On Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:06:32 +0200, scott wrote:

> Gee, I'd hate to work at your company where the IT people don't even let
> you watch videos or play an odd game of Internet Reversi during a break.
> Actually some of our customers send us video clips of problems
> sometimes, it would be a bit embarrassing if we had to explain how we
> chose an IT system that didn't allow us to watch them...

This is becoming more and more popular in businesses; I worked for a 
Fortune 50 that enforced a special wallpaper so employees would know they 
were working on a company machine.  (I had some involvement in this 
because I created the wallpaper as a lark - thought "wouldn't it be fun 
to create the company's logo as a glass-like texture using POV - and was 
asked by the guy doing the desktop lockdown project if he could get a 
copy of it - next thing I knew, it was on over 10,000 desktops across the 
company).

That was now about 10 years ago (doesn't seem possible it was that long 
ago).  But desktop lockdown and software installation policies are very 
common in corporate IT policies these days, especially with all the 
crapware/malware/spyware that's in the Windows world.

Jim

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Warp wrote:
> Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
>> The C declaration of
>>    unsigned int X;
>> does not allocate an integer variable.
> 
>> You wouldn't need signed/unsigned conversion rules if you were working 
>> with integers instead of int's.
> 
>   I may be unusually dense here, but I still can't understand.

I'm assuming you know what an integer is? And what an int is as defined 
by C?  And how they differ?

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     Remember the good old days, when we
     used to complain about cryptography
     being export-restricted?

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Warp wrote:
> Fredrik Eriksson <noo### [at] nowherecom> wrote:
>> I am fairly certain he simply means that the range of 'int' in C++ is only  
>> a subset of Z (the set of integers).
> 
>   I would like to see the compiler which manages to handle the entire set
> of integers.

They're called UTMs. Universal Turing Machines. ;-)

But yes, what happens when you exceed what the machine can handle is 
*exactly* what we're talking about here. C does a well-defined but 
surprising-to-the-naive method for dealing with integers too large.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     Remember the good old days, when we
     used to complain about cryptography
     being export-restricted?

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scott wrote:
> that's one reason why cameras use USB and not LAN or WLAN 

USB *is* a LAN. You mean memory chips? I've seen cameras that do 
wireless LAN too, for (for example) places that take your ID photo and 
print it out for you.

> too hard/impossible to get a network stack on DOS?

Errrr, nope!  You could get network stacks pretty easily, really. That's 
what the whole NETBIOS was.  Back in the DOS 3.x days, if I recall. Why 
would it be difficult to put a network stack on a DOS machine?

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     Remember the good old days, when we
     used to complain about cryptography
     being export-restricted?

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scott wrote:
> Yep, even on something relatively much simpler, like the radio in a car, 
> it is the software that causes the biggest headaches.  We can develop 
> and test the hardware usually in two or three 6 month blocks, but it 
> always the software that requires *way* more time and is usually the 
> reason for requested hardware changes, extra builds and delays.

Exactly. Now, ask yourself, if the software is that painful, why have 
software at all? Why not implement everything in hardware?

Because it's too complicated to implement in hardware. Software may be 
painful, but it's the *least* painful way of doing something like that. :-)

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     Remember the good old days, when we
     used to complain about cryptography
     being export-restricted?

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Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> Because almost no software will run on it any more.
> Seriously. I'd still be using WinNT if it wasn't for that.

Now consider why it might be that new software doesn't run on old OSes, 
even tho the old software runs on the new OSes.  Maybe it's because the 
new OSes provide more services and functionality that the programmers 
like to take advantage of to make their lives easier?

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     Remember the good old days, when we
     used to complain about cryptography
     being export-restricted?

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Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> Warp wrote:
> > Darren New <dne### [at] sanrrcom> wrote:
> >> The C declaration of
> >>    unsigned int X;
> >> does not allocate an integer variable.
> > 
> >> You wouldn't need signed/unsigned conversion rules if you were working 
> >> with integers instead of int's.
> > 
> >   I may be unusually dense here, but I still can't understand.

> I'm assuming you know what an integer is? And what an int is as defined 
> by C?  And how they differ?

  Why is that relevant? There are no programming languages which can handle
the entire set of integers.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Darren New wrote:
> Orchid XP v7 wrote:
>> Because almost no software will run on it any more.
>> Seriously. I'd still be using WinNT if it wasn't for that.
> 
> Now consider why it might be that new software doesn't run on old OSes, 
> even tho the old software runs on the new OSes.  Maybe it's because the 
> new OSes provide more services and functionality that the programmers 
> like to take advantage of to make their lives easier?

More likely M$ rearranged some API to induce an artificial dependency, 
but anyway...

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Darren New wrote:
> 
> Exactly. Now, ask yourself, if the software is that painful, why have
> software at all? Why not implement everything in hardware?
> 
> Because it's too complicated to implement in hardware. Software may be
> painful, but it's the *least* painful way of doing something like that. :-)
> 

Software is cheaper, when production hits masses. For instance a volume
control on a car stereo - normal, old-style potentiometer has been
around for decades, it's easy to manufacture, it's easy to use and it's
easy to implement. Still the cheapest hardware use software for the
matter, as it can be done without extra hardware (there's already a DAC
or DSP oslt, which can handle the volume code).

-- 
Eero "Aero" Ahonen
   http://www.zbxt.net
      aer### [at] removethiszbxtnetinvalid

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"Orchid XP v7" <voi### [at] devnull> wrote in message
news:47230b23$1@news.povray.org...
> Darren New wrote:
> > Orchid XP v7 wrote:
> >> Because almost no software will run on it any more.
> >> Seriously. I'd still be using WinNT if it wasn't for that.
> >
> > Now consider why it might be that new software doesn't run on old OSes,
> > even tho the old software runs on the new OSes.  Maybe it's because the
> > new OSes provide more services and functionality that the programmers
> > like to take advantage of to make their lives easier?
>
> More likely M$ rearranged some API to induce an artificial dependency,
> but anyway...

Actually, one of their requirements is backward compatability, at least til
XP. Stuff that ran on 98 should still run on XP. It way require enabling
compat modes, but it should run. That's for stuff that used the APIs as they
were designed to be used. For stuff that used undocumented features and
bugs, all bets are off however

There's a tale about a workaround that was put into one version of the OS (I
think it was win 95) to allow SimCity to work on the newer OS. Simcity had
been depending on a bug that was fixed in the newer version, and hence it
didn't run.

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