Re: It's all bad
Richrard M. Stallman is a hacker; what the bourgeois calls hackers are cybercriminals; never mind the virtual colour of their hats.
706 publicly visible posts • joined 19 Aug 2009
"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?
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.
Standardisation would be good. It will help major vendors craft other implementations. Who likes a family of incompatible languages like the Algols, the Javas and C# family?
The name Guido appears not to mean 'guide', but related to the French name 'Guy' and the Latin name 'Vitus', and derive from old Germanic 'wid' meaning wood or forest.
The solution is obviously for the UK to unplug from the EU and maybe mandate US standards.
"It's up to the commercial end of the industry to agree on easy to understand labels, and the regional bureaucratic blocks (like the EU) to enforce them. So Apple would certify that its plug and cable support 'Blue speeds', for example. Wouldn't that be handy?"
Industry is like the free market: it can only work successfully under severe and expensive government regulation and oversight. It's like Microsoft or Intel: it creates pseudostandards like Win32 or PCI at best'.
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.
Windows NT took so long to build because Gates insisted on compatibility with MS-DOS, MS-Windows and (16-bit) OS/2. Compared to MS-Windows it was stable and performed half decent if you had lots of RAM. I once ran, err crawled ran NT 3.51 and Exchange server in 16 MB.
MS-Windows 4.00 was usuallly packaged with MS-DOS 7.00 and sold as Windows '95. That crap was hastily launched as 32-bit OS/2 started to gobble up MS Windows market share and NT had too high hardware requirements for the unwashed masses until the Home Edition of NT 5.1, a.k.a. XP, not to mention the selling price. It took Redmond until 2000 to create a usable server edition. Compared to Unix it still lacks (pseudo)-terminal support.
Funny how NT 4.00 complained about the presence of a disc in the CD-ROM drive when it was labeled C:, but not when after renaming it to H:.
So long Brittannia, farewell ARM, goodbye INMOS.
But the EUil Empire still has Signetics (part of NXP), with their old 2650 microprocessor, the NE555 chip and WOM chips (write-only memory). After 60 years of promotion by the Common Market, the European IT industry still cannot compete, not even on its home turf.
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.
I once crashed Windows '95 by starting a small visual basic app,then starting up a second instancee, third, etc, until Redmond decided that 56 running programs was the limit. I then tried to log out to stop all the instances without having to click them all separately. This was enough to crash Windows '95. Later I crashed an old NT server by firing ping packets at it without the customary 1 second delay and in other ways.
More interesting was when I upgraded a PC of the local student union from Windows '98 to NT 4.0. This worked until I looked at the registry settings and noticed that mostly any logged in user could change any setting, so I tried to secure it, but I went a little further than intended. Now nobody had access - even Administrator and System. NT could not boot without registry access. The usual trick of trying to upgrade Windows (to the same version as it was running) also failed without registry access. Only reformatting the disc helped.
Once upon a time the physics department terminated my computer and relegated me to a noisy room with a desk and a PC equipped with only one wordprocessor (ChiWriter, an abomination).
I was able to secure the PC with a few commands in the autoexec.bat file
@ECHO OFF
MODE MONO
PARK
The first two insured that onlookers were not shown what was going on, the last one parked the hard drive and halted the processor (the latter act was non-standard). I would switch on the computer and terminate the batch job with <CTRL-C>, and run a different batch file to start the word processor. The rest of the department thought the box was broken, since <CTRL-ALT-DEL> would not reboot it. (security by obscurity was effective in this case)
"Apple’s B2B division in the UK and Ireland is run by enterprise director Matt Key. The new hire will report to him. He has been in situ for less than a year.".
That makes their regional B2B division cost 2 salaries, while raising almost 0 income. Understandably they wish to grow.
"The people here at Apple don’t just create products"
Once upton a time Steve Wozniak used to create products, but the Products division is shrinking these days.
Far more easy to do it with Dutch hardware... A joint venture of NXP Semiconductors, Tulip, Philips-Electrologica, KPN Research and TNO could succeed given three decades and TeraBucks in subsidies... make tiny nation rule the waves again.
We would of course be up against the likes of Siemens-Nixdorf, Bosch, ICL, Inmos, ARM, Acorn, Bull, Olivetti, Norsk Data and Nokia and fail to sell outside the Low Countries. Soon South America will overtake Europe.
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.
Ai has become pretty good at playing chess and go and more applications are expected before this century is over. In the year 2525, maybe citizens no longer have to vote in ballots, as computers choose politicians. A thousand years onwards, computers could replace politicians altogether.
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?
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.
You had PC-DOS and MS-DOS, with different version numbers.
Then you had MS-Xenix and MS Lan Manager
Microsoft cooperated on early versions of OS/2.
You had MS Windows 1.0, 2,0, 3,0, 3.1, 3.11, 3.2, Win32S, 4.0 (a.k.a. Windows 95, 98, ME).
You had versions of MS-DOS like 7.0 (a.k.a. Windows 95)
You had Windows NT 3.1, 3.50, 3.51, 4.0, 5.0(a.k.a. Windows 2000), 5.1 (XP), 5.2, (2003), 6.0 (a.k.a. Windows 2008), 6.1 (a.k.a. Windows 7), 6.2 (a.k.a. Windows 8), 10 (a.k.a. Windows 2016), etc.
You had Windows CE which begat Windows Phone.
You have Microsoft Midori. (versions? )
Nothing weirder than the version names of Ubuntu that went from 'a' to 'z' and then restarted or OpenSuse with version numbers 10, 11, 11.1 , 11.2, 12, 12.1, 42, 42.1, 42.2, 16.
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!
Let's start with the funky memory models of PC-DOS (and 16-bit Windows). Then we mention the TSR applications of DOS and the 'cooperative multi-tasking' of 16-bit Windows. Visual Basic gets an unhonorary mention, together with GUIs in general. Did you notice that Windows is so bad they keep changing the GUI with every release?
It's not that 640 KB was a whole lof of RAM, Microsoft abused it to turn MS-DOS into a bloated feature-overflowing monster. ...and that was before they created all those other buggy incompatible documented APIs, which keep you searching for some documentation. ...where old source code needs updating for every new version. Did we mention that you cannot find the OS sources anywhere, let alone fix them? That you cannot even peruse www.microsoft.com with their own Internet Explorer 2.0 (and maybe not even version 6.0).
Windows is expensive, slow, bloated and insecure, but more importantly it lacks stability - the infamous Blue Screen Of Death. Finally, only a handful of elite companies are eligible for technical support, that the rest of us cannot afford.