Computing | Software and Hardware

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noddy
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Re: Computing: Software and Hardware

Post by noddy »

the latest tin foil hat fad is to worry about the never ending feature creep of the bios/pre boot systems that has happened without much attenion on the latest pc chipsets.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Act ... Technology

nutshell, their is now a complete hidden operating system with its own network stack and peripheral drivers on all modern computers.
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noddy
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Re: Poland

Post by noddy »

steve jobs is a bad example i think - he is a sociopathic control freak that turned apple from an industry leader into a minority player twice.

at certain points in history apple has had excellent techies (wozniak in v1 and anonymous burnouts in v2 iDevice) .. the whole messianic thing around the nasty salesman is extremely disturbing.
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Heracleum Persicum
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Re: Poland

Post by Heracleum Persicum »

noddy wrote:.

steve jobs is a bad example i think - he is a sociopathic control freak that turned apple from an industry leader into a minority player twice.

.

Strange

I always thought the opposite .. Jobs "twice turned apple from a minority player into an industry leader".

noddy, you sure we talkin same Jobs :lol:

.
noddy
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Re: Poland

Post by noddy »

must be.

the apple 2 dominated the home office market but his control freak nature took them to an also ran while microsoft ate his lunch.

then the iphone was the first and best of the new generation smartphones and the same thing is happening.

Image

only in the alternate apple reality that doesnt exist are they dominating, to everyone else they are heading back to the 10-20% minority status they always had.
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Re: Poland

Post by Heracleum Persicum »

noddy wrote:.

must be.

the apple 2 dominated the home office market but his control freak nature took them to an also ran while microsoft ate his lunch.

.

Apple II ? ? ? :lol: :lol: :lol: , come on

What made Apple Apple was Apple MAC .. "Macintosh"

If Jobs had stuck with Apple II, Apple would have ended with many other computer makers in Cupertino cemetery.

And Jobs was right, look where is Apple now and where is Microsoft.

Silicon valley has not seen equal to Jobs, probably will not ever.

.
noddy
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Re: Poland

Post by noddy »

Heracleum Persicum wrote:
noddy wrote:.

must be.

the apple 2 dominated the home office market but his control freak nature took them to an also ran while microsoft ate his lunch.

.

Apple II ? ? ? :lol: :lol: :lol: , come on

What made Apple Apple was Apple MAC .. "Macintosh"

If Jobs had stuck with Apple II, Apple would have ended with many other computer makers in Cupertino cemetery.

And Jobs was right, look where is Apple now and where is Microsoft.

Silicon valley has not seen equal to Jobs, probably will not ever.

.
perfect example of the reality distortion field, a seperate history that only happens in the appleverse :) :) :) :)

apple 2 did dominate the home market, then mac and the ibm/microsoft came out and mac became a minority 10-20% because of incompetent control freak behaviours over hardware and software, they wasted their oppurtunity.

apple iphone did shakeup the mobile market, then android came out and apple got stuck in a minority 10-20% because of incompetent control freak behaviours over hardware and software, they wasted their oppurtunity.

smartphones are not in the innovation stage anymore, they are a commodity item and changes will be incremental from now on, new sensor, new app every couple of years, apple is a fashion item for rich people, like it always was.

LOOOK at the graph azari, which line would you say dominated the market :)

only in the steve jobs religion is 20% declining to 10% dominating.
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Nonc Hilaire
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Re: Poland

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

IBM was successful because so many businesses ran on IBM mini and mainframes with maintenance contracts. Output was written, and IBM had line printers and Quietwriters under contract too. Only IBM PC's sold by IBM could be included in those contracts, so industry always bought IBM and MS-DOS followed like a puppy on a leash. The maintenance contracts shut everybody else out, including Apple.

What Noddy calls "freakish control nature" was an insistence on compatibility on the hardware and software level that ensured 'plug and play' level usability for peripherals and scriptable automation between 100% of applications. This "Freakish control" made all applications use the same basic interface and sharply reduced the need for training and technical support. All CPU's and peripherals had to self-identify eliminating those stupid jumper blocks. Apple runs a true OS and not just MS-DOS with a GUI file manager. That is smart, not freakish.

This is why Apple eventually defeated all its competitors. Windows will run on a Mac, but nobody wants to do that except as a last resort. OSX will run on a PC, but nobody wants to do that either. Job's vision still stands out.
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Re: Poland

Post by Heracleum Persicum »

noddy wrote:.

LOOOK at the graph azari, which line would you say dominated the market :)

.

Hmmmm


True, apple market share for smartphone OS is much less than Android .. but Android makers many, apple maker only Apple .. same story with apple computer and MS-DOS computers

and ? ?

look where are MS-DOS computer makers (so many of them) and where Apple

That was Jobs "very smart" decision to keep Apple's OS "exclusivity"

Apple margin for anything apple making is astronomical .. other computer makers all on the brink of failing.

Job thought, very correctly, by keeping Apple OS exclusive to Apple, Apple is in control of the "margin" for Apple's inventions .. and he was and is right

Jobs invented the idea with using "window" for computers, MS copied the idea (window itself was not Jobs invention that is why MS could copy Job's idea).

Same thing happened with with iPhone .. Job invented the idea to use touch control for input device and all the rest (touch technology was not Job's invention but using it for iPhones was) .. again .. this time Google .. copied the idea.

Job was one of a kind .. not comparable with others

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Last edited by Heracleum Persicum on Thu Oct 29, 2015 4:06 pm, edited 2 times in total.
noddy
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Re: Poland

Post by noddy »

Nonc Hilaire wrote:IBM was successful because so many businesses ran on IBM mini and mainframes with maintenance contracts. Output was written, and IBM had line printers and Quietwriters under contract too. Only IBM PC's sold by IBM could be included in those contracts, so industry always bought IBM and MS-DOS followed like a puppy on a leash. The maintenance contracts shut everybody else out, including Apple.
ibm lost relevancy early on in the story, it was the rise of windows on generic hardware that cut costs and allowed the windows/intel machines to dominate.

Nonc Hilaire wrote: What Noddy calls "freakish control nature" was an insistence on compatibility on the hardware and software level that ensured 'plug and play' level usability for peripherals and scriptable automation between 100% of applications. This "Freakish control" made all applications use the same basic interface and sharply reduced the need for training and technical support. All CPU's and peripherals had to self-identify eliminating those stupid jumper blocks. Apple runs a true OS and not just MS-DOS with a GUI file manager. That is smart, not freakish.
microsoft dropped the crap msdos based one during the NT switchover that became XP and apple dropped their equally broken operating system forthe unix based osx - this happened at the same time.

the control freakerymeans that everyone that isnt apple isnt even allowed to participate in the market, this garuntees apple will always be a minority player with the 10-20% of the market they are currently stuck at, the rest of the planet is not going to stop producing tech just because apple wont play with them.

you cant be against every tech company in the the entire world which isnt you, thats control freakery of the highest order.
Nonc Hilaire wrote:
This is why Apple eventually defeated all its competitors. Windows will run on a Mac, but nobody wants to do that except as a last resort. OSX will run on a PC, but nobody wants to do that either. Job's vision still stands out.
they dont dominate, they have the 10-20% of the market they always have, its all they can have, they are an exclusive product for rich people and they wont allow that product to become democratized.
Last edited by noddy on Thu Oct 29, 2015 4:25 pm, edited 4 times in total.
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noddy
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Re: Poland

Post by noddy »

Heracleum Persicum wrote:
noddy wrote:.

LOOOK at the graph azari, which line would you say dominated the market :)

.

Hmmmm


True, apple market share for smartphone OS is much less than Android .. but Android makers many, apple maker only Apple .. same story with apple computer and MS-DOS computers

and ? ?

look where are MS-DOS computer makers (so many of them) and where Apple

That was Jobs "very smart" decision to keep Apple's OS "exclusivity"

Apple margin for anything apple making is astronomical .. other computer makers all on the brink of failing.

Job thought, very correctly, by keeping Apple OS exclusive to Apple, Apple is in control of the "margin" for Apple's inventions .. and he was and is right

Jobs invented the idea with using "window" for computers, MS copied the idea (window itself was not Jobs invention that is why MS could copy Job's idea).

Same thing happened with with iPhone .. Job invented the idea to use touch control for input device and all the rest (touch technology was not Job's invention but using it for iPhones was) .. again .. this time Google .. copied the idea.

Job was one of a kind .. not comparable with others

.
xerox invented the windows computer and everyone else stole it.
palm pilot invented the portable touch screen device and everyone else stole it.

it doesnt matter who makes the pc or the android device, thats THE EXACT POINT, they can go broke, another will be doing it.

the apple control freak model only allows apple to play the game, this is absurd, every tech company in the world that isnt apple is fighting them, the apple model is incompatible with the entire planet that isnt apple, madness.

with windows on desktop or android on phone/tablet everyone can play, that is why they win, that is why they dominate, that is why apple is always a minor vendor (10-20%)

---

imagine a book that only one brand of pen can work on - that is control freakery stupid - that is apple.
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Re: Poland

Post by Heracleum Persicum »

noddy wrote:
Heracleum Persicum wrote:
noddy wrote:.

LOOOK at the graph azari, which line would you say dominated the market :)

.

Hmmmm


True, apple market share for smartphone OS is much less than Android .. but Android makers many, apple maker only Apple .. same story with apple computer and MS-DOS computers

and ? ?

look where are MS-DOS computer makers (so many of them) and where Apple

That was Jobs "very smart" decision to keep Apple's OS "exclusivity"

Apple margin for anything apple making is astronomical .. other computer makers all on the brink of failing.

Job thought, very correctly, by keeping Apple OS exclusive to Apple, Apple is in control of the "margin" for Apple's inventions .. and he was and is right

Jobs invented the idea with using "window" for computers, MS copied the idea (window itself was not Jobs invention that is why MS could copy Job's idea).

Same thing happened with with iPhone .. Job invented the idea to use touch control for input device and all the rest (touch technology was not Job's invention but using it for iPhones was) .. again .. this time Google .. copied the idea.

Job was one of a kind .. not comparable with others

.
xerox invented the windows computer and everyone else stole it.
palm pilot invented the portable touch screen device and everyone else stole it.

it doesnt matter who makes the pc or the android device, thats THE EXACT POINT, they can go broke, another will be doing it.

the apple control freak model only allows apple to play the game, this is absurd, every tech company in the world that isnt apple is fighting them, the apple model is incompatible with the entire planet that isnt apple, madness.

with windows on desktop or android on phone/tablet everyone can play, that is why they win, that is why they dominate, that is why apple is always a minor vendor (10-20%) , sure they do get good margins on middle class product.

---

imagine a book that only one brand of pen can work on - that is madness, that is control freakery stupid - that is apple.

.

noddy, in technology, you can only make money if you keep being the innovator .. things become fast, very fast "commodity" .. as you correctly said, smart phones are "commodity" now, no money is made in mobile phones anymore.

And, apple is the "innovator" .. they come always with something new .. once they not innovate, they dead .. that is the name of the game in technology .. once the idea is out, you have only a window to make a killing, and the window closes fast .. I speak from my own experience in silicon valley :lol: :lol:

Issue not selling a lot, issue making a killing selling
noddy
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Re: Poland

Post by noddy »

Heracleum Persicum wrote:
noddy, in technology, you can only make money if you keep being the innovator .. things become fast, very fast "commodity" .. as you correctly said, smart phones are "commodity" now, no money is made in mobile phones anymore.

And, apple is the "innovator" .. they come always with something new .. once they not innovate, they dead .. that is the name of the game in technology .. once the idea is out, you have only a window to make a killing, and the window closes fast .. I speak from my own experience in silicon valley :lol: :lol:

Issue not selling a lot, issue making a killing selling
i can agree with this, but im not seeing the innovation from apple, even microsoft spotted that googles real power was its amazing search and knowledge infrastructure, its mapping, its AI tech, self driving cars, all the rest of it.

apple does beautiful interfaces, it doesnt have the backend innovation which is carrying google - this critical difference means that google doesnt care if you use windows or apple or whatever, you still use google :)

unless apple does innovate soon, i predict they will drop in profit fast and be nothing but a maker of pretty phones and tablets, the same thing that happened to their desktop macintosh.
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Re: Poland

Post by Typhoon »

Have to say I'm with noddy on this one.

Never understood the hagiography regarding Jobs.

As an OS, Windows 10 x64 is brilliant.
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Heracleum Persicum
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Re: Poland

Post by Heracleum Persicum »

noddy wrote:
Heracleum Persicum wrote:
noddy, in technology, you can only make money if you keep being the innovator .. things become fast, very fast "commodity" .. as you correctly said, smart phones are "commodity" now, no money is made in mobile phones anymore.

And, apple is the "innovator" .. they come always with something new .. once they not innovate, they dead .. that is the name of the game in technology .. once the idea is out, you have only a window to make a killing, and the window closes fast .. I speak from my own experience in silicon valley :lol: :lol:

Issue not selling a lot, issue making a killing selling
i can agree with this, but im not seeing the innovation from apple, even microsoft spotted that googles real power was its amazing search and knowledge infrastructure, its mapping, its AI tech, self driving cars, all the rest of it.

apple does beautiful interfaces, it doesnt have the backend innovation which is carrying google - this critical difference means that google doesnt care if you use windows or apple or whatever, you still use google :)

unless apple does innovate soon, i predict they will drop in profit fast and be nothing but a maker of pretty phones and tablets, the same thing that happened to their desktop macintosh.

.

Agree .. Apple must be on "move" .. once "stands still" for a while, danger it drops dead

and that is the name of the game in silicone valley, all "dinosaurs" on trajectory of slow dead, some faster some slower .. good example is MS

And

Re Google

search engine now commodity too, dime a dozen .. Yandex, a good buy

Google same story as Microsoft .. making money on search and "click" scam .. the rest is the gravy

Making money for Google was Kordestani idea .. but this now flattening and will lose steam

Google no innovator .. Google Map and Google Earth and and no innovations.


.
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Nonc Hilaire
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Re: Poland

Post by Nonc Hilaire »

Typhoon wrote:Have to say I'm with noddy on this one.

Never understood the hagiography regarding Jobs.

As an OS, Windows 10 is brilliant.
Jobs was a perfectionist with vision. He was not a penny-pinching pragmatist. It's that simple.
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Heracleum Persicum
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Re: Poland

Post by Heracleum Persicum »

Nonc Hilaire wrote:
Typhoon wrote:Have to say I'm with noddy on this one.

Never understood the hagiography regarding Jobs.

As an OS, Windows 10 is brilliant.

.
Jobs was a perfectionist with vision. He was not a penny-pinching pragmatist. It's that simple.

.

seconded


.
noddy
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Re: Poland

Post by noddy »

having a preference because something suits your aesthetic is perfectly normal and natural... i just dont get the alternate reality were 10% is domination and an aggressive salesman invented everything.

ive been a *nix hacker for a long time now, the thing i find most amusing is that after all these years of people claiming it was irrelevant, android (linux unix) and apple (netbsd unix) actually did win the operating system war.


Image

heathens.
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Re: Poland

Post by Simple Minded »

noddy wrote:having a preference because something suits your aesthetic is perfectly normal and natural... i just dont get the alternate reality were 10% is domination and an aggressive salesman invented everything.

ive been a *nix hacker for a long time now, the thing i find most amusing is that after all these years of people claiming it was irrelevant, android (linux unix) and apple (netbsd unix) actually did win the operating system war.


Image

heathens.
noddy,

yer so nigh-eve. dress in black, people think yer cool. no more data required.
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Heracleum Persicum
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Re: Poland

Post by Heracleum Persicum »

.


noddy, invention dime a dozen .. key is "commercialization" of those inventions

That is what makes America America.

Russia has a lot of inventions and top leading edge lo .. but no commercialization of those inventions and technologies and ideas.

Key is to take those inventions and technologies and built something that makes one's life easier and people wanting to buy and can afford it.

That is what America is good at .. and that is what Jobs was all about

Very few inventors could commercialize their invention .. not only because they were no entrepreneurs, not only because they were people's people, not only because they did not understand the consumer etc etc.

Patent registry bursting from patent entries, need people like Jobs who take those patents and built something with it that consumer want and can afford it .. that is the key.


.
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Re: Poland

Post by Typhoon »

noddy wrote:having a preference because something suits your aesthetic is perfectly normal and natural... i just dont get the alternate reality were 10% is domination and an aggressive salesman invented everything.

ive been a *nix hacker for a long time now, the thing i find most amusing is that after all these years of people claiming it was irrelevant, android (linux unix) and apple (netbsd unix) actually did win the operating system war.

Image

heathens.
A good point.

However, I have mixed views about Dennis Ritchie.

UNIX is a brilliant OS. Where I worked in the US Midwest, we were one of the first, if not the first, groups to take delivery of Silicon Graphics workstations.
Compared to the VAX 11/780, they were an epiphany as was the OS.
However, it took Google and Apple to make UNIX widespread. Linux on the desktop turned out to be a non-starter. Servers are a different situation.

On the other hand, I later had to switch from Fortran to C as per K&R and for someone doing massive numerical calculations that was an exercise in pure frustration
and I lost count of the number of times I mentally consigned K&R to a special level of hell.

The situation has improved considerably over the years.
However, only the most recent version of C++ finally has an intrinsic capability for handling complex numbers. :shock:

Jobs had an eye for industrial design.
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noddy
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Re: Poland

Post by noddy »

Typhoon wrote:
On the other hand, I later had to switch from Fortran to C as per K&R and for someone doing massive numerical calculations that was an exercise in pure frustration
and I lost count of the number of times I mentally consigned K&R to a special level of hell.

The situation has improved considerably over the years.
However, only the most recent version of C++ finally has an intrinsic capability for handling complex numbers. :shock:
.
c is brilliant because it presents the primitives available in the underlying hardware in a clear and easy to use manner, which also happens to be its problem (as described by you above) because that means you are only really using the primitives on the hardware :)

all the modern languages with higher level concepts like complex numbers and frameworks for memory management and reusable libraries are typically written in c or based on c - its the primary layer of modern computing.

i use c++, c# and python in my work - they are all very simmilar because they are all in the c family/

i still find c the most fun but its a non starter for most modern computing, except in micro controllers which dont need the fancy framework stuff so much.
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Re: Computing | Software and Hardware

Post by Typhoon »

For those who may not have seen it.

The first web page on the World Wide Web
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Re: Poland

Post by Zack Morris »

Typhoon wrote: The situation has improved considerably over the years.
However, only the most recent version of C++ finally has an intrinsic capability for handling complex numbers. :shock:
It's just a library. There is no intrinsic concept of an imaginary number in C++ to this day. Complex number libraries have probably existed since the earliest days of the language. C++ is a beast of a language, though, that's for sure. But is anyone doing any serious numerical work in anything but C++ and Python these days?
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Re: Computing | Software and Hardware

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New untraceable text-messaging system comes with statistical guarantees
Anonymity networks, which sit on top of the public Internet, are designed to conceal people's Web-browsing habits from prying eyes. The most popular of these, Tor, has been around for more than a decade and is used by millions of people every day.

Recent research, however, has shown that adversaries can infer a great deal about the sources of supposedly anonymous communications by monitoring data traffic though just a few well-chosen nodes in an anonymity network. At the Association for Computing Machinery Symposium on Operating Systems Principles in October, a team of MIT researchers presented a new, untraceable text-messaging system designed to thwart even the most powerful of adversaries.

The system provides a strong mathematical guarantee of user anonymity, while, according to experimental results, permitting the exchange of text messages once a minute or so.
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Re: Computing | Software and Hardware

Post by noddy »

http://hackaday.com/2015/12/30/32c3-ins ... ng-system/
Red Star goes much deeper than custom browsers and a desktop theme. There are other, subtler components inside the OS. There is a program that verifies the integrity of the system by checking signatures of the custom files against a database. If a file has been tampered with, the system reboots. Since this tamper check runs on bootup, Red Star makes it nearly impossible to modify files for study. This is one of the big features designed into Red Star – system integrity is paramount.

There are other custom bits of software that hide files from the user even if they have root, and a ‘virus scanner’ that is anything but. This virus scanner checks documents for patterns that, when put through Google Translate, are strange, weird, and somewhat understandable. Phrases like, “punishment”, “hungry”, and “strike with fists” are detected in all documents, and depending on what the developers decide, these documents can be deleted on a whim.

While scanning a system for documents that contain non-approved speech is abhorrent enough, there’s another feature that would make any privacy advocate weep. Media files including DOCX, JPG, PNG, and AVI files are watermarked by every computer that opened the files. This allows anyone to track the origin of a file, with the obvious consequences to free speech that entails.

While most people in the US consider North Korea to be a technological backwater and oppressive regime, the features that make Red Star OS useful to the DPRK are impressive. The developers touched nearly everything in Red Star, and the features inside it are rather clever and make their style of surveillance very useful. They’re also doing this without any apparent backdoors or other spycraft; they’re putting all their surveillance out in the open for all to see, which is, perhaps, the best way to go about it.
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