by including a smaller power supply.
ex motor-cyclist here. I got into that situation because the motorist ran through a stop sign. Then gave a false address and drove off.
I understand that this particular posed picture looks like the car did not face a posed stop sign, but I was in a large intersection at a rail crossing, with the edge of the intersection just out of shot.
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