new flash memory from motorola

Motorola will show prototypes of Flash memory chips built with a new kind of nanocrystal, allowing the same storage density in half the area. Cool.

SCM and TCO

Murph posted a good comment on my previous entry on SCM systems:

Hmm, coming from an MS background I know and, more or less, understand VSS. But that costs if you can't afford a sufficiently serious MSDN sub (I can) so I too have looked. I've been somewhat blinkered by the desire for IDE integration but think I'm going to have to give up on that )-:

Perforce is seriously not cheap (even by the heady standards of version control software...)

I might have taken a punt on subversion if a) I hadn't quite given up on IDE integration and b) I hadn't discovered that I already have CVS on my server (!)

CVS... well there is a certain weight of argument and an abundance of tools available across several platforms. Time will tell...

Cost can definitely be a problem, and it's one of the variables I'm looking at. I've used VSS in the past and I'd choose CVS over VSS any day of the week, even though both integrate with the tool I'm using (IDEA). What I want from a SCM system is some advanced features, such as proper branch management, distributed development and so on. We'll see how they compare after I do some testing.

so the lawyers didn't use vmware

Over the weekend I "discovered" a copy of Windows 98 Second Edition (sometimes looking through my stuff feels as if I'm on an archeological dig). While I was trying to install it on VMWare Beta 4, setup kept failing after the "setup wizard" had been "prepared" (whatever that means). I tried different settings and still no luck. Changed drivers on the boot disk. Prepared the drive in different ways. Nothing.

Then I realized that the floppy from which I was booting had been prepared for an IBM Thinkpad laptop, and it contained DR-DOS 7.0.

Ah, DR-DOS. I remembered the trial (although I don't remember what happened with it in the end, and I don't even want to spend time looking more, the last piece of news I found on it is here) in which Caldera, who eventually ended up owning DR-DOS, was suing Microsoft for modifying Windows to fail with DR-DOS. I needed an original Microsoft Win98SE bootdisk. So I looked online and got a version from here. Created the disk. Booted.

Installed without a hitch.

Score: Monopoly 1, Little guy 0. I wonder why Caldera's lawyers had a hard time proving Microsoft's behavior. Seems pretty obvious to me.

more on version control

Still checking to look at the recent advances in source control management (SCM) systems. I began looking about two months ago and at that time I saw BitKeeper and subversion. Then Chris Bailey from CodeIntensity and Dylan both recommended Perforce. So now I've downloaded both Perforce and Bitkeeper. Installed Perforce, created a repository, etc. Still not installed BitKeeper. Will post impressions of both systems once I've given them a workout, which is not so hard since I already have a source structure that is reasonably complex.