Posts by Daniel von Asmuth

Windows '95 = cybercrime

"W95 probably still does 90% of what most users need"

90 % of users don't need a computer, but they need food & drink, clothing, shelter, transportation, heating & lighting, health care, protection from evil (put them in prison), forgiveness for their sins & salvation for their souls, entertainment, education, but love they need most.

You could use Windows '95 for heating; what else? Mostly it crashes regularlty, thereby losing your unsaved files. It has no security whatsoever. it promotes the spreading of virii and other malware. If you need software for it, go looking for the old MS-DOS shareware archives. Furthermore it costs a lot in licensing fees, but your money goes to the Bill & Linda Gates Foundation, which people believe does good things. Then it's mouse causes RSI. On a good day, Windows PCs just waste hours of productivity. Windows '95 does what only Wall Street investors seem to need.

23 Years old? Is that too late to sue for the damage of WIndows '95 to the people and the economy?

Tates will provide

Microsoft sell that greatest number of licenses and in some cases for high prices. Customer retention is the key, not price/quality. What we would want to know is how much that software increased or decreaed worker productivity.

The future is in the clouds! Buy British Airways.

Re: I have a big question

Cygwin has been running X11 GUI applications on Windows for many years. Even Apple supports X11.

APIs

FIrstly, try the good old ICMP echo a.k.a. 'ping' API. If the remote server does not respond, there may be an outage. If that is not sophisticated enough for you, SNMP is your friend.

Secondly, these banks have APIs for interbank payments and customer transactions. You only have to create an automated system that tries to make bank transactions on-line. If thers fail, you may be looking at an outage.

AI is exploding

What will Intel do? Make brooms and shovels to clean up the rubble?

Gates's law

640 TB of memory should be enough for anybody

Re: I think I lack computer skills to do my job well

I am proud to lack certain computer skills, such as proficiency with Microsoft Office.

Most of the time, I think my skills are sufficient for a reasonably good result, but the available time is ever lacking.

Re: some striking logos along the way

"The Apple II was dreadful and a success mostly due to Visicalc."

The Apple ][ had its problems, but the MacIntosh was really dreadful. .... if Gates had intended us to use a mouse, He would have given us three hands.

Modern UI

So ReactOS and LibreOffice look more like Windows and MS Office than the current Microsoft crop of crap.

Not since 1981

Our economy was in a sorry state already: Industry, mining, and agriculture were all but bankrupt en unemployment soared. Then IBM with Intel and Microsoft introduced the PC - it's called the era of digital transformation now. Instead of boosting the productiviity of typists compared to IBM typewriters, the PC undermined it. A disaster became total when Apple and Microsoft introduced Windows. Within a decade the old industrial zones had been replaced by high-rise office blocks. All tthese office workers added to corporate and government costs without contributing to useful production.

The popular press that used to like XP, vomited vitriol onto Vista, only to like to Windows 7, then to cast scorn on 8, so as to praise 10 again. But nobody seems to have found any differences between them except for the version numbers.

The problem is that if you buy a PC that's certified for Windows 10 and a software suite that requuires Windows 10, you won't know which version of Windows 10 these might work with.

Meetings

Without meetings there would be no cooperation nor organisation.

A an hour spent in front of the PC is an hour wasted on administratrivia. Microsoft has been a productivity black hole since 1981.

Re: Missed the obvious one

Megasoft. (what could be more obvious?) Or Visual AppStore.

Everybody just lurves new Windows windows!

Has Redmond decides on price yet?

Re: international cyber-force

If left up the Eurocrats, it will turn into an expensive cyber-farce.

Why can't the member states gather their own team of experts and cooperate with their neighbours?

Economic recovery

Not so long ago, a high number of U.S. companies went bankrupt. so the percentage of start-ups was high, with gigantic financial and social cost, But now the economy is stabilising, so the age of the average company is rising..... until Trump makes America go into a great recession again.

Simply the worst Windows I ever used, and I used Windows ME.

Did those responsible for vast economical damage and many lost lives ever face a court of law?

Re: What measure of 'drink' did these Americans use?

If you mean the Unites States, they measure milk in gallons. South-America uses litres.

Re: Disagree....

C++ has so many features it has become unlearnable. It cannot be completely specified in less than 1000 pages. It is almost impossbile to write a C++ compiler from scratch.

Just learn the core features and try to invent a new language based on those.

Re: Trivial...

Nice idea, except that theire are no trivial document formats, only legacy formats like various derivatives of ASCII and EBCDIC.

FTP over TCP over IP over Ethernet or ATM? Hardly a simple protocol! You may have nmore success with Kermit over serial lines.

P.S. I wonder what kind of 'Science Museum grade IT' the UK justice is using? Analytical Engines? Enigma machines? Sinclair Spectra? BBC Micros?

Re: Gimme speed

A 10 GHz CPU? Try to revive the old Alpha AXP architecture. Forget about complex instructions and speculative executing or hyperthreading; say hello to even longer pipelines. Use photonic chip interconnections. Focus on low latency and smile when you see fewer TFLOPS in benchmarks, and expect huge cooling requirements.

Amdahl's Law will tell you that most programs will receive less than a 100-fold speed-up if you run them on 100 cores (instead of 1), but but tasks can be parallellised to some degree.

Re: Perhaps IETF's YANG might help here?

I am not sure what problem YANG is supposed to solve, but Moore's lay implies that within n months (for some value of n, you can buy ten-billion-transistor-chips which makes support for those protocols possible.... It'll work with Windows 11.

What Weird War?

You can call it the Second Gulf War or the War Against Tea, but we've been fighting it for almost 17 years now and it involves a rather long list of nations in one role or another.

......

so if the enemy manage to shoot down an F-35, it will phone home and order a couple of millions of spare parts before hitting the turf, kool!

Where's the news angle?

That would be the fact that this one cost ten times the amount of other major failed government IT projects and tthe author fails to explain the exorbitant cost. Other countries have enough incompetence of their own.

The upside

Hitler's Mein Kampf entered the public domain 70 years after his death and will now become proscribed again.