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Really? Because that's exactly the set of values that I'd choose to indoctrinate my serfs with.

Or, to summaries: 'Hey oppressed people, don't think about following a leader from amongst yourself, that kind of thing always ends badly'.

Laplink also had a neat mode where it would install on the remote machine for you (which was useful for me, because it came on 3.5" floppies and one machine only had a 5.25" drive). The mechanism for this was quite interesting - you ran command.com on the remote machine machine, telling it to use com1 as the console device (something I hadn't been aware DOS could do). Then it would use the type command (similar to cat on UNIX systems) to write a stream of data from the standard input to a file and finally run that file.

This obviously raises the question of why, when you have a serial console with working flow control, do you need laplink at all? If you have a null modem cable and a lot of patience, then you can always extract files by writing them to standard output and reading them off with a serial program - just make sure that you've correctly configured the UART first. If you're a bit paranoid, then running something like par2 first (I think there are DOS binaries and they're pretty small, though they may take a while on a 386) and you'll be able to recover small data errors.

Copying 160MB over a serial connection won't be fast, but I'm assuming that this isn't urgent if it's been sitting on a 160MB disk for years without backups...

While this is technically true, it's also misleading. You could delete iexplore.exe, but don't expect a working system afterwards. Lots of other parts of Windows (and Office) invoked iexplore.exe directly, rather than providing a web view with MSHTML.dll or invoking the default browser via the URL opening APIs.

What is this, 1998? IE was never part of the kernel. The complaints were:

• MSHTML.dll (around which IE was a very thin wrapper) was installed by default and used by loads of things.
• Lots of things in Windows that should have used MSHTML.dll to embed a web view, or just invoked the default browser, used IE so that you couldn't uninstall IE without breaking Windows.
• MS bundled IE with Windows and used their near monopoly in the desktop OS market to gain a dominant position in the browser market and push Netscape (and a few other browser makers) out of business.

It was never part of the kernel and never ran with system-level privileges.

I've not been paying much attention to Windows for a few years, but does IE still have the same poor security reputation? I was under the impression that it did the multiprocess thing and sandboxed each instance, putting it in the same ballpark as Chrome and Safari and ahead of Firefox (which is finally going to start adding sandboxing support now). Did they manage to screw up the sandboxing and make something that's still trivially exploitable, or are you just repeating ten-year-old information?

"Creativity" of software development is way overstated. It is not creative work in most cases.

Making yet another CRUD GUI is not exactly creative. Neither is any kind of usuall application you would be creating in business setting. Those mazes come presolved and you just trace line on paper.

In other cases, if you do not learn about problem being solved enough to be able to give good estimate - why are you professional? You should have business design document and technical design document and almost all gotchas covered already. What should remain is implementation itself and that is not much of creative work either - even if you have to wrestle with programing language to implement some concepts.

But it's so easy to make a good estimate, takes less than 10 seconds:

Take your instinctive estimate.
Double it.
Increase units by one (if you think "hours", make it days. If you think "weeks" make it months, etc.)

So if you think it'll take 2-3 days, tell your manager it'll be ready in 4-6 weeks. Don't forget that in management school, they teach these fuckers to under-promise and over-deliver. He understands.

The psychological issue is that you don't know, but you have a hunch, you have some insight. You know it's probably going to be a few hours.

But for non-techies, all this stuff is a total blackbox. When you say "I don't know" they panic, because for them that means anything from a day to a month or maybe infinity. Uncertainty is a horrible psychological state and people try to avoid it. It's an instinct. When you don't know if that shadow is a monkey or a lion, it's better to panic just in case.

By saying "three days", you give him certainty. Now he knows the shadow isn't a lion.

Test equipment is allowed to transmit and receive on those frequencies. If it looks like a radio, it can't. I have a number of cellular testers hanging around here that can act like base stations, mostly because I buy them used as spectrum analyzers and never use the (obsolete) cellular facilities. Government has different rules regarding what it can and can't do in the name of law enforcement, although FCC has been very reluctant to allow them to use cellular jammers.

If you can afford it, something from Ettus would better suit your application.

Because "It's Simple! All You Have To Do Is..."

Not just managers. Even working for yourself won't save you. Customers as well.

At least you could get in. I had to change my resolution so I could find the edge of the login option. It was hidden under the search box.

Now that I'm in I'm still seeing overlapping options along the top edge.

Brings to mind the Maxell ad where the guy is sitting in the chair, hair blown back by the JBL-L100 in front of him.

Imagine the paper tapes instead of the L100. Except no hair would be blowing back, and I suspect the fellow would be asleep. Other than that, exactly the same.

To answer your question about connectivity, the device has 10/100 Ethernet with the Linux networking stack built in.

That's excellent. Did you build your own protocol, or did you use the mechanism RFSPACE, Andrus, AFEDRI and the various USB-to-Ethernet servers have established?

I try -- hard -- to support all ethernet based SDRs for which I can obtain protocol information.

It also has USB-OTG, and I already know WiFi and USB Sound Cards work with no additional work.

Sound card I/Q is no problem for SdrDx -- that gets the RF in, and of course I support that. The problem with the rest is controlling the SDR's settings: center frequency, attenuator, sample rate, and so on. This is because of the radical differences in USB interfacing from platform to platform.

Having said that, if you've got a working command line utility that talks to the control systems on your SDR, then SdrDx emits information via TCP that can be used to drive the command line client from a script. We've pulled this off with the Peabody and Softrock SDRs pretty well. Again, though, we run into the issue of which platform(s) the utility is available for, seeing as how they'd have to be radically different from one another.

That reading would seem to permit the Feds to override any and all State laws against political subdivisions doing anything. Some States have decided as a matter of public policy not to engage in public solid waste collection but rather to rely on the private sector for such services. Can Uncle Sam override such decisions?

I would agree with the FCC's action if it was limited to overriding laws that preclude people from starting co-ops. I think it's a bridge too far for the FCC to tell a State that it must allow a political subdivision into the telecommunications business.

*shrug*, Rush makes his living by being a showman. I don't really care for the show, though as a human being I have respect for anyone that can laugh at himself, which Rush does (he has played himself on Family Guy, amongst other things), so there's that. If you're looking for an in-depth and impartial analysis of the issues you're probably not tuning into The Rush Limbaugh Show. Conservatives see a slippery slope here to further regulation. I don't entirely discount that argument and it's hard to escape the fact that the internet became what it is today by being unregulated and free of top-down mandates that impede innovation.

I'm generally supportive of what the FCC is trying to accomplish but I think the means they're using is questionable at best. They're also going after hypothetical impediments to innovation (the oft-discussed fast lane hasn't actually happened) while ignoring real threats (data caps) to innovation. Frankly I'd rather see them in the business of regulating tariffs than telling the ISPs how to run their networks (*), because I view data caps as a far more serious threat to internet video (the "killer app" that started this whole conversation) than a fast line that has yet to come to fruition.

(*) Here's a hypothetical for you: Is it "reasonable network management" to prioritize one's voice service over other applications? Keep in mind that circuit switched voice is fast becoming a thing of the past, on both wireless and wireline. On the wireline side you've got the cable company's VoIP service running on the same DOCSIS node as your neighbor's bittorrent download. On wireless you've got VoLTE replacing circuit switched voice, so voice is just another data application there as well, one that's competing for bandwidth on an increasingly congested wireless data network.

If the answer is "Yes" then you've advantaged Time Warner/Verizon/et. al's voice product over Skype and similar offerings. If the answer is "No" then you're placing phone calls at the same "best effort" level as your neighbor's porn addiction.