> Intel didn't help with the terrible 286 mode change, requiring "bumping" errors against the A20 gate...

That was because the original plan was that the 80286 would either operate in real mode like the 8088, or else boot up in real mode and flip to protected mode. Once it got to protected mode, *IT WAS NOT SUPPOSED TO BE ABLE TO GO BACK TO REAL MODE, SHORT OF A REBOOT*. There was some ugly hacking to get the 80286 to switch back and forth so that a DOS real mode program could access extended memory. This was fixed when the 80386 came out. It was designed to be able to switch modes easily.

The 80286's emulation of the 8088 wasn't quite perfect. The 8088 (based on the 8086) had 2 sets of 16 channels. Unfortunately, the multiplexing was very wasteful. Addressing consisted of 20 bits

( base_register * 16 ) + offset_register

Since each register is 16 bits wide, that's 16 * 64K = 1 megabyte, which was all that real mode (i.e. DOS) could address. At the top of the address range the 8088 wrapped around to zero. The 80286's real mode emulation did not wrap around. So it could go up to 1 megabyte plus 64K - 1 bytes. That extra 64K (officially known as XMS memory) was extremely precious for DOS as programs grew in size.

The real tragedy was the wasteful address multiplexing scheme of the 8086/8088. If the addressing had been set to 28 bits, i.e...

( base_register * 4096 ) + offset register ...the original 8086/8088 could've addressed 256 megabytes in real mode. Imagine DOS with 256 megabytes... that should be enough for anybody.

I believe that the newspaper industry's underlying problems existed before the internet. Yes, the internet exacerbated them and sped up the collapse, but they were around before the internet. I believe that, even without the internet, these problems would've eventually hit newspaper publishing revenues, but it would've taken longer to do so.

    First question... what was the newspaper business model? For many advertisers, newspapers were the only source of eyeballs for their products/services before the internet. Newspapers used their print advertising monopoly to charge extremely high ad rates, which paid for...
* the cost of printing/running the ad
* paying reporters and foreign correspondents all over the country and around the world
* and a nice fat 30%+ annual ROI for shareholders
In plain English, newspapers effectively levied a tax on advertisers. This defacto "advertising-tax" paid for newspaper journalism, among other things.

    The newspaper business model, which subsidized journalism, could be attacked by advertisers getting their products/services in front of customer eyeballs by a method other than newspaper ads ("advertising-tax avoidance"). The "advertising-tax avoidance" scenario played out over the years...

* "Auto Trader Magazine" was established in 1977. See http://www.manta.com/c/mmj727f/auto-trader-magazine It had one major advantage over newspaper classifieds... it did not have the overhead of paying for the salaries/accomadations/airline-tickets of reporters all over the planet. It was an advertising "pure play", that had a lot less overhead than a newspaper, and could make a profit while charging much lower ad rates.

* Right now in Toronto (where I live) there are 2 or 3 free weekly employment "papers" (to use the term loosely) that can be picked up at newspaper boxes around the city. They're 1/2 tabloid size. One reason they can use the free model is that they don't have to pay for reporters, etc. The ads paid for by employers are sufficient.

* Back in the mid-1980's, when I was looking for a place to live in Toronto, I found "The Real Estate Weekly". It was a free 1/2 tabloid put out by the local MLS (Multiple Listing Service), a co-operative venture of local real estate firms. It had a lot more leeway that Auto Trader or the employment weeklies. Auto Trader and the employment weeklies are put out by for-profit corporations. "The Real Estate Weekly" could break even, or even lose a bit of money. But as long as it cost the the member real estate firms less than running ads in local papers, the real
estate firms came out ahead.

* Major national chains began printing their own advertising flyers and having newspapers insert them ("advertising inserts"). The original reason was that it was a pain for a national outfit to co-ordinate running the same ad at the same time at dozens of papers across the country, or even a region. Also, there were some newspapers that didn't have 4-colour presses, and were physically incapable of printing the multicoloured ad inserts. Then the national chains found out that it cost a lot less to do their own printing, and let the newspapers do the physical delivery. Then, with falling newspaper circulation, it became obvious that the newspaper deliveries covered only part of the target market. The only way to cover all of a market was to either...
    - have a private firm deliver the flyers door-to-door (suitable for single-dwelling units)
    - or send the flyers as 3rd-class "junkmail" to all units in rental and condominium buildings

    Notice something about the 4 examples above? There is no mention whatsoever of the internet or the World Wide Web. Even in a pre-web world, newspapers were losing classified ad revenues for used cars, employment, real estate, and retail advertising to non-newspaper competitors. The competitors have now expanded to websites, but the first losses were occuring before the web existed.

...is WTF the bank app would need to install *ANYTHING* on their phone. SMS is supposed to work on my "dumb" Nokia 6015i http://www.cellphones.ca/cell-phones/nokia-6015i/ I can't install stuff on it. The whole point of SMS autentication is that you use a separate device (cellphone) to authenticate a transaction entered on your PC. Of course, the people who do their banking via mobile phone apps have zilch security.

Speaking of retiring... or being on vacation... or a promotion... or leaving for another job... or being fired, when person A is replaced by person B, do you really still want person A's phone ringing when Joe Public calls the company to buy their product/service? NO!!!

It's not a case of reaching the desk of Joe Blow, but rather, reaching the desk of sales or support or whatever other function the public expects to respond.

> Now, targeting third-party desktop apps is a completely different issue. There's
> been some success there on Windows RT, getting desktop apps to run in an
> AppContainer sandbox (which means limited access to the outside system),
> but building such apps definitely requires recompiles as well as setting up a
> launcher for them. People (hackers, in the not-malicious sense) are working on this.

Howsabout MS swallowing their pride, and asking the WINE team for an ARM port?

> Just imagine, if Surface RT had come out, with a 100% touch interface and MS Office had
> done a proper touch interface. They would have had a killer product on their hands.
> Instead MS Office division fails to deliver a touch version, Surface then gets botched
> with a load of Desktop Windows support, and the product flops in the market.

The only "proper touch interface" for a word-processor, or database, or spreadsheet, on a 24" vertical monitor is a keyboard and a mouse. It the-interface-formerly-known-as-Metro is adopted in the workplace, RSI health claims will shoot through the roof. An interface designed for young kids to with small hand and fingers to punch out short tweets or Fecesbook updates on a smartphone absolutely S-U-C-K-S when used by adults on a vertical 24" monitor trying to do real work.

> So who does Ballmer kick out? The Office division leaders? Nope. He
> kicked out the guy who had to work with the botches and deliver something.

Microsoft's problem is "change for the sake of change". What they should've done is make Windows XP or 7 a permanent OS with incremental improvements via service packs. The initial purchase price would get you service packs and security updates for 4 years from date of purchase. Instead, MS comes out with something new and (allegedly) improved every few years. The admin interface seems to change with every version of Windows. And of course we have the (in)famous ribbon interface in MS Office.

To use a car analogy, imagine that the interface (steering/acceleration/braking/etc) on cars totally changed every 4 or 5 years. And you had to go back to driving school every 5 years to learn how to drive current cars.

> The OEMs are certainly willing to help and they have no incentive not to.

Howsabout an option to have "null keys"? I.e. no key required? That would help immensly. Such machines wouldn't run Windows, but there'll be enough Chromebooks, linux, etc to form a market. Hopefully I won't have to buy a Raspberry Pi as my next linux machine.

UEFI is a solution looking for a problem. And before anyone mentions disks > 2 terabytes. GPT (GUID Partition Table) can be implemented on BIOS-based machines, allowing (2^64) - 1 sectors (i.e. 9 zetabytes). Mac OS X and Windows 8 implement an arbitrary restriction of allowing it only with UEFI, but that's a corporate monopolist decision, not a technical limitation.

> Really? No Google Now, Youtube or Facebook apps?

Google? There's an app for that. It's called a web browser.

Youtube? There's an app for that. It's called a web browser.

Facebook (bleagh)? There's an app for that. It's called a web browser.

Local Weather? There's an app for that. It's called a web browser.

Get the picture?

A full-of-themselves group of developers pissed off enough people to get a viable fork going. Hopefully systemd-udev gets kicked to the curb by udev-ng.

BTW, Poettering and Sievers are the same characters who wanted a binary syslog with an undocumented format http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/11/23/1733236/secure-syslog-replacement-proposed The Slashdot summary noted "This is being done as an extension to systemd". Sound familiar? Give them enough time, and those guys will end up rolling the linux kernel into the systemd tarball.

> I see a lot of criticism of Windows 8, but I don't see a lot of folks
> that have actually tried to use it with a touch screen device.

If you think students are going to write 10,000-word-essays, or corporate types will do large spreadsheets or reports, or programmers will code 10,000-line-programs with a touchscreen device, you are totally out of it. And no, I'm not going to pay twice as much for a Surface as for a real PC, and then go out and buy a bluetooth keyboard plus mouse.

In the mid-1980's, the MS-DOS PC walked all over VT100 terminals as far as getting serious work done was concerned. That's why it was adopted so fast. Touchscreens are so-so for 140-character tweets, or short Fecesbook updates. They suck for real work in the corporate world. Windows 8 is going nowhere, fast. MS better release a "back to the future" Windows 9, or simply start charging for Windows 7 service packs.

> My record can be used in court. Please do, it is more likely to save me than to convict me.

Ahem. http://www.computerworld.com.au/article/424729/auscert_2012_virtualization_security_needs_improvements/

> "The only reason he was caught was that he paid for his McDonald's coffee with
> a credit card and the FBI used that information to track him down," Reeman said.

> You know, there are a lot of idiots (and otherwise smart people) going on
> about how the ITU is terrible and the UN will ruin everything, and such.
> You know, like how the ITU really ruined international phone calls,
> and the UPU (IPU) has totally fucked up handling of international mail.

The ITU is an international body of PTTs (Postal, Telephone, and Telegraph authorities). These outfits see the internet (VOIP and email and IM) as a threat to their communication monopolies. And they do what they can to fight it in their jurisdictions... https://blogs.law.harvard.edu/infolaw/2006/05/05/blocking-voip/

> we noted in our study on Internet filtering in the United Arab Emirates,
> for example, that two people who used VoIP to bypass the state telecom
> company's monopoly were imprisoned. Now, it turns out that the UAE
> blocks Skype's Web site as well (to protect Etisalat's position).
> Who blocks VoIP? Belize (which held a hearing), Mexico, Israel, China
> (with help from Narus), Qatar, Oman, Guatemala, Saudi Arabia... It
> even happens here in the States, although the FCC cracks down on this.

The ITU membership would dearly love to kill VOIP. Putting the ITU in charge of regulating the net is like putting the horse+buggy industry in charge of regulating cars. They would attempt to destroy the net.

> When teenage indiscretions become commonly known,
> society will adapt to what level of indiscretion is acceptable.

Are you in a position to hire people? If you found out that a job applicant had previously offered to give away customer data at another company (emails, pictures, addresses, sns), would you hire him? Especially if he admitted the charges were true? http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/09/20/100920fa_fact_vargas?currentPage=all

> ZUCK: yea so if you ever need info about anyone at harvard
> ZUCK: just ask
> ZUCK: i have over 4000 emails, pictures, addresses, sns
> FRIEND: what!? how'd you manage that one?
> ZUCK: people just submitted it
> ZUCK: i don't know why
> ZUCK: they "trust me"
> ZUCK: dumb fucks

I remember Redhat 6.x from the ealy 2000's. It installed with all services+listeners running by default. Stuff like SMTP and RPC and bind was listening. For a Redhat install, the only safe way to install was from CD. Then run "lsof -i" and see what services are listening to the internet, and spend the better part of an hour shutting them down, and/or uninstalling them altogether. Worms like L10n and Ramen were rampant. After a lot of yelling+screaming Redhat finally listened, and stopped installing that stuff by default. Installs could be done without needing a firewall. The worms went away.

Microsoft was run by a bunch of idiots who wanted everything to "just work". One of the advertising claims for Windows 3.1 was "ease of administration". You could send a script as an email to all users in the office, and they simply had to click on it and it would re-configure their PC as you desired. This worked great in a 10-person office before the WWW. On a hostile web/internet, it was a disaster waiting to happen.

In order to make things "just work" for home PCs, Windows defaulted to NetBIOS/NetBEUI and RPC all turned on. This was one of the causes of all the worms that spread by portscanning. To make things worse, by Win98SE, *YOU COULD NOT TURN OFF RPC EVEN IF YOU WANTED TO*.

The "Autorun" mentality was another problem. We all know about sticking a USB key into a Windows machine, and it "automagically" ran stuff. That was not the only such problem.

Excel had "autoexec macros" that ran when you fired up the spreadsheet. MS' first response was to change Excel to set a bit in the file header of the spreadsheet, flagging that it had autorun macros, and Excel shouldn't run them if the user had changed his Excel config to disallow autorun macros. It didn't require genius for bad guys to save a spreadsheet with autoexec macros, and edit the file header of the spreadsheet with a hex editor, telling Excel that the spreadsheet was "safe". Excel then proceeded to run the autoexec macro when loading the spreadsheet, regardless of the user's settings. That was eventually fixed.

Outlook Express (known "affectionately" as "Outhouse Excuse") also "auto-rendered" files. This allowed photos to be displayed inline, and music files (WAV, etc) to be played automatically. The "security" consisted of filtering against a list of safe file extensions (WAV, JPG, etc), and then handing off the file to the OS to run. The OS ignored the extension, and determined the file type by checking the file header, then it handed off the file to the appropriate program. So the bad guys renamed "virus-installer.exe" to "song.wav", and it was automatically executed. This is how SirCam and Bubble-Boy wormed their way around the web.

And then we get to Active X, known "affectionately" as "Active Hacks". This was the mechanism behind so many "drive-by-downloads". What made it worse was that Active-X was rammed down people's throats by Internet Explorer. Let's say you disabled Java, Javascript, and Active-X in IE.

* Java was Sun's product. You launched a webpage with a Java applet, the applet didn't download and run, but the rest of the page displayed properly. IE "degraded gracefully".

* Javascript (originally called "Livescript") was Netscape's baby. You launched a webpage with javascipt, the javascript didn't run, but the rest of the page displayed properly. IE "degraded gracefully".

* Active-X was Microsoft's baby. A lot of webpages had Active-X code. When IE came across a page with Active-X, and IE had Active-X, then IE came to a screeching halt, and put up a modal dialogue about how "This page may not display properly". It would not budge until you clicked OK. With all the Active-X applets on the web, IE was effectively unusable with Active-X disabled. Just like UAC several years later, people got sick and tired of clicking "OK" every 30 seconds, and simply enabled Active-X in IE. That was what kept drive-by-downloads going.

Microsoft have only themselves to blame.

Control W closes the current window, so you don't have to guess the correct tab.