NIB – Microsoft MS-DOS 5 Upgrade

Posted on by Sol Young with Leave a comment

2008-11-19 09:24:14 -05002008-11-19 09:27:03 -0500

Mike, our IT coordinator dropped this on my desk this morning. It’s still shrinkwrapped. 1991. We have a USB 3.5″ drive, but unfortunately we don’t have an earlier version to get this installed. Would Boot Camp support it?

Amongst the highlights:

  • “Online Help from the shell or command-line interface…” – Online help has come a long way.
  • “Undelete utility helps you recover critical files…” – Control+Z and “Undo” were born.
  • “Unformat utility…” – What?
  • “MS-DOS QBasic replaces GW-BASIC…” – Many a coder’s first language.
  • “… freeing up at least 45K more conventional memory…”
  • “Is network ready” – Remember “net use“?
  • “Although we test with a wide variety of system manufacturers, it is your responsibility to confirm with your personal computer manufacturer that this product correctly supports your computer and peripheral devices.” – So, ummm, is it REST or SOAP?

Click through on the images to Flickr – the pics are high enough resolution to read the full the text.

Posted in History, Microsoft

Amazon AWS releases CloudFront – here’s how it works

Posted on by Sol Young with Leave a comment

Amazon released CloudFront to public beta today. It’s a simple way to get free content publicly available to the edge of the network (closest to the recipient downloader).

From the AWS announcement:

Amazon CloudFront is a web service for content delivery. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments.

Here’s how it works:

  1. Upload your content files to S3.
  2. Call the CloudFront API, specifying the S3 bucket.
  3. Use your S3 bucket’s already created domain and filename in your website (no change here).
  4. When a customer clicks a link the closest file is automatically routed.

UPDATE:
So, uhhh, what’s special here? From AWS’s description, CloudFront is simply setting a flag for your S3 bucket that means it’s to be distributed around the cloud or remain in a single location.

This should be an addition to the S3 service, not a separate service. The added step of having to let CloudFront know you want the edge network coverage is an unnecessary chore. It would be better as an attribute for the S3 bucket. This would make S3 a stronger brand, keep it clearer for those navigating AWS, and simplify the process of pushing content (1 less step).

Here’s how much it costs:
Continue Reading

Posted in Amazon, Architecture, Cloud, Web Services

Kulling the blogs – down to 196

Posted on by Sol Young with Leave a comment

Maybe it’s Winter preparedness, or maybe it’s a slow news day… But I’m reviewing the blogs I follow, deleting the old, and subscribing to new. I was breaking well over 300 and realized many were dead (in my opinion, a blog that isn’t updated for 6 months is dead).

It’s cleaning time. I’m under 200. Bring on the cold.

Posted in Google, RSS