> On 12 Dec 2006 08:17:42 -0800
> "toby" telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
>
> about Microsoft ...
>

>> Let's keep the guillotine sharp.

>
> Must we ? Can't we use a nice blunt rusty hacksaw ? ... please.

>In alt.folklore.computers "toby" telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
>

>>Walter Bushell wrote:

>>> In article s907.apx1.sbo.ma.dialup.rcn.com>,
>>> jmfbahciv@aol.com wrote:
>>>

>>>> It is Micshit's original folklore that
>>>> requires the latter to always be done.

>>>
>>> You weaken your case by referring to those spawn of Satan as "Micshit".
>>> Just stick to the facts, no name calling.

>>
>>It doesn't weaken the case; the facts are completely unaffected. Or we
>>may as well refer to them as "the defendant", since they do more
>>lawyering to try to evade culpability for their crimes than anything
>>else:
>>http://www.groklaw.net/staticpages/index.php?page=2005010107100653
>> ...

>Actually, lawyering is how Bill Gates got rich in the first place.

>It certainly wasn't by writing software!
>He *STOLE* the operating system by taking somebody else's 8080-based OS,
>recompiling it as 8086 code, and then claiming it as his own, and then
>selling the result to IBM, since the original owner of the code wouldn't
>do it for that price. THEN, he stole it *BACK* from IBM, claiming he
>only sold them the right to make copies. In general, he got away with
>the thefts by good lawyering, not engineering talent. What good
>engineering talent he has, he *bought* by hiring other engineers ...
>REAL engineers.

>Oh, I'll admit it took a *small* amount of talent (very small) to know
>enough to cross-assemble 8080 code over to an 8086 (OK, 8088), but not
>much. I could have done that in one night. BTDTBTTS.

> Well I would not give Nick credit. This idea went back to the IBM TF-1
> and people thought for 3 orders of magnitude they would take the "power"
> for no languages. They'd be willing to hand machine code. They didn't
> buy into it and the TF-1 was never completed. Sure the GF-11 was,
> barely and it ran 8 GFs. Nor was a big RP3 ever made.

>On Mon, 11 Dec 2006 19:23:46 -0500, Micheal H. McCabe wrote:

>> Yes -- but the sanders operate automatically when they detect wheel
>> slippage, generally when starting the locomotive. It's a pneumatic system
>> that actually blows the sand down some pipes from a bin. Remember there are
>> at least two braking systems involved -- locomotive brakes and train brakes.
>> The locomotive brakes only apply to the engines themselves. Around here,
>> the most common locomotive (again, B&LE) is the SD-40T made by EMD (GM).
>> These locomotives have 6 axles each. The typical train is 2 or 3 loco's
>> pulling > 100 cars in a consist (mostly coal / iron ore). Each car weighs
>> around 120,000 lbs. on 8 axles. That's where the train brakes come into
>> play -- adding a little bit of sand to the locomotive's wheels isn't going
>> to improve the braking performance much, overall.
>>
>> A third braking system used on diesel-electric locomotives is "dynamic
>> braking" where, depending on the system, the kinetic energy of the train is
>> converted to electricity (by running the traction motors as a generator) and
>> dissipated as heat by using resistive coils to load down the generator. In
>> effect, the load on the generator serves as an electromagnetic brake to slow ...

> To begin with, each file was a linked list of 512-byte
> blocks, of which four bytes were devoted to a pair of forward
> and backward links. The forward links were always reliable,
> but the backward links could only be trusted under restricted
> conditions, because the file could have two "heads" sharing
> a common tail.

> Charlie Gibbs wrote:

>> Not so simple - they'll insist that you use a dedicated Windows-only
>> app. Either that, or they'll use a web site which is carefully
>> crafted to only work with the latest version of Internet Explorer.
>> If you're running OS X, Linux, or Solaris they won't want to hear
>> from you. Go to the back of the bus.

>
> Actually I've been using online banking for years with at least 3
> different banks and (thankfully) none of them ever insisted I use
> Windows - the sites work fine with any browser and O/S. So MS hasn't
> wrecked that stuff yet, and if we're vigilant, they never will. If your
> bank insists you pay Microsoft before you can use their stuff... well,
> you can always complain loudly, find out which...

>specify softare specs. The last thing that the computing
>biz needs is politicians telling developers how to do
>their job.

> how 'bout virtual appliances ... possibly not quite what they are
> talking about in this news release ... instead of ease of deployment ...
> talk about partitioning, security, isolation, ease of management,
> etc.

> Let's keep the guillotine sharp.