My manager is a comp sci grad from a few decades back. He's one of the best computer geeks I know, and he continually says that graph theory is the most useful course he took in University. A programmer in our group also says that essentially graph theory is an abstraction of programming theory.
Waaaay back when U2 was an edgy (ha!) band, I was in high school. We generally agreed that The Unforgettable Fire was either their last honest album, or their first descent into whininess.
Yeah, they've written some catchy tunes, but have they had anything to say as musicians since "Sunday Bloody Sunday" that justifies their arrogant, angsty, self-centred attitude?
Oh yeah, but before the NFL schlock came along, there was MULE, Archon, Pinball Construction Set, Hard Hat Mack, Seven Cities of Gold, and others. Genre-defining games! Also, their marketing was different--the ads took the name seriously (Electronic Arts, taking games to a new level, that sort of thing)--and they introduced their programmers to the world as the artists and stars of the company.
Napster doesn't belong on that list, because at its height, it was never a great or proud company--just an early one.
Packard-Bell has been a joke for so long that hardly anyone young enough to care remembers when they weren't.
Netscape doesn't really exist. They acknowledge that, but still put it on the list. Same for Netscape, and (sorta) Compuserve.
There are some others I would add to the list, though: Silicon Graphics and Atari deserve top honours. Also, hugely powerful and profitable though it may be, Electronic Arts almost defines "tarnished brand," considering their origins. Also, how about Radio Shack? Can you even get parts there anymore?
Now if we jump into the audio world, there are more than anyone can count. Advent, Sansui, Nakamichi, Hafler, Scott, etc..
1) Oh yeah. "faster boot" into a desktop which doesn't actually respond until the underpinnings are loaded is a trick that MS first really exploited in ME, and continues to the present. Of course, it genuinely _was_ faster at booting because it didn't have real-mode DOS! Goodbye old software. 2) Fewer IE buttons than 98? Um...no. 3) Comes with a lot of crapware. 4) System Restore was so broken for almost a year that people learned to avoid it. When fixed, it was a clunky rollback model that never worked well. 5) These files were no longer executed because they were needed for real-mode DOS - which it dropped. 6) Well 98SE may not have had general midi emulation, but you didn't need it to run DOS programs in real-mode DOS. 7) Microsoft/x86 power management has NEVER been good enough to bother with. Faster doesn't mean anything if it didn't work right!
Which is the real problem with ME. It was slower to use than 98SE on all but the newest computers in its day, it threw away backwards compatibility without providing sufficiently accurate DOS emulation, The new features were clunky and poorly designed, and it was unstable as hell. It crashed more than any version of Windows since 3.0, and had a much greater tendency to corrupt data than its predecessors, or than anything in the NT development stream.
Lots of people on here telling the EU to fuck themselves. Lots of Europeans on here apologizing for their countries' stupidity. Ultimately, it doesn't look like ANYONE thinks this is a good idea, except for the governments and the industry lobbyists.
So of course, it'll go through. With Harper in power, it'll go through easily. He has been working very hard to sell out Canadian interests to foreign industry, and the more rational law he can destroy in favour of international silliness, the better.
"Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts."
Now if a waiter (or actually chef) cuts the pizza off-centre, they're almost certainly not going to make the angles consistent.
(which of course isn't to say that it's not a fun paper)
You're entirely correct. However, Monty blogged a while ago about how that's not enough, and (to reduce things terribly) mindshare follows the original product. He basically said that forks don't survive. He might well be right.
However, he's the guy who sold MySQL. He's the guy that got roughly a BILLION dollars for it, and hence, he's the guy who has no right to whine about the current state of affairs.
Because they've only now hit the end of their rope, so to speak. They've spent decades trying to work with the CRIA, but with either false or no progress.
People have generally described this as a big misstep on Schmidt's part. Maybe it is, but only in that he revealed a bit more of Google's attitude than they normally do.
Google has been prancing around for years saying, "oh, don't worry about our data collection. We're the GOOD guys! We even have a motto that says don't be evil, and in fact we're so good that it's not even official." In the meantime, they've been behaving just like any other smart corporation in a sensitive monopoly position. It amazes me that nobody in the media and damned few people in the industry seem to care about what they're doing, just that they've said "don't be evil" and so everything is OK.
So either Schmidt has revealed more than he meant to (which would be a misstep), or he realises that they are so powerful that they don't have to pretend anymore. You can be sure, however, that he did NOT misrepresent Google or its values.
All citizens must be known to the government at all times. This leads to all citizens must be forced to carry identification at all times. Biometrics is a short-circuit around forcing people to carry ID papers 24/7. At present, I can walk out of the house without my wallet, and nobody can identify me without my permission. Not so with biometrics.
More to the point, it's a way of monitoring the populace. It assumes that everyone is a latent criminal, and needs to be watched.
And hey--what if they decide that racial group 'x' needs to be wiped out? They've got the data from face scans, they just need to send out the troops.
You're so cutely naive that I want to pat you on the head.
Google is evil--they're a publicly traded corporation, dedicated to the stockholders and the executives. They have been quietly taking over the internet. They don't care about your privacy, they don't care about technology, they care about MONEY, and how to get more of it. That's all. This is old news, but they were smart enough to lean heavily on their "don't be evil" image to avoid being recognised for their actual behaviour.
1) Vinyl is nowhere near the apex of analog audio fidelity (1/2" tape is much better for starters). 2) Analog is nowhere near the peak of recorded audio fidelity. 3) You need to understand fourier theory and the nyquist sampling criterion before you open your mouth about the evil jaggies that digital puts into your analog signal. Digital audio EXACTLY represents the analog waveform, up to a given frequency. 4) Big players _did_ invest in higher resolution audio, about a decade ago: SACD (1999) and DVD-A (2000). SACD is still slumping around, but only barely. One interesting point is that time after time, CD-resolution reductions from SACDs are indistinguishable. In other words, all that extra resolution and frequency response is unnecessary for audibly perfect two-channel reproduction. (Whether or not the two channels that are written to the medium are perfect is another story.)
For the record (heh!), I _am_ a vinyl guy, with several hundred albums. I love 'em, listen to 'em, and will never give 'em up; but done properly, digital is better.
Dunno about the _new_ vinyl, but it was certainly a problem for the _old_ vinyl.
Many albums, and probably 70-80% of top 40 stuff in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were mastered with virtually no dynamic range. I picked up a used copy of Kim Carnes "Mistaken Identity" recently, and the whole thing is as bright as the bottom of a mud puddle. It is compressed to hell and then some.
Seriously, call the warranty claims department and explain that the printer came with defective (i.e. less than full) ink cartridges, and since the ink is the most expensive part of the printer, it was a significant defect. They'll tell you "starter cartridges, bla bla bla..." but be firm, and escalate as high as you can. File a formal complaint with the government's consumer affairs department.
It would be far more honest for them to sell that $50 printer for $50 with _no_ ink in it at all.
Mostly a good solution. There are still cases where printing is the right answer--your kid's (and mine too) colouring book pages is one. Having photos of my family on my desk at work is another. (Or for my grandma, who doesn't care what the technology is as long as she has a real picture on paper in her hands at the end of the day.)
For the most part though, printing is getting pretty rare for us. We'll probably just go to the store to do our small amounts of colour printing when our current printer dies on us.
Now I have to admit up-front that I am presently working for a company with very generous on-call benefits, and appreciate them a great deal.
However, it's very simple for me: If I'm not getting paid to carry a pager, I'm not carrying a pager. I see that some people aren't even getting paid to do work after hours, which means that fixing other people's computers is apparently your hobby. Hope you're enjoying it. I'd rather play with my son.
If a company needs you, they need to pay you. If they need you to be available for emergencies, then they need to pay to tie you down. If they want your number but accept that you may or may not answer it, then you're probably not providing a pay-worthy service after hours.
When I carry the pager, I'm required to stay sober, available, and local. I can't go out of town, I can't go to an event where pagers have to be turned off, and similar things. This is something I'm willing to do part-time for compensation. I won't do it 24/7/365, and I won't do it for free. Anyone who does is selling themselves short.
The day they announced the Oracle buyout, his blog was pulled off of the front page of blogs.sun.com. You can still get to it, but he's only had one post since then, and it was about how the Java Store (to be officially announced at JavaOne) will be the greatest thing in the history of computing.
I suspect he's lying as low as possible, to avoid irritating the EU further.
Sun was dead the minute that Jonathan "look, I'm a geek--I have a ponytail too!" Schwartz took it over. He has consistently and publicly done everything in his power to run down the stock price, in order to make it a tempting buyout option. A while ago, Sun had enough free cash on hand to take the company private again, and Schwartz refused to do so. "We're looking for a buyer" was the essence of his message. It has convinced me that he's not incompetent, as it widely believed, but ruthlessly competent at making a profit by destroying his own company.
I still don't understand how McNealy fits into it anymore. He's already stupidly rich, and it seems counter-intuitive for him to want to run his own company into the ground for the sake of getting richer, but who knows? He doesn't seem to be trying to save them.
I'd love to see Oracle spin off MySQL, complete the purchase, and then kick these two to the curb without a single extra penny. Fire them for non-performance, and threaten enormous lawsuits if they don't just get the hell out.
But that's just me, and I LIKE the colour of sky in my fantasy world!
I looked at Second Life, but it was unusable with my old, slow computer.
When I got a new computer, I tried it out again, and found that it was still...unusable. Clunky, laggy, slow, awkward, and ultimately not very interesting. A pity really, because it was a neat idea.
To answer your question, I don't think it's big _anywhere_ now. It had its heyday, and it's dying painfully.
I think you need to (a) understand enterprise servers a bit better, and (b) learn to measure performance better.
Right now--TODAY--the fastest enterprise server I can buy for $50-100k is from Sun. Power7? Maybe when it ships, it'll catch up to where Niagara has been for the last 18 months.
IBM's hard partitions are definitely ahead of Sun--hell, they invented it back in the dawn of mainframe computing. Intel's partitioning, by comparison with either one, is laughable.
Sun disks, um...yeah. No comment. Their pricing is a joke, no argument. Their x86 gear, however, is steps ahead of Dell and HP, the only real competition on that platform. (IBM's x86 division just isn't playing the same game--Power yes, x86 no.) Look at the cost vs. performance graphs, or cost vs. serviceability, or cost vs. power consumption, or...
Intel's Nehalem processors AREN'T HERE YET. Power7 ISN'T HERE YET. These are the products to kill Sun's three-year-old technology, and they're NOT AVAILABLE YET.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure that Niagara is SPARC's last great hurrah--the economies of scale just make it impossible to manufacture a niche processor. However, it is, quite objectively, one helluva cool hurrah. I didn't mention the big feature--power. These things are very very low power, compared to the competition. I've seen more data centres run out of power in the last four years than I care to count, and the problem is only getting worse.
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My manager is a comp sci grad from a few decades back. He's one of the best computer geeks I know, and he continually says that graph theory is the most useful course he took in University. A programmer in our group also says that essentially graph theory is an abstraction of programming theory.
Waaaay back when U2 was an edgy (ha!) band, I was in high school. We generally agreed that The Unforgettable Fire was either their last honest album, or their first descent into whininess.
Yeah, they've written some catchy tunes, but have they had anything to say as musicians since "Sunday Bloody Sunday" that justifies their arrogant, angsty, self-centred attitude?
Oh yeah, but before the NFL schlock came along, there was MULE, Archon, Pinball Construction Set, Hard Hat Mack, Seven Cities of Gold, and others. Genre-defining games! Also, their marketing was different--the ads took the name seriously (Electronic Arts, taking games to a new level, that sort of thing)--and they introduced their programmers to the world as the artists and stars of the company.
Napster doesn't belong on that list, because at its height, it was never a great or proud company--just an early one.
Packard-Bell has been a joke for so long that hardly anyone young enough to care remembers when they weren't.
Netscape doesn't really exist. They acknowledge that, but still put it on the list. Same for Netscape, and (sorta) Compuserve.
There are some others I would add to the list, though: Silicon Graphics and Atari deserve top honours. Also, hugely powerful and profitable though it may be, Electronic Arts almost defines "tarnished brand," considering their origins. Also, how about Radio Shack? Can you even get parts there anymore?
Now if we jump into the audio world, there are more than anyone can count. Advent, Sansui, Nakamichi, Hafler, Scott, etc..
1) Oh yeah. "faster boot" into a desktop which doesn't actually respond until the underpinnings are loaded is a trick that MS first really exploited in ME, and continues to the present. Of course, it genuinely _was_ faster at booting because it didn't have real-mode DOS! Goodbye old software.
2) Fewer IE buttons than 98? Um...no.
3) Comes with a lot of crapware.
4) System Restore was so broken for almost a year that people learned to avoid it. When fixed, it was a clunky rollback model that never worked well.
5) These files were no longer executed because they were needed for real-mode DOS - which it dropped.
6) Well 98SE may not have had general midi emulation, but you didn't need it to run DOS programs in real-mode DOS.
7) Microsoft/x86 power management has NEVER been good enough to bother with. Faster doesn't mean anything if it didn't work right!
Which is the real problem with ME. It was slower to use than 98SE on all but the newest computers in its day, it threw away backwards compatibility without providing sufficiently accurate DOS emulation, The new features were clunky and poorly designed, and it was unstable as hell. It crashed more than any version of Windows since 3.0, and had a much greater tendency to corrupt data than its predecessors, or than anything in the NT development stream.
Lots of people on here telling the EU to fuck themselves. Lots of Europeans on here apologizing for their countries' stupidity. Ultimately, it doesn't look like ANYONE thinks this is a good idea, except for the governments and the industry lobbyists.
So of course, it'll go through. With Harper in power, it'll go through easily. He has been working very hard to sell out Canadian interests to foreign industry, and the more rational law he can destroy in favour of international silliness, the better.
Folks, get used to us all being criminals.
"Suppose the harried waiter cuts the pizza off-centre, but with all the edge-to-edge cuts crossing at a single point, and with the same angle between adjacent cuts."
Now if a waiter (or actually chef) cuts the pizza off-centre, they're almost certainly not going to make the angles consistent.
(which of course isn't to say that it's not a fun paper)
Yep. You're right. That's what the GPL states. If you don't like it, take it up with the GPL, not Oracle.
You're entirely correct. However, Monty blogged a while ago about how that's not enough, and (to reduce things terribly) mindshare follows the original product. He basically said that forks don't survive. He might well be right.
However, he's the guy who sold MySQL. He's the guy that got roughly a BILLION dollars for it, and hence, he's the guy who has no right to whine about the current state of affairs.
Because they've only now hit the end of their rope, so to speak. They've spent decades trying to work with the CRIA, but with either false or no progress.
People have generally described this as a big misstep on Schmidt's part. Maybe it is, but only in that he revealed a bit more of Google's attitude than they normally do.
Google has been prancing around for years saying, "oh, don't worry about our data collection. We're the GOOD guys! We even have a motto that says don't be evil, and in fact we're so good that it's not even official." In the meantime, they've been behaving just like any other smart corporation in a sensitive monopoly position. It amazes me that nobody in the media and damned few people in the industry seem to care about what they're doing, just that they've said "don't be evil" and so everything is OK.
So either Schmidt has revealed more than he meant to (which would be a misstep), or he realises that they are so powerful that they don't have to pretend anymore. You can be sure, however, that he did NOT misrepresent Google or its values.
All citizens must be known to the government at all times.
This leads to all citizens must be forced to carry identification at all times. Biometrics is a short-circuit around forcing people to carry ID papers 24/7. At present, I can walk out of the house without my wallet, and nobody can identify me without my permission. Not so with biometrics.
More to the point, it's a way of monitoring the populace. It assumes that everyone is a latent criminal, and needs to be watched.
And hey--what if they decide that racial group 'x' needs to be wiped out? They've got the data from face scans, they just need to send out the troops.
You're so cutely naive that I want to pat you on the head.
Google is evil--they're a publicly traded corporation, dedicated to the stockholders and the executives. They have been quietly taking over the internet. They don't care about your privacy, they don't care about technology, they care about MONEY, and how to get more of it. That's all. This is old news, but they were smart enough to lean heavily on their "don't be evil" image to avoid being recognised for their actual behaviour.
Utter rubbish.
1) Vinyl is nowhere near the apex of analog audio fidelity (1/2" tape is much better for starters).
2) Analog is nowhere near the peak of recorded audio fidelity.
3) You need to understand fourier theory and the nyquist sampling criterion before you open your mouth about the evil jaggies that digital puts into your analog signal. Digital audio EXACTLY represents the analog waveform, up to a given frequency.
4) Big players _did_ invest in higher resolution audio, about a decade ago: SACD (1999) and DVD-A (2000). SACD is still slumping around, but only barely. One interesting point is that time after time, CD-resolution reductions from SACDs are indistinguishable. In other words, all that extra resolution and frequency response is unnecessary for audibly perfect two-channel reproduction. (Whether or not the two channels that are written to the medium are perfect is another story.)
For the record (heh!), I _am_ a vinyl guy, with several hundred albums. I love 'em, listen to 'em, and will never give 'em up; but done properly, digital is better.
Dunno about the _new_ vinyl, but it was certainly a problem for the _old_ vinyl.
Many albums, and probably 70-80% of top 40 stuff in the late 1970s and early 1980s, were mastered with virtually no dynamic range. I picked up a used copy of Kim Carnes "Mistaken Identity" recently, and the whole thing is as bright as the bottom of a mud puddle. It is compressed to hell and then some.
Seriously, call the warranty claims department and explain that the printer came with defective (i.e. less than full) ink cartridges, and since the ink is the most expensive part of the printer, it was a significant defect. They'll tell you "starter cartridges, bla bla bla..." but be firm, and escalate as high as you can. File a formal complaint with the government's consumer affairs department.
It would be far more honest for them to sell that $50 printer for $50 with _no_ ink in it at all.
Mostly a good solution. There are still cases where printing is the right answer--your kid's (and mine too) colouring book pages is one. Having photos of my family on my desk at work is another. (Or for my grandma, who doesn't care what the technology is as long as she has a real picture on paper in her hands at the end of the day.)
For the most part though, printing is getting pretty rare for us. We'll probably just go to the store to do our small amounts of colour printing when our current printer dies on us.
Now I have to admit up-front that I am presently working for a company with very generous on-call benefits, and appreciate them a great deal.
However, it's very simple for me: If I'm not getting paid to carry a pager, I'm not carrying a pager. I see that some people aren't even getting paid to do work after hours, which means that fixing other people's computers is apparently your hobby. Hope you're enjoying it. I'd rather play with my son.
If a company needs you, they need to pay you. If they need you to be available for emergencies, then they need to pay to tie you down. If they want your number but accept that you may or may not answer it, then you're probably not providing a pay-worthy service after hours.
When I carry the pager, I'm required to stay sober, available, and local. I can't go out of town, I can't go to an event where pagers have to be turned off, and similar things. This is something I'm willing to do part-time for compensation. I won't do it 24/7/365, and I won't do it for free. Anyone who does is selling themselves short.
The day they announced the Oracle buyout, his blog was pulled off of the front page of blogs.sun.com. You can still get to it, but he's only had one post since then, and it was about how the Java Store (to be officially announced at JavaOne) will be the greatest thing in the history of computing.
I suspect he's lying as low as possible, to avoid irritating the EU further.
Sun was dead the minute that Jonathan "look, I'm a geek--I have a ponytail too!" Schwartz took it over. He has consistently and publicly done everything in his power to run down the stock price, in order to make it a tempting buyout option. A while ago, Sun had enough free cash on hand to take the company private again, and Schwartz refused to do so. "We're looking for a buyer" was the essence of his message. It has convinced me that he's not incompetent, as it widely believed, but ruthlessly competent at making a profit by destroying his own company.
I still don't understand how McNealy fits into it anymore. He's already stupidly rich, and it seems counter-intuitive for him to want to run his own company into the ground for the sake of getting richer, but who knows? He doesn't seem to be trying to save them.
I'd love to see Oracle spin off MySQL, complete the purchase, and then kick these two to the curb without a single extra penny. Fire them for non-performance, and threaten enormous lawsuits if they don't just get the hell out.
But that's just me, and I LIKE the colour of sky in my fantasy world!
The EU also slept with your wife and shot your dog. Don't forget that!
I looked at Second Life, but it was unusable with my old, slow computer.
When I got a new computer, I tried it out again, and found that it was still...unusable. Clunky, laggy, slow, awkward, and ultimately not very interesting. A pity really, because it was a neat idea.
To answer your question, I don't think it's big _anywhere_ now. It had its heyday, and it's dying painfully.
"...incentivizing..."
Ugh. You just lost my support.
London has had the status of having the most CCTVs per capita for ages. Does anyone have a comparison between the cities?
I think you need to (a) understand enterprise servers a bit better, and (b) learn to measure performance better.
Right now--TODAY--the fastest enterprise server I can buy for $50-100k is from Sun. Power7? Maybe when it ships, it'll catch up to where Niagara has been for the last 18 months.
IBM's hard partitions are definitely ahead of Sun--hell, they invented it back in the dawn of mainframe computing. Intel's partitioning, by comparison with either one, is laughable.
Sun disks, um...yeah. No comment. Their pricing is a joke, no argument. Their x86 gear, however, is steps ahead of Dell and HP, the only real competition on that platform. (IBM's x86 division just isn't playing the same game--Power yes, x86 no.) Look at the cost vs. performance graphs, or cost vs. serviceability, or cost vs. power consumption, or...
Intel's Nehalem processors AREN'T HERE YET. Power7 ISN'T HERE YET. These are the products to kill Sun's three-year-old technology, and they're NOT AVAILABLE YET.
Honestly, I'm pretty sure that Niagara is SPARC's last great hurrah--the economies of scale just make it impossible to manufacture a niche processor. However, it is, quite objectively, one helluva cool hurrah. I didn't mention the big feature--power. These things are very very low power, compared to the competition. I've seen more data centres run out of power in the last four years than I care to count, and the problem is only getting worse.