>> I'm sure if you knew enough about Linux, you could do this kind of thing
>> pretty easily. I don't have the knowledge required.
> 
> That's a far cry from "doesn't appear to be documented".

...and why do you think I don't have the knowledge required?

Maybe because I couldn't find it documented anywhere? ;-)

>> I *have* such a thing. It's a little Linux boot disk that allows you to
>> access an NTFS partition and rewrite the SAM DB. [The thing that stores
>> the local administrator password.] Very damn useful too! ;-)
> 
> Yep.  I've got a copy of that one around here somewhere as well from my 
> days working on Win2K Server.  Pity it didn't work on the domain 
> controller I was having problems with, though - W2Ks had a problem where 
> if the administrator password got corrupted (that's the best guess 
> Microsoft had about the issue), you couldn't even boot into safe mode.  
> The utility disk at the time didn't understand AD DCs (indeed, since it 
> was a DC, it wasn't the SAM but the AD database that needed to be 
> accessed, and it wasn't designed for that).

Yeah, AD works completely differently to the SAM - even down to using a 
different hash function IIRC. Good luck with that! [Time for an 
authoritative restore - oh, wait, it doesn't boot! OK, time for a 
parallel install to set up the backup software to restore the original 
data over the top of the boot partition. Yes, I have personally done 
this. No, it isn't amusing.]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> In a real multitasking OS, several programs can "do stuff" at once. 
> 
>   And so they can in a cooperative multitasking OS. I don't really see
> the difference.

Right... So cooperative multitasking is a kind of multitasking. Not 
disputing that. I'm disputing whether Windows 3.11 could multitask.

>> Really? That's news to me. I was told that only the program that owns 
>> the active window can actually use the CPU.
> 
>   You were told wrong.

OK, fair enough.

>> 1. You have to reboot the machine to do that.
> 
>   And the difference with Win9x/DOS is...?

You can switch without rebooting.

>> I don't recall ever complaining about the hardware being closed, or the 
>> OS being tied to it. [Though obviously it *is* a bit of a pitty that 
>> Macs come in a fixed set of configurations and cannot be changed.] 
> 
>   How many times have you changed the configuration of a PC (other than
> eg. adding an additional hard drive or RAM, both of which you can
> perfectly well do to a Mac)?

Thrice.

I changed the graphics card, later I changed the CPU, and later still I 
changed the soundcard.

It's more the fact that Apple will only sell you a Mac in one of a small 
number of possible configurations. You can have a Mac with X, Y and Z, 
or a Mac with A, B and C. But you cannot purchase a Mac with X, Y and C. 
Not a major catastrophy, just a bit of a pitty.

>> 1. A Mac is a very expensive piece of hardware [assuming you can find 
>> somebody who sells them].
> 
>   You still have this misconception and you just don't want to let go
> of it.
> 
>   Sure, Apple doesn't offer almost anything in the below-crappy and
> laughably cheap range, but their prices seem very competitive to me
> when compared to PCs with *equivalent* specs.

I'm pretty sure we've had this conversation. I go online and look up 
specs, and a PC of a similar spec usually comes out several percent 
cheaper than a Mac.

>> 2. I would have to throw away all my existing software.
> 
>   That doesn't make even the least bit of sense. Are you saying that if
> you buy a second computer, you have to throw away the first one? Why?
> How does that make any sense?

My bedroom has finite volume? (Not to mention power supplies. And space 
for a keyboard, mouse and monitor...)

>> Apple are quick to claim that it's "easy" to get a Mac to talk to other 
>> Windows PCs. But given that I have two Windows PCs and they don't want 
>> to talk to each other, what are the chances of them talking to a 
>> complete alien? ;-)
> 
>   The chances are pretty good when you install the software which Apple
> gives you.

Well... I guess it's possible that a Mac might be better at talking to 
PCs than other PCs are. After all, OpenOffice is better at reading Word 
documents than Word itself is. ;-)

>> If I was going to go down this road, I'd need to know for sure that I'd 
>> actually be able to do something *useful* with a Mac.
> 
>   Like what?

I'm just saying, the quantity of software I can find for a Mac has to be 
large enough that it's worth turning the thing on at least occasionally.

I guess I could just use the Mac as a rendering machine - but then, if 
you want a Mac with serious CPU power, it gets *frighteningly* 
expensive. So that's not really gonna work.

>> I played this game 
>> with Linux; I had both Windoze and Linux installed, but since 98% of the 
>> software I want to use is on Windoze
> 
>   Exactly what software is that?
> 
>   Personally, the *only* software I need which is only available for
> Windows is computer games. I boot to Windows only to play (and I do
> that relatively rarely).

Well, obviously there's all the games I play. But for example, I have a 

it's completely useless on a Mac. I'm sure there exists Mac software 
that does something similar - but I do not own that software. I own Cubase.


*believe* should actually work on a Mac. [I'm not sure what the product 
activation system would make of it though. It might bawk at me trying to 
activate the product on another platform.]

Next there's my brand new graphics tablet. It comes with a copy of 
PhotoShop Elements. Now I'm fairly sure that can be run on a Mac - but I 
don't know if *my* copy can be. I think the CD I have is PC-only.


think that has Mac drivers.

The majority of the software I use is actually freeware. Some of it 
exists on the Mac, some of it doen't. Most of it probably has 
alternatives. So that's not such a big issue. I'm more worried about the 
software I've shelled out my hard-earned cash for.

Provided I can find enough useful things to do on a Mac, it's worth 
having one.

[Hypothetically, I guess some kind of laptop would be a good start. But 
those are really expensive, so...]

>> Eventually I got tired of Linux being catestrophically 
>> broken every time any item of hardware changed, so I just removed it 
>> completely.
> 
>   Right, no other linux user ever changes their hardware and thus
> avoids all problems, which is why linux is never fixed. You are the
> only person in the world to do that.

Linux is an OS "designed by experts, for experts". I am not an expert.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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On Fri, 06 Jun 2008 20:03:03 +0100, Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull>
wrote:

>
>BTW... apparently some cell phones these days can actually access the 
>Internet. (So I'm told anyway.)

The one I bought 10 years ago couldn't.  :p
-- 

Regards
     Stephen

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Obviously there's also a truckload of ways AmigaOS is *different* from 
> Unix. [There are no device files, pathnames have a syntax more like 
> MS-DOS, configuration is always stored in binary files not text files...]

Ah. OK.  I was looking at AmigaOS as the software and how you interface 
to the operating system.  I wasn't looking at AmigaOS as the 
command-line commands that come with AmigaOS.

I mean, really, CP/M had "more" and "type" and such.

> Now I would suspect that would tend to break horribly as soon as some 
> new application is added that expects everything to be in the normal 
> locations...

That would be where the symlinks come into it. :-)

> [Basically I have absolutely no clue how the traditional Unix file 
> layout is supposed to work. I don't know why, for example, we have /bin, 
> /root/bin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin, /usr/share/bin...]

Legacy, and the fact that way too many programs hard-coded file paths 
instead of the OS doing something like providing APIs for finding out 
such stuff or having some efficient central storage like a registry. Of 
course, the #! syntax *requires* hard-coded paths in every file, so it's 
kind of difficult to improve easily in that sense.

You started out with two disk drives: the root, and the users' 
directories. But they were small, so you wound up putting things like 
the mail spool on the user disk (hence, /usr/spool) and things like 
executables you don't need before the system is booted enough to mount a 
second disk someplace like /usr/bin. And there were executables that 
only the administator could run anyway, so to cut down the number of 
directories everyone else had to search, you put those in /sbin and 
/usr/sbin, depending on whether they were the kind that needed the 
drives mounted or not. (Check a file system: better be on the root. 
Delete a user: Didn't need to be on the root.)

Then you had network-shared file systems, so you needed /usr/share as a 
place to mount that, and /var as a place that you could refer to with a 
common name but was actually different storage on each machine.

Then /usr got so overused for everything that it didn't make sense to 
actually put, you know, users there. So you got /home or any of a 
half-dozen variations on that.

Nowadays, it looks like this, mostly:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filesystem_hierarchy_standard

> They had trouble. Somebody walked past and the T-adaptor on their PC 
> fell apart, breaking the ring. 

They set up the ring wrong, then. :-)  Each loop is supposed to go back 
to the hub that detects a broken connection and bypasses it.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> Obviously there's also a truckload of ways AmigaOS is *different* from 
> Unix. [There are no device files,

Actually, there are. CON: was, for example, a device file.

> pathnames have a syntax more like MS-DOS, 

Actually, not. Each was up to the device driver to interpret. The stuff 
before the colon was the name of the device driver that the rest got 
passed to. The "Speach:" driver, for example, had no pathnames remotely 
resembling MS-DOS.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> I always wondered why the hell AmigaDOS provided this lame little "more" 
> command. Or why it had "type". I was even more perplexed by "ed" - a 
> program that lets you edit a text file one line at a time by typing in 
> utterly cryptic instructions. And I often wondered why the "dir" command 
> has a "SHOW=" option.

  That sounds to me more like DOS than unix.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> I *have* such a thing. 

I suggest you also check out BartPE, by the way. A good tool for some 
things.

-- 
   Darren New / San Diego, CA, USA (PST)
     "That's pretty. Where's that?"
          "It's the Age of Channelwood."
     "We should go there on vacation some time."

Post a reply to this message

Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> 1. You have to reboot the machine to do that.
> > 
> >   And the difference with Win9x/DOS is...?

> You can switch without rebooting.

  Debatable. Just because you can shut down Windows and boot to DOS (and
the other way around) without going through the BIOS bootup sequence
doesn't necessarily make them tied together. It may just mean that Win9x
supports booting to DOS without having to go through BIOS bootup.

> >> I don't recall ever complaining about the hardware being closed, or the 
> >> OS being tied to it. [Though obviously it *is* a bit of a pitty that 
> >> Macs come in a fixed set of configurations and cannot be changed.] 
> > 
> >   How many times have you changed the configuration of a PC (other than
> > eg. adding an additional hard drive or RAM, both of which you can
> > perfectly well do to a Mac)?

> Thrice.

  Oh, my. ;)

> It's more the fact that Apple will only sell you a Mac in one of a small 
> number of possible configurations. You can have a Mac with X, Y and Z, 
> or a Mac with A, B and C. But you cannot purchase a Mac with X, Y and C. 
> Not a major catastrophy, just a bit of a pitty.

  The PowerMac line has always been quite configurable and extendable.
Heck, it's even 10 times easier to open than a PC. With the typical PC
you need a screwdriver, and accessing the things inside is not the easiest
possible task. With a typical PowerMac you press a button, open the
computer and everything is nicely laid out there. (Well, at least this
was so in the past.)

> >> 2. I would have to throw away all my existing software.
> > 
> >   That doesn't make even the least bit of sense. Are you saying that if
> > you buy a second computer, you have to throw away the first one? Why?
> > How does that make any sense?

> My bedroom has finite volume? (Not to mention power supplies. And space 
> for a keyboard, mouse and monitor...)

  Switches exist. They aren't even expensive.

> >> If I was going to go down this road, I'd need to know for sure that I'd 
> >> actually be able to do something *useful* with a Mac.
> > 
> >   Like what?

> I'm just saying, the quantity of software I can find for a Mac has to be 
> large enough that it's worth turning the thing on at least occasionally.

  What kind of software? I bet you don't spend thousands of pounds in
software, so that must be free software? What kind of free software?
What is it that you do that requires Windows-only software?

  If you play games, I agree. I have that situation too. That's why I have
a dual boot. But games are just a very small portion of everything I do.

> I guess I could just use the Mac as a rendering machine - but then, if 
> you want a Mac with serious CPU power, it gets *frighteningly* 
> expensive. So that's not really gonna work.

  There we go again.

> Well, obviously there's all the games I play. But for example, I have a 

> it's completely useless on a Mac. I'm sure there exists Mac software 
> that does something similar - but I do not own that software. I own Cubase.

  You still have this obsession that you have to throw out your Windows
machine (or Windows altogether). Nobody is forcing you.


> think that has Mac drivers.

  Probably not, because MacOS X probably supports it out of the box.

> >> Eventually I got tired of Linux being catestrophically 
> >> broken every time any item of hardware changed, so I just removed it 
> >> completely.
> > 
> >   Right, no other linux user ever changes their hardware and thus
> > avoids all problems, which is why linux is never fixed. You are the
> > only person in the world to do that.

> Linux is an OS "designed by experts, for experts". I am not an expert.

  How does that counter my sarcasm? I think it's still valid.

-- 
                                                          - Warp

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>> I always wondered why the hell AmigaDOS provided this lame little "more" 
>> command. Or why it had "type". I was even more perplexed by "ed" - a 
>> program that lets you edit a text file one line at a time by typing in 
>> utterly cryptic instructions. And I often wondered why the "dir" command 
>> has a "SHOW=" option.
> 
>   That sounds to me more like DOS than unix.

Actually, FWIW, AmigaDOS accepts both "dir" and "list". (But NOT "ls". 
Although you can create it as a shell alias if you want...)

AmigaDOS uses pathname syntax similar to MS-DOS. (There is no "/". There 
is "FD0:", "FD1:", "CD0:", "RAM:", "PAR:", "SER:"...) But in places it 
uses paths in a vaguely Unix way. (There is a "CON:", which opens a new 
GUI window. There is a "SPK:" or similar which renders using the speach 
synthesizer.) It had Unix-style piping, and the famous Unix "ed" 
program. (Don't ask me if it was compatible! But it certainly worked in 
a similarly cryptic way to the real Unix program does.)

It also had the ability to create "assigns", which are very vaguely like 
symlinks. Basically I can create a thing called "FOO:" which actually 
points to any folder in the system - or possibly another assign! Rather 
than always looking for the fonts on C:\FONTS or some such like Windoze 
does, it would look in FONTS: - which could be assigned to any pathname 
in the system. [Hence my ability to split my system disk across two 
floppies.]

In fact, unlike a symlink, you could assign FOO: to *multiple* paths. So 
it's kind of like having a search path - but not just for executable 
files, for ANY kind of file! (That includes any arbitrary kind a file an 
application might want to track down.) And it just looks like a normal 
pathname.

Basically, AmigaDOS was "like" MS-DOS and also "like" Unix and also 
completely unlike either of them. Strange little hybrid thing... but 
very useful.

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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>> Obviously there's also a truckload of ways AmigaOS is *different* from 
>> Unix. [There are no device files,
> 
> Actually, there are. CON: was, for example, a device file.

Well that's not really a "file". That's a magic filename. Unix has real, 
actual *files* that you can "touch". And you create new devices by 
creating one of these magical files.

[AmigaDOS had device description files, but these are text files. They 
don't work the same way Unix device files do with device codes and such; 
the AmigaDOS device description files are textual things telling it what 
driver to load and with what settings.]

>> pathnames have a syntax more like MS-DOS, 
> 
> Actually, not. Each was up to the device driver to interpret. The stuff 
> before the colon was the name of the device driver that the rest got 
> passed to. The "Speach:" driver, for example, had no pathnames remotely 
> resembling MS-DOS.

There is no "/", no unique root filesystem.

Instead, there are lots of roots like "FOO:", "BAR:", etc. This is more 
like MS-DOS pathname syntax.

Now, the way it *works* is of course more like Unix...

[OTOH, it uses forward slashes rather than backslashes.]

-- 
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*

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