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Comment Re:Surface Hardware Looks Awesome (Score 1) 128

I for one am hoping and expecting Mozilla to come to deeply regret abandoning Firefox on Metro. I.E. is pretty nice in Metro on a tablet and when Microsoft comes out with their new non-IE browser with Windows 10 all the third party browsers are going to be caught with their pants down. Apple should probably start porting Safari to Metro as soon as they can, for when the iPad is roadkill.

Comment Re:downgrading cpu to make battery numbers look be (Score 1) 128

Microsoft is done with the ARM versions of Windows on tablets. Likely they want that whole mess to die in a fire. Because the new line of Atom processors is really good. I forget to plug my Asus Transformer tablet in all the time and it crashes if I leave it that way for a day or so. Because the battery life is good enough that I generally use it unwired to the charger, and the life is long enough that you forget about that. It's not fabulous battery life but it's pretty good battery life. Enough that ARM just isn't important anymore to Microsoft.

Comment Re:2GB? (Score 1) 128

There is a broad range of Windows 8.1 tablets now running with x86 processors. Very broad. If you attach a bluetooth keyboard and mouse and run the thing in desktop mode it will run all the Windows stuff going way back. The Win8 on these things is the 32 bit version, so a lot of old legacy 32 bit stuff that breaks on Win 8 desktops will work on these tablets.

Comment Re:Play nice, dammit! (Score 1) 92

I have an RS/6000 box that runs AIX. A few years ago I reinstalled AIX on it using an external CD-ROM drive over a serial console. One of the Microchannel cards in it has the Power1 Chipset. It also has Microchannel SCSI and various other I/O cards on it. It's not joke hardware running OS/2 with an x86 processor. It's the real thing, not a run-to-proprietary-becuz-we-had-to PC clone.

It's totally different from IBM shoveling their 'IBM PC' business onto proprietary hardware and x86 on a microchannel buss design. They did that with the 'PC' to run away from the ISA buss which they had lost control of. They could have gone EISA, they could have done any number of other things. They chose to run off onto a proprietary path because they were afraid of the competition.

Comment Re:And what good would it do? (Score 1) 447

You weren't supposed to use it like a '101 Electronics Projects' cookbook.

I've never used anything but the first edition. It did become a 'rockstar' book, and it's possible later editions went south.

It's a 'survey' book similar to taking a 'survey' course in any topic.

It may be sometimes slightly overpraised. Hacks aren't sneered at here on Slashdot, btw.

What do you recommend? It's a book targeted at non-electronics people, i.e. scientists who need a good survey course in applied electronics for practical use in the lab. There aren't many other books like it.

Comment Re:Simplr math ... (Score 1) 353

Have you ever thought that maybe Bill and Dave having gone away was the cause of HP crumbling, and not whomever happened to be at the helm during the dissolution.

I love my HP calculators and even the Omnibook 300 which was probably the last really nice piece of hardware the Corvalis Division came out with. But times had changed. My Tektronix 465M scope is a beautiful piece of gear and the 547 mainframe before it a stunning technical achivement. But those days are over. Tech equipment cannot be the works of art that it was back in the cold war era when gear was designed to last a century. General Radio is over. H-P is over.

Don't blame it on people like Carly. She was just the corporate type who happened to take the seat at that point in history. You come off like misogynist assholes to regular people if you try.

Bill and Dave were smarter than that. You'd really disappoint them if they knew you were invoking their name the way you are.

Comment Re:Reminds me of Visicalc (Score 1) 92

Visicalc was available only on the Apple II for about the first year it existed. Businessmen would go into the fledgling new Personal Computer shops and say "Can you sell me a Visicalc."

That was actually the origin of Apple's initial success as a company: the exclusive marketing deal with Visicalc. Anything else about the 'origins of Apple' is a myth. They're really lucky they were able to get past that, because when Visicalc became available on the new IBM PC nobody wanted Apple hardware anymore.

Comment Re:And what good would it do? (Score 1) 447

Black tape is considered 'bush league' by any clueful technican/engineer/geek. Anywhere you use it, you should have planned ahead and used heat shrink tubing.

It even says the above (almost a verbatim quote on the 'bush league' part) in the first edition of Horowitz & Hill.

(if you don't know of H&H's book, turn in your geek card. You can get it back after you've bought and read your copy of the book)

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