Posts by Dale Reese

How the OS/2 flop went on to shape modern software

IBM from the release of the first "PC" carefully trimmed their products at the knees, elbows, and eyebrows trying to keep them from cannibalizing other product lines.

My TRS-80 interpreter BASIC was faster executing than a 5150... They'd simply recompiled the 8-bit BASIC into x86 opcodes...

From my memory, it was 4 or 5 *years* before IBM admitted that it was possible to do word processing on a PC. (daisywheel, very NIH)

"Oh, let us show you our DisplayWriter line for professionals..."

'Portable' CD player puts MP3 into a spin

Speed varies while playing

The main parameters of the CD (taken from the September 1983 issue of the compact disc specification) are as follows:

Scanning velocity: 1.2–1.4 m/s (constant linear velocity) – equivalent to approximately 500 rpm at the inside of the disc, and approximately 200 rpm at the outside edge. (A disc played from beginning to end slows down during playback.)

One in 10 webpages scrutinized by Google were laced with malware

RTFA - 1 in 10 of *suspicious* pages???

The pages analyzed were selected specifically, *not* as a random sample, from several billion web pages that exhibited suspicious behavior.

Yes, 10% of the 4.5 million (450,000) analyzed in detail were bogus, but a more accurate statistic is: >2G/450K, or about 0.02% (or less) of the web pages Google sampled.