Monthly Archives: June 2006

VMS The other day, I was thinking about the old debate. Worse is better. Just good enough. One of the classic examples in those texts is the way that BSD was designed vs. the MIT operating systems. (The other big … Continue reading →

According to an old Ex-Intel employee, the primary architect of Windows NT thought that the x86 wouldn’t be around very long: Given your interest in VMS you might find this amusing. In the early 1990′s we visited Microsoft to try … Continue reading →

Today was a ‘bad network’ day. Lots of sites just wouldn’t load. Of all the sites, the one that worked the best was gmail. Everything else had large pages and the full refresh would just kill the page load. The … Continue reading →

enough said. This is the best VI and it consistently surprises me at how good it is. I still find features that solve every problem I have ever had with vi. My .vimrc file is starting to look like my … Continue reading →

I just ordered a New laptop. It’s not a Mac, its a Dell. Why? Wasn’t I using a MacBook? Yep, and a MacBook is nice, but they do have their quirks. Right now, I just need a laptop to get … Continue reading →

There is a neat article that gives a tour of the ECS motherboard factory. Frankly, I like ECS motherboards. Fry’s often has deals on them and as a result some people think they are of a lower quality. This is … Continue reading →

The other day, I was thinking about register windows, like the kind on a Sparc CPU. I don’t remember why I was thinking about this, but it was probably me just surfing Wikipedia. At any rate, the question I had … Continue reading →

Back in the old days, when Windows was just starting to run on the 386, the fastest way to get from v86 mode (which the vast majority of apps were running), and into protected mode was to execute illegal instructions … Continue reading →