``The DCS stands
for 'Digital Collection System'.''
Oooh! Now that makes me feel so much more, um, private.
Note to FBI: Naming the damned thing so it sounds like the latest model of dishwasher doesn't mean that the privacy advocates are going to calm down. (As Bugs Bunny might have said: What a bunch of maroons!)
``Unless they have some sort of backdoor built into Office 2000''
Yep. No doubt that when any of the following:
Bill Gates's conviction (or death)
Microsoft's stock price falling below a certain level
Microsoft losing money for several consecutive quarters
The backdoors are used to punish American businesses for the arrogance in believing that they could fnction without Bill Gates's benevolent vision and guiding hand.;-)
``People in the tech industry commonly overestimate the size and importance of Microsoft to the world as a whole.''
Actually, I'd say it was mainly the folks outside the tech industry that overestimate Microsoft's importance.
This Leadbeater fellow sounds an awful lot like Nicholas Negroponte and his aimless ramblings about how my doorbell and shower would be telling me about my new emails and other such drivel. The reason I stopped reading Wired years ago (way back when it was still considered somewhat on the ``cool'' side).
I, for one, am getting more than a little sick and tired about these marketing know-nothings ranting on about wanting to enhance/maximize/whatever my ``internet experience''. I've experienced AOLs style of ``internet experience'' and said No thanks. But bozos like Leadbeater will need to shove it down my throat whether I want it or not.
Unfortunately, if we just ignore idiots like Leadbeater, they won't just go away. They'll find some clueless CEO and add yet another member to their cult of ignorance (after all: ignorance is bliss).
`` I've got an old Pentium 120 sitting in my bedroom... I'm really considering Linux for that machine''
Go for it. I have two P100s that I was got for US$0 since the the school that had received them as a donation found they couldn't run Windows well enough to be useful. And, no, they weren't interested in having Linux installed. I hang my head in shame at this advocacy failure). At least I was able make use of these systems and extend the useful lifetime of the local landfill by a bit. One of them found a new lease on life as a nice little system for C programming (the wife was taking a course). The other now lives on, after the addition of a couple of oleder IDE drives, as an LPRng/Samba server that sits in the basement and allows me to print from my Linux boxen and the wife and kids to have more disk space and print from the Windows box in the spare bedroom. I wouldn't even want to consider running Windows on a machine of that vintage. But with Linux it is quite usable (though X is a bit pokey depending on what you're trying to do).
``Or get that bobbing head bird to hit the keyboard like Homer Simpson did.''
I actually proposed something like that in a department meeting held on April 1 back in 1980 (maybe 1981) so those who were running long simulations wouldn't get disconnected by the silly IBM terminal controller from the campus VM/CMS system. No keyboard activity for fifteen minutes and you got clobbered. (Tentative funding for the project was approved until initial project team discussions revealed that the only place where anyone could remember seeing one of the birds was at a Stuckey's on the Ohio turnpike and enthusiasm for the project waned quickly.)
``drive spinup seems to be the time when a borderline drive will fail''
Not to mention that it's the time when the drive's current requirements are the greatest. These inrush spikes are not a big problem for a system with a drive or two but I've seen places with systems with large RAID arrays attached to servers where they popped breakers if the power came back on while the drive cabinets were sitting there with their power switches in the ON position. Apparently, not all setups allow you to or are configured to use the SCSI start command to sequence the drive's startups like they used to do in the days of yore. Happily, newer drives are not as power hungry (I can remember some old 5.25 inch disks that used 40+W of power) but now that these 15,000 RPM drives are coming out...
If you're trying to save power turning off the monitors when no one's actually sitting in front of them helps enormously. Where I used to work, whenever there was a power outage and we switched over to the UPS (no generator while I was there) standard procedure was to immediately turn off any monitors that no one was actively working on. Gave us well over another half hour or more of battery time. Switching to KVM boxes to handle, say, eight servers with a single monitor halped out a lot too.
Doug Miller certainly has the Microsoft party line down cold.
Wondering: Is this the guy Microsoft hired for that Linux position that they had posted on their site around, oh say, a year ago? (If so, perhaps this sort of attitude is what got him the job:^) )
``Face it, bankers are old fashioned and play things in a very old school manor.''
No argument there. My experience in the banking industry (well, the bond trading part of it) as well as (a small) credit card processing company was that they tended to lean toward ``trailing edge'' technology since it was tried and true.
``With Open Source project management practices being as bad as they are and with the open source evangelists and advocates screaming and preaching that open source is ?shareware?''
What OSS ``evangelists'' are screaming that it's shareware? Never heard any myself. Shareware has a certain meaning that most OSS advocates that I know don't find particularly applicable to most OSS.
And regarding ``Open Source project management practices being as bad as they are...'': my experience was that project management in the banking industry was no better (and IMHO, actually worse) than other industries and from what I gather the OSS development process. It seemed to be more politically driven than I'd ever seen before... or since. I spent a lot of late nights fixing problems that these development processes produced. Amazing how many vice presidents were calling me at 11:30 P.M. asking for help getting their crappy software kludges to work or backing it out since it was never going to work that night. I worked on projects with more sophisticated development processes on Govt. contracts at a University.
``The Open source zealots cannot scream the DCMA sucks...''
Granted `Open source zealots' might be saying that DCMA `sucks' but a far larger number of people, like consumer rights advocates, are saying the same thing. (Though they don't use the word `suck'.)
--
Re:255 color gray scale?
on
The ASCII Cam
·
· Score: 2
I had to chuckle over the ``color gray scale'' phrase.
Also, the human eye can not detect much difference in gray levels once you get to about 64 levels; any more than that and your gilding lilies. But then, I supposed it doesn't hurt to go ahead and use the whole byte.:-)
All in all, I've got to say: ``Kudos to the author!'' This is one of the coolest things I've seen in quite a while. Not everyone's got a T1 into their home and this package could make crude but servicable video conferencing available for people on a budget... or can't afford a fat pipe... or live too far away from the CO for ADSL. Now I'm wondering how cheaply I can get a camera for the PCs at home...
\begin{aside} Back in my grad school days I was doing programming involving image compression techniques (Hadamard, Haar, DCT, etc.), Viterbi encoding, etc. for use over noisy channels and the only output device I had easy access to that could produce a viewable image was the monster IBM band printer. We had some programs to produce output like the hasciicam only it used overstrikes to create much of the gray scale levels. (Other folks eventually got used to seeing before-and-after images hanging from the walls like wallpaper.) We eventually got (for another study) a thermal printer but was a pain to use (serial input from the mainframe, required expensive paper that turned yellow green after a while, etc.) This brings back some memories.
\end{aside}
``Radio Amateurs have been doing this since Methuselah was a youngster. Meteor scatter transmissions have been going on around the world since at least the early sixties.''
You noticed that,too? I used to run across at least an article every couple of months in the IEEE Transaction on Communications back when I was in college (which was too long ago for me to want to mention just now). While doing research I would run across similar articles in the journals that predated the IEEE. This is old stuff indeed. --
I wasn't aware that DGPS was capable of getting down into the cm positioning accuracy area. Is that cm range achieved by using DGPS in conjunction with carrier tracking? I led an engineering team that did some early work on DGPS for NASA and the Army back in the '80s for precision approaches and we didn't see accuracies like that using straight differential (but it was good enough to meet CAT II requirements when you used P-code). Carrier tracking was pretty much out of the question at the time (cost = outrageous). Having been out of the GPS field for a number of years now, I have to ask: Is carrier tracking common in today's receivers?
...where you paid a higher rate in order to connect at a higher speed. (Oh, and since I'm 19,200 feet from the CO don't even mention ADSL ans its pricing scheme to me.)
What's next? Art museums where you can pay a lower admission fee but you're forced to wear a pair of glasses that blur your vision during the visit?
This is the kind of crap that will kill HDTV for a lot of people. Frankly, news like this makes it easier and easier for me to justify renting movies or spending even more time just sitting in an easy chair and reading a good book. --
``You aren't the only one with a head crash story like that.''
Oh, I'm certain of that. You tended not to believe those stories until you experienced one first-hand.
``It was fun toggling in boot programs.''
I guess it depends on the situation. We had an 11/34a installed in a truck out in California. One of the guys from the team flew out there to man it for some flight data collection seesions we were running with NASA. He somehow clobbered the boot block of the RL02 pack. Luckily we had a version of the 34a that had the programmer's front panel (Field Service really hated to work on customerss systems who didn't have that keypad). I had to read the bootstrap code to him over the phone and have him key it in about an hour before the flight tests were to begin. Then I had to overnight him instructions on how to rebuild the boot block. Actually, it was pretty nifty that you could even do that. I cannot imagine doing that on a PC, though I suppose with a DOS boot disk with DEBUG.COM you could accomplish the same thing. (Uh, oh. I think I just added another thing to my weekend to-do list!)
--
...I've heard of in a while. Hmm... watching movies on your PC. Listening to music through your PC. Makes me laugh. I don't know of anyone, not a soul, who thinks this is a good idea. Oh sure, a few think it's clever or mildly interesting, but not one person I know has even considered trading in their TV or stereo setups and started done their viewing or listening on their computers. Not one. Hell, I have a hard enough time trying to recreate a reasonable facsimile of the ``theatre experience'' with my modest stereo/TV setup. Why would I want to try doing it in an even smaller space.
Sure it can be done but why would you want to?
And why the heck do you want to spend $2000 to be able to do those things. No computer system that you can afford will match the picture quality or sound quality of a nice A/V stereo setup. At least when I'm in my family room watching a movie or listening to music I don't have to listening to spinning disk drives or muffin fans. And sitting in front of a computer is not as comfortable as sitting in a nice easy chair with a bowl of popcorn.
Besides, I can think of a few dozen ways I'd rather be spending $2000 on computer equipment that don't involve attempting to turn it into a home entertainment center. (Actually, with the amazingly low quality of the majority of TV programs, movies, and worst of all, music releases, my computer is my home entertainment center. A couple of hours working with Apache/PHP/PostgreSQL is, generally, much more enjoyable than the equivalent amount of time spent watching television.)
Take a break from the effin' computer once in a while... unless, of course, you have some real computing to do. But, cripes, if you want to see a movie go to a theatre (or rent it and watch it on a decent TV) or attend a live concert (buy CDs from the band and support the musicians in a way that the RIAA doesn't). Get a life.
a PDP-8 front panel (that mustard-yellow style; were there others?).
a platter from a crashed RK06 pack.
a core memory board from an 11/70.
a KIM microcomputer (in case of emergency:-) ).
The 11/70 parts came from a system we got used from NASA Goddard back in the mid '80s and used as spare parts to keep our aging ``production'' 11/70 running. The crashed disk platter was particularly memorable. The heads didn't just crash into the disk; they were torn off the arm which proceeded to scrape all the data off the center of the platter along with a significant amount of aluminum. I don't think anyone who was there will ever forget the sound. Today's disk failures are nothing in comparison.
There seems to be no end to what bizaare stuff computer folks hang onto (and display like trophies on the wall).
I met a guy at DECUS years ago who was running a PDP-11/45(?) (essentially an 11/70 w/o cache) in his basement. Like the 11/70, I believe these needed three-phase power to run. I suppose you could rework all the power supplies to avoid the hassle of three-phase but that doesn't do much about the current draw. This guy's electric bill must have been something! The UNIBUS and MASSBUS PDPs could be serious power hogs.
You could have run RSX quite nicely on a Q-bus PDP-11 that wouldn't have emptied out your bank account. I actually considered it but I couldn't scrounge up a 9-track tape drive to do the OS load. And a good thing, too! The tape drive would have really run up the electric bill.
Nah. TOPS-20 wasn't so weird. Now Sperry's EXEC operating system. It had so many barriers to getting anything done that it nearly drove me nuts. I was so happy when I could move my software onto an RSX11 system.
Back in the last century, I was working for a defence contractor that was putting together a proposal in response to a DoD RFP for some work involving space systems, L-band communications, spread spectrum, etc., etc. Rumor had it that we had essentially won the competition for the work but lost out when the DoD decided that they didn't want to have `all their eggs in one basket'. Perfectly reasonable, actually.
As it turned out a major, Texas-based electronics company (don't want to give it away) had won the contract. Guess who ran a full page ad in the next weekend's local Sunday newspaper looking for electrical engineers with experience with ``space systems, L-band communications, spread spectrum, etc.''. Was really funny. AFAIK, no one quit and went to work for them but it certainly would have been interesting how the company's non-compete clauses would have held up. This was defence-related work of a classified nature and there aren't a lot of players in that ball game.
Do that many people actually wind up signing contracts that contain non-compete clauses?
Granted, I probably haven't been working in a field lately where my going to another company would threaten any trade secrets. In fact the last time was back in the '80s when I left an employer and there were maybe two other companies in the U.S. that would have found my experience (in GPS) useful enough at the time to want to pick my brain. (Oddly, my new employer did hire me because of that experience -- and for real-time software development -- but in a research environment so I guess my former didn't feel too threatened. They didn't squawk, anyway.) We did discuss non-compete issues during exit interviews though I'm sure this was done out of habit due to other sections of the company doing business in areas that had much more competition.
More recently, the closest thing I've experienced was a clause in the employment agreement as a consultant that stated that I would not work for a client for some period of time (at least a year if memory serves) after leaving the consultancy. (They actually decided it was a good idea to sue a client for stealing someone away from their employ -- IMHO, not exactly a stellar PR move.)
Now I have heard of some cases of Big Five/Six/whatever accounting/consulting firms luring away high powered consultants, partly because of these consultants' rolodexes. And legal proceedings sometime result because the former employer sees that rolodex full of contacts as its IP. Most of the time you hear about these non-compete suits being brought about against high level execs who leave (and take people with real talent with them).
I've heard about many folks who have had judges toss out the cases brought before them over non-compete issues. From what I understand, it helps to have your wife and children sitting in the front row (having them weap doesn't hurt) -- I've never been sure if the guy who told me that story was kidding or not. Apparently, judges are not fond of telling someone that they can't work in their chosen field:
``So what did you do before you got into the septic tank game?''
``I used to write C++ for Microsoft and a judge said I couldn't do that anymore.''
With the popularity of the Internet, chat rooms, and other communication tools out there, how a company thinks this enhances their position is baffling. Having trouble hiring and keeping good employees? Ever wonder why?
``proprietary search technology in the areas of identifying and eliminating duplicate pages in an index''
So ``sort | uniq'' will be a patent violation?
(Well, I certainly hope there's more to it than that!)
What we need is a Proxmire-type (of ``Golden Fleece Award'' fame) senator to publicize these ridiculous patents. Perhaps when the general public starts finding these patents as ludicrous as we do, these corporations might start feeling embarassed (when people start laughing at them, Jay Leno makes jokes about silly patents on the Tonight Show, etc.) and positive things might start happening at the USPTO.
In Illinois (in the U.S. for you international folks) a lot of cities grant tax breaks to industries for locating in their towns. The idea is that it's a chance for citizens to find jobs in their home town. On the surface it sounds like a great idea (workers have a shorter commute therefore less pollution, less strain on the inadequate road system, better quality of life, etc, etc.). Most of the time the complaints about these corporate tax benefits come from normal citizens who wind up taking up the slack. Also, the corporations wind up shutting down just before the tax break period ends leaving town and a large empty building that no one's paying taxes on.
Why Microsoft would be complaing about a tax break that largely benefits corporations is beyond me.
I sort of agree with the poster who asked whether this was Microsoft's way of testing the waters of how far they can push governments around. Dear Prime Minister of Australia: Don't let them do it.
If Microsoft has anyone to complain about the lack of broadband it'd be the telecomm industry. They're much too busy getting everyone to walk around with a cell phone glued to their ear to find the time to install decent broadband to most of their customers. IMHO, their take on broadband is something like: ``We still don't get this packet thing... but we do understand people talking across wires.''
One I would have liked to have seen was the one that some guy wore to a DECUS Symposium years ago. It had printed on it the DCL code you needed to disable the VMS license manager. Apparently, DECUS officials quietly asked him to not wear it anymore.
Another one was from HP back in the '70s. The University was a beta site for MPE and got some goodies as a result. There was a poster that had a neat design and said `Homo Programmus'. One of the student admins (a classmate) got a T-shirt with that on it. I was bummed they didn't have more.
Slashdot Mirror
Oooh! Now that makes me feel so much more, um, private.
Note to FBI: Naming the damned thing so it sounds like the latest model of dishwasher doesn't mean that the privacy advocates are going to calm down. (As Bugs Bunny might have said: What a bunch of maroons!)
--
Yep. No doubt that when any of the following:
- Bill Gates's conviction (or death)
- Microsoft's stock price falling below a certain level
- Microsoft losing money for several consecutive quarters
The backdoors are used to punish American businesses for the arrogance in believing that they could fnction without Bill Gates's benevolent vision and guiding hand.Actually, I'd say it was mainly the folks outside the tech industry that overestimate Microsoft's importance.
--
This Leadbeater fellow sounds an awful lot like Nicholas Negroponte and his aimless ramblings about how my doorbell and shower would be telling me about my new emails and other such drivel. The reason I stopped reading Wired years ago (way back when it was still considered somewhat on the ``cool'' side).
I, for one, am getting more than a little sick and tired about these marketing know-nothings ranting on about wanting to enhance/maximize/whatever my ``internet experience''. I've experienced AOLs style of ``internet experience'' and said No thanks. But bozos like Leadbeater will need to shove it down my throat whether I want it or not.
Unfortunately, if we just ignore idiots like Leadbeater, they won't just go away. They'll find some clueless CEO and add yet another member to their cult of ignorance (after all: ignorance is bliss).
--
Go for it. I have two P100s that I was got for US$0 since the the school that had received them as a donation found they couldn't run Windows well enough to be useful. And, no, they weren't interested in having Linux installed. I hang my head in shame at this advocacy failure). At least I was able make use of these systems and extend the useful lifetime of the local landfill by a bit. One of them found a new lease on life as a nice little system for C programming (the wife was taking a course). The other now lives on, after the addition of a couple of oleder IDE drives, as an LPRng/Samba server that sits in the basement and allows me to print from my Linux boxen and the wife and kids to have more disk space and print from the Windows box in the spare bedroom. I wouldn't even want to consider running Windows on a machine of that vintage. But with Linux it is quite usable (though X is a bit pokey depending on what you're trying to do).
--
I actually proposed something like that in a department meeting held on April 1 back in 1980 (maybe 1981) so those who were running long simulations wouldn't get disconnected by the silly IBM terminal controller from the campus VM/CMS system. No keyboard activity for fifteen minutes and you got clobbered. (Tentative funding for the project was approved until initial project team discussions revealed that the only place where anyone could remember seeing one of the birds was at a Stuckey's on the Ohio turnpike and enthusiasm for the project waned quickly.)
--
Not to mention that it's the time when the drive's current requirements are the greatest. These inrush spikes are not a big problem for a system with a drive or two but I've seen places with systems with large RAID arrays attached to servers where they popped breakers if the power came back on while the drive cabinets were sitting there with their power switches in the ON position. Apparently, not all setups allow you to or are configured to use the SCSI start command to sequence the drive's startups like they used to do in the days of yore. Happily, newer drives are not as power hungry (I can remember some old 5.25 inch disks that used 40+W of power) but now that these 15,000 RPM drives are coming out...
If you're trying to save power turning off the monitors when no one's actually sitting in front of them helps enormously. Where I used to work, whenever there was a power outage and we switched over to the UPS (no generator while I was there) standard procedure was to immediately turn off any monitors that no one was actively working on. Gave us well over another half hour or more of battery time. Switching to KVM boxes to handle, say, eight servers with a single monitor halped out a lot too.
--
Doug Miller certainly has the Microsoft party line down cold.
Wondering: Is this the guy Microsoft hired for that Linux position that they had posted on their site around, oh say, a year ago? (If so, perhaps this sort of attitude is what got him the job :^) )
--
No argument there. My experience in the banking industry (well, the bond trading part of it) as well as (a small) credit card processing company was that they tended to lean toward ``trailing edge'' technology since it was tried and true.
What OSS ``evangelists'' are screaming that it's shareware? Never heard any myself. Shareware has a certain meaning that most OSS advocates that I know don't find particularly applicable to most OSS.
And regarding ``Open Source project management practices being as bad as they are...'': my experience was that project management in the banking industry was no better (and IMHO, actually worse) than other industries and from what I gather the OSS development process. It seemed to be more politically driven than I'd ever seen before... or since. I spent a lot of late nights fixing problems that these development processes produced. Amazing how many vice presidents were calling me at 11:30 P.M. asking for help getting their crappy software kludges to work or backing it out since it was never going to work that night. I worked on projects with more sophisticated development processes on Govt. contracts at a University.
Granted `Open source zealots' might be saying that DCMA `sucks' but a far larger number of people, like consumer rights advocates, are saying the same thing. (Though they don't use the word `suck'.)
--
I had to chuckle over the ``color gray scale'' phrase.
Also, the human eye can not detect much difference in gray levels once you get to about 64 levels; any more than that and your gilding lilies. But then, I supposed it doesn't hurt to go ahead and use the whole byte. :-)
All in all, I've got to say: ``Kudos to the author!'' This is one of the coolest things I've seen in quite a while. Not everyone's got a T1 into their home and this package could make crude but servicable video conferencing available for people on a budget... or can't afford a fat pipe... or live too far away from the CO for ADSL. Now I'm wondering how cheaply I can get a camera for the PCs at home...
\begin{aside}
Back in my grad school days I was doing programming involving image compression techniques (Hadamard, Haar, DCT, etc.), Viterbi encoding, etc. for use over noisy channels and the only output device I had easy access to that could produce a viewable image was the monster IBM band printer. We had some programs to produce output like the hasciicam only it used overstrikes to create much of the gray scale levels. (Other folks eventually got used to seeing before-and-after images hanging from the walls like wallpaper.) We eventually got (for another study) a thermal printer but was a pain to use (serial input from the mainframe, required expensive paper that turned yellow green after a while, etc.) This brings back some memories.
\end{aside}
--
You noticed that,too? I used to run across at least an article every couple of months in the IEEE Transaction on Communications back when I was in college (which was too long ago for me to want to mention just now). While doing research I would run across similar articles in the journals that predated the IEEE. This is old stuff indeed.
--
I wasn't aware that DGPS was capable of getting down into the cm positioning accuracy area. Is that cm range achieved by using DGPS in conjunction with carrier tracking? I led an engineering team that did some early work on DGPS for NASA and the Army back in the '80s for precision approaches and we didn't see accuracies like that using straight differential (but it was good enough to meet CAT II requirements when you used P-code). Carrier tracking was pretty much out of the question at the time (cost = outrageous). Having been out of the GPS field for a number of years now, I have to ask: Is carrier tracking common in today's receivers?
--
...of my patent application involving
Consider youselves warned.
--
...where you paid a higher rate in order to connect at a higher speed. (Oh, and since I'm 19,200 feet from the CO don't even mention ADSL ans its pricing scheme to me.)
What's next? Art museums where you can pay a lower admission fee but you're forced to wear a pair of glasses that blur your vision during the visit?
This is the kind of crap that will kill HDTV for a lot of people. Frankly, news like this makes it easier and easier for me to justify renting movies or spending even more time just sitting in an easy chair and reading a good book.
--
Oh, I'm certain of that. You tended not to believe those stories until you experienced one first-hand.
I guess it depends on the situation. We had an 11/34a installed in a truck out in California. One of the guys from the team flew out there to man it for some flight data collection seesions we were running with NASA. He somehow clobbered the boot block of the RL02 pack. Luckily we had a version of the 34a that had the programmer's front panel (Field Service really hated to work on customerss systems who didn't have that keypad). I had to read the bootstrap code to him over the phone and have him key it in about an hour before the flight tests were to begin. Then I had to overnight him instructions on how to rebuild the boot block. Actually, it was pretty nifty that you could even do that. I cannot imagine doing that on a PC, though I suppose with a DOS boot disk with DEBUG.COM you could accomplish the same thing. (Uh, oh. I think I just added another thing to my weekend to-do list!)
--
...I've heard of in a while. Hmm... watching movies on your PC. Listening to music through your PC. Makes me laugh. I don't know of anyone, not a soul, who thinks this is a good idea. Oh sure, a few think it's clever or mildly interesting, but not one person I know has even considered trading in their TV or stereo setups and started done their viewing or listening on their computers. Not one. Hell, I have a hard enough time trying to recreate a reasonable facsimile of the ``theatre experience'' with my modest stereo/TV setup. Why would I want to try doing it in an even smaller space.
Sure it can be done but why would you want to? And why the heck do you want to spend $2000 to be able to do those things. No computer system that you can afford will match the picture quality or sound quality of a nice A/V stereo setup. At least when I'm in my family room watching a movie or listening to music I don't have to listening to spinning disk drives or muffin fans. And sitting in front of a computer is not as comfortable as sitting in a nice easy chair with a bowl of popcorn.
Besides, I can think of a few dozen ways I'd rather be spending $2000 on computer equipment that don't involve attempting to turn it into a home entertainment center. (Actually, with the amazingly low quality of the majority of TV programs, movies, and worst of all, music releases, my computer is my home entertainment center. A couple of hours working with Apache/PHP/PostgreSQL is, generally, much more enjoyable than the equivalent amount of time spent watching television.)
Take a break from the effin' computer once in a while... unless, of course, you have some real computing to do. But, cripes, if you want to see a movie go to a theatre (or rent it and watch it on a decent TV) or attend a live concert (buy CDs from the band and support the musicians in a way that the RIAA doesn't). Get a life.
--
Gee... I thought I was the only one.
I have hanging on the wall in the den:
The 11/70 parts came from a system we got used from NASA Goddard back in the mid '80s and used as spare parts to keep our aging ``production'' 11/70 running. The crashed disk platter was particularly memorable. The heads didn't just crash into the disk; they were torn off the arm which proceeded to scrape all the data off the center of the platter along with a significant amount of aluminum. I don't think anyone who was there will ever forget the sound. Today's disk failures are nothing in comparison.
There seems to be no end to what bizaare stuff computer folks hang onto (and display like trophies on the wall).
--
I met a guy at DECUS years ago who was running a PDP-11/45(?) (essentially an 11/70 w/o cache) in his basement. Like the 11/70, I believe these needed three-phase power to run. I suppose you could rework all the power supplies to avoid the hassle of three-phase but that doesn't do much about the current draw. This guy's electric bill must have been something! The UNIBUS and MASSBUS PDPs could be serious power hogs.
You could have run RSX quite nicely on a Q-bus PDP-11 that wouldn't have emptied out your bank account. I actually considered it but I couldn't scrounge up a 9-track tape drive to do the OS load. And a good thing, too! The tape drive would have really run up the electric bill.
--
Nah. TOPS-20 wasn't so weird. Now Sperry's EXEC operating system. It had so many barriers to getting anything done that it nearly drove me nuts. I was so happy when I could move my software onto an RSX11 system.
--
Whoa...
I think I'm having an ASCII FORTRAN and FORTRAN V flashback!
--
Back in the last century, I was working for a defence contractor that was putting together a proposal in response to a DoD RFP for some work involving space systems, L-band communications, spread spectrum, etc., etc. Rumor had it that we had essentially won the competition for the work but lost out when the DoD decided that they didn't want to have `all their eggs in one basket'. Perfectly reasonable, actually.
As it turned out a major, Texas-based electronics company (don't want to give it away) had won the contract. Guess who ran a full page ad in the next weekend's local Sunday newspaper looking for electrical engineers with experience with ``space systems, L-band communications, spread spectrum, etc.''. Was really funny. AFAIK, no one quit and went to work for them but it certainly would have been interesting how the company's non-compete clauses would have held up. This was defence-related work of a classified nature and there aren't a lot of players in that ball game.
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Do that many people actually wind up signing contracts that contain non-compete clauses?
Granted, I probably haven't been working in a field lately where my going to another company would threaten any trade secrets. In fact the last time was back in the '80s when I left an employer and there were maybe two other companies in the U.S. that would have found my experience (in GPS) useful enough at the time to want to pick my brain. (Oddly, my new employer did hire me because of that experience -- and for real-time software development -- but in a research environment so I guess my former didn't feel too threatened. They didn't squawk, anyway.) We did discuss non-compete issues during exit interviews though I'm sure this was done out of habit due to other sections of the company doing business in areas that had much more competition.
More recently, the closest thing I've experienced was a clause in the employment agreement as a consultant that stated that I would not work for a client for some period of time (at least a year if memory serves) after leaving the consultancy. (They actually decided it was a good idea to sue a client for stealing someone away from their employ -- IMHO, not exactly a stellar PR move.)
Now I have heard of some cases of Big Five/Six/whatever accounting/consulting firms luring away high powered consultants, partly because of these consultants' rolodexes. And legal proceedings sometime result because the former employer sees that rolodex full of contacts as its IP. Most of the time you hear about these non-compete suits being brought about against high level execs who leave (and take people with real talent with them).
I've heard about many folks who have had judges toss out the cases brought before them over non-compete issues. From what I understand, it helps to have your wife and children sitting in the front row (having them weap doesn't hurt) -- I've never been sure if the guy who told me that story was kidding or not. Apparently, judges are not fond of telling someone that they can't work in their chosen field:
With the popularity of the Internet, chat rooms, and other communication tools out there, how a company thinks this enhances their position is baffling. Having trouble hiring and keeping good employees? Ever wonder why?
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Re:
So ``sort | uniq'' will be a patent violation?
(Well, I certainly hope there's more to it than that!)
What we need is a Proxmire-type (of ``Golden Fleece Award'' fame) senator to publicize these ridiculous patents. Perhaps when the general public starts finding these patents as ludicrous as we do, these corporations might start feeling embarassed (when people start laughing at them, Jay Leno makes jokes about silly patents on the Tonight Show, etc.) and positive things might start happening at the USPTO.
One can only hope...
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Don't make a lot of sense.
In Illinois (in the U.S. for you international folks) a lot of cities grant tax breaks to industries for locating in their towns. The idea is that it's a chance for citizens to find jobs in their home town. On the surface it sounds like a great idea (workers have a shorter commute therefore less pollution, less strain on the inadequate road system, better quality of life, etc, etc.). Most of the time the complaints about these corporate tax benefits come from normal citizens who wind up taking up the slack. Also, the corporations wind up shutting down just before the tax break period ends leaving town and a large empty building that no one's paying taxes on.
Why Microsoft would be complaing about a tax break that largely benefits corporations is beyond me.
I sort of agree with the poster who asked whether this was Microsoft's way of testing the waters of how far they can push governments around. Dear Prime Minister of Australia: Don't let them do it.
If Microsoft has anyone to complain about the lack of broadband it'd be the telecomm industry. They're much too busy getting everyone to walk around with a cell phone glued to their ear to find the time to install decent broadband to most of their customers. IMHO, their take on broadband is something like: ``We still don't get this packet thing... but we do understand people talking across wires.''
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None of the T-shirts were alll that old.
One I would have liked to have seen was the one that some guy wore to a DECUS Symposium years ago. It had printed on it the DCL code you needed to disable the VMS license manager. Apparently, DECUS officials quietly asked him to not wear it anymore.
Another one was from HP back in the '70s. The University was a beta site for MPE and got some goodies as a result. There was a poster that had a neat design and said `Homo Programmus'. One of the student admins (a classmate) got a T-shirt with that on it. I was bummed they didn't have more.
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Yep. You're right. But, I'll still avoid robotic surgery.
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