That's just plain wrong. VMS was very sophisticated internally, even by today's standards. If by modern you mean *nix, that's wrong too since the basic design of Unix is over 30 years old.
VMS was also a very good application platform with incredible stability and a wonderfully rich set of APIs.
The only criticism I would offer is to do with the DCL shell which, although fairly feature rich, was hardly rational or intuitive in design. Lexical functions for example - did *anybody* ever learn to handle the context-sensitive calls (like the ones to do with queue information) without having the manual open beside them?
More fundamentally, DCL lacked command-line pipes - which are hard to do without once you have tasted Unix. When VMS became OpenVMS a POSIX shell was added, but it was very sluggish in processing large files through pipelines. I once heard an explanation something along the lines that the POSIX shell command line pipes in OpenVMS v6 were implemented using terminal IO rather than buffered IO and this slowed things down. I don't know what the truth is about that.
Having said all that there were some things VMS enjoyed that Unix doesn't. I have often lamented the absence in Unix of VMS logical name tables which in VMS allow you to define a "logical" device which is actually an ordered searchlist of directories. This allows any application *transparently* to make use of a PATH-like variable for any and all file accesses. Its a very useful thing to have and if you have never used it you may be surprised to learn of all the places where it comes in useful. The most obvious example would probably be where you want a hierarchy of config files (specific in turn to site, host, user, pwd).
This is not primarily a DMCA issue. For the vast majority of DVD buyers the right to make backups is moot - few people would want to go to the trouble and expense of making a backup or providing extra storage space for it.
Instead what the average DVD buyer wants, and what they have been led to believe they actually have, is a medium that will last an indefinitely long time - long enough that it won't expire before they tire of it anyway.
Bearing in mind the huge number of DVDs that many people own and the huge investment this represents I predict that if this problem turns out to affect a significant proportion of retail dics less than ten years old, there will be scandal, class action lawsuits and massive payouts.
To give you an idea of how much bad news this would be for the media companies responsible: suppose there are 300 million households in the Western hemisphere and say one in ten of those owns 100 DVDs bought at an average of $10 apiece. Further suppose that one in ten discs goes bad. Thats 300 million bad discs. The DVD producers then have to pay out compensation on a disputed figure of $3 billion. Thats gotta hurt.
And succeeding generations, absent the influence of gravity, will probably grow to a larger and larger maximum adult size.
What we are seeing, ladies and gentlemen, is the birth of a new race of giant space ant. I strongly advise that they are destroyed or at least kept under very strict quarantine on the station. I mean, what if they get out? Wait, what's that noise? Oh NO THEY'RE BREAKING THROUGH! OMYGOD THEY'RE...AAAARGHBLBLBL !!! sadfgW^W$£^GR;;;;
I almost agree, except...although the iPaq H5450 is still very expensive, the H3970 (which has only been out for about a year, if that long) has now dropped to a price point not dissimilar from competitors' top-of-the-range colour models.
The H3970 has a small flaw in that its bluetooth driver doesn't support a headset profile so you can't get it to talk to a bluetooth headset like Jabra's. I believe this has been rectified in the H5450 though.
My point rests upon the expectation that as successive iPaq models appear over the coming year the prices of these models will continue to drop and features like bluetooth will inevitably appear in competitors' mid-range models.
If the IBM reference design doesn't make it easy for manufacturers to incorporate bluetooth functionality in its earliest descendants then by the time they appear on the market (late this year I'd guess) they won't be able to compete very well against more mature designs like these iPaqs.
It's not the first time that a company has gotten a prototype to market only find that others have got there first with a better design. It's unusual for IBM though, I'll grant.
Yawn. Yet another "me too" PDA. Unfortunately it's behind even the *previous* generation of iPaqs, having no built-in Bluetooth and no CompactFlash slot either. Yes that's right folks, according to the specs it doesn't even support IBM's own microdrives.
IMO these two features are indispensable for the serious PDA user. Bluetooth so I can access the internet one-handed with my cellphone sitting inconspicuously on my hip, CompactFlash slot which holds a 1GB Microdrive with my entire CD collection ripped to MP3.
The new IBM design supports "SD", i.e. "Secure Digital". What fricking use is a big storage device if you can't store your MP3's on it?
Bluetooth needs to be built in rather than provided by a card because then you get in situations like wanting to download this large file straight onto the drive but you can't have both the Bluetooth device and the storage card fitted at the same time.
The Sharp Zaurus C700 would be interesting, if only it had built-in Bluetooth. But IBM's new design is underspecified and just too dull for words.
IMO Banks' isn't the most consistent writer. Some of his stuff is amongst the best out there (Use of Weapons, The Wasp Factory, Walking On Glass). His later novels have suffered a little from a swollen ego I think.
I agree Excession was largely unreadable, consisting, as it often did, of long rambling conversations of half-finished sentences and vague allusions to unknown events, between completely unnamed participants. How are you supposed to follow something like that? And the ending leaves one up in the air.
Personally I think Banks has lost it a bit. One must wonder if his brain might have gone soft - inevitable I suppose if he is anywhere near as fond of recreational drug use as his novels' characters are mostly.
Most people would consider Ken Macleod to be his natural successor (and like Banks his stuff is written in a very Scottish voice) but if Macleod is too political for you (it's unremittingly far-left in colour) or you've already read all his stuff then I strongly recommend Michael Marshall Smith (Only Forward, Spares) whose stuff has the same black "hidden horror just under the surface" flavour that the best Banks novels do.
Other than that, for a good read: Greg Egan (just about anything, especially Diaspora and Permutation City), Stephen Baxter (Voyage, Titan and the Manifold Series especially), Peter F Hamilton (Night's Dawn Trilogy). And if you haven't read Greg Bear's Eon and its sequel Eternity yet I urge you to go back read those too.
Well I'll be the first to admin that there are no hard and fast rules and that there is always the possibility of extenuating circumstances. Suit the technique to the problem.
But even so an exposition of such techniques should always come with a clearly visible warning such as: "this code is write-only and cannot be maintained by anyone except the author - or even by the original author himself after six months away from it".
Preferably in capitals inside a big frame of asterisks.
I agree with everything the above ac said. I wanted to be impressed but the film came across as more style than substance. It just doesn't deliver any clear message, not even emotively, beyond lampooning GWB and demonstrating that the US establishment is pretty much gearing up for war - which we all knew already.
As to the style - it's typical of todays film college grads. None of them seem capable of holding a camera still for more than a couple of seconds. Take the recent James Bond movie for example - those stuttering shots of the Aston Martin speeding over the snow & ice. WTF was that supposed to be?
Trust me, you need to browse that thread at a threshold of or lower to see all the funny stuff...I've just read it again and I'm still laughing now:o))
In the UK there are ISPs that do not allow VoIP traffic. It's not legislated for, but it's still in the Terms of Service part of your contract with the ISP. The ISP is probably just honouring constraints forced upon them by the owner of the broadband network infrastructure between your house and the ISP, which is always a telco.
Fair comment. Though the perpetual chaotic inflation scenario is ultimately unsatisfying to me in that it either supposes there never was a beginning, which just seems preposterous, or else it just punts the question further and further back in time.
This Vilenkin I know nothing about. I'm off to have a look.
It's still an interesting intellectual exercise. Why would you want to stop people from attempting to form plausible cosmological theories? I think your remark was a little arrogant if you'll forgive me for saying so.
Theoretically, we can create a black hole that will expand into another universe with its own space-time, orthogonal to ours. Still, "before" can clearly be defined for that universe.
Yeah, but then what about before the birth of the parent universe? Or before the birth of it's parent? IMHO an ancestry for our universe which extends infinitely back in time is too like the steady state/continuous creation theories for comfort. It's far more ridiculously mind-boggling than a Universe with a definite beginning (whether that happens to be ours, or a remote ancestor of ours).
Hawking hasn't "shown" any such thing. He's got one theory; there are many others, and none of them have any supporting evidence as yet.
True enough. But Hawking's use of complex time *is* the neatest solution currently available which enables us to eliminate the awkward what-about-before-the-big-bang question that everybody asks at some point. It does so by postulating a spacetime geometry that makes the concept "before the big bang" similar to the definititely nonsensical "north of the north pole".
For those who wonder how this could work, check out the diagrams in Hawking's "A Brief History of Time".
Yeah yeah, yadda yadda. How many times have I heard this. But the acting in the original Star Trek was anything but wooden.
It never ceases to amaze me how so many people can blithely keep on repeating stuff they've heard from somewhere without ever checking for themselves to see if it was true.
Bruce, you apparently have no idea what you sound like here.
I know you have put yourself on the line for software freedom time and time again but just because you couldn't do any better on your own in this particular instance doesn't mean others shouldn't be able to try themselves.
In the first place the hippocampus (instrumental in the deposition of long-term memory) is not properly formed until about three years of age so it's thought that this will prevent formation of long-term episodic memory (memory of events) as is it understood in adults.
Secondly, both episodic memory and declarative memory (memory of things) depend upon having a cognitive framework within which they can be placed. It takes time and experience for that framework to get assembled and of course you can only remember things that you can understand (either properly or improperly) in some way. Things you can't make any sense out of at all will be remembered only vaguely, if at all.
Crying about it on slashdot gets you NOWHERE. You might as well be talking to yourself. Most people reading this already agree with you but very few people here would risk their comfort zone to be caught doing something about it.
This is the triumph of Western state power: the creation of a large, reasonably contented middle class, self-interested, lazy, apathetic, and motivated only to preserve (through inaction) as much of the status quo as possible.
After all if these people can't even manage to boycott movie tickets, DVD's and CD's for a while in order to help rein in growing rampant corporatism supported by a corrupt legislature, what chance is there that they will risk disenfranchisement/unemployment/police beatings/prison in order to preserve a bunch of freedoms which in practice are largely abstract and theoretical anyway?
Sure but I understand why he would have made that error if it's been a while since he read it. Over time, the impression the book leaves you with is that the state's monitoring is so pervasive and so relentlessly effective that they might as well be monitoring your thoughts. It's not for nothing that the ultimate crime is "thoughtcrime", and it's clear from several passages in the book that weaker characters are effectively motivated by terror to be genuinely *trying* to force their thoughts into the proper shape demanded by the authorities. Indeed during Winston's torture by O'Brien, the theme of the passage is very much one of O'Brien as teacher and Winston as student - O'Brien will settle for nothing less that Winston's *genuine* belief that the number of fingers on display is what he is told it is, and Winston's peristent failure to do so is being treated as a personal failure on his part by both parties.
Slashdot Mirror
Theres no document at that URL. You made it up! LOL!
That's just plain wrong. VMS was very sophisticated internally, even by today's standards. If by modern you mean *nix, that's wrong too since the basic design of Unix is over 30 years old.
VMS was also a very good application platform with incredible stability and a wonderfully rich set of APIs.
The only criticism I would offer is to do with the DCL shell which, although fairly feature rich, was hardly rational or intuitive in design. Lexical functions for example - did *anybody* ever learn to handle the context-sensitive calls (like the ones to do with queue information) without having the manual open beside them?
More fundamentally, DCL lacked command-line pipes - which are hard to do without once you have tasted Unix. When VMS became OpenVMS a POSIX shell was added, but it was very sluggish in processing large files through pipelines. I once heard an explanation something along the lines that the POSIX shell command line pipes in OpenVMS v6 were implemented using terminal IO rather than buffered IO and this slowed things down. I don't know what the truth is about that.
Having said all that there were some things VMS enjoyed that Unix doesn't. I have often lamented the absence in Unix of VMS logical name tables which in VMS allow you to define a "logical" device which is actually an ordered searchlist of directories. This allows any application *transparently* to make use of a PATH-like variable for any and all file accesses. Its a very useful thing to have and if you have never used it you may be surprised to learn of all the places where it comes in useful. The most obvious example would probably be where you want a hierarchy of config files (specific in turn to site, host, user, pwd).
This is not primarily a DMCA issue. For the vast majority of DVD buyers the right to make backups is moot - few people would want to go to the trouble and expense of making a backup or providing extra storage space for it.
Instead what the average DVD buyer wants, and what they have been led to believe they actually have, is a medium that will last an indefinitely long time - long enough that it won't expire before they tire of it anyway.
Bearing in mind the huge number of DVDs that many people own and the huge investment this represents I predict that if this problem turns out to affect a significant proportion of retail dics less than ten years old, there will be scandal, class action lawsuits and massive payouts.
To give you an idea of how much bad news this would be for the media companies responsible: suppose there are 300 million households in the Western hemisphere and say one in ten of those owns 100 DVDs bought at an average of $10 apiece. Further suppose that one in ten discs goes bad. Thats 300 million bad discs. The DVD producers then have to pay out compensation on a disputed figure of $3 billion. Thats gotta hurt.
And succeeding generations, absent the influence of gravity, will probably grow to a larger and larger maximum adult size.
What we are seeing, ladies and gentlemen, is the birth of a new race of giant space ant. I strongly advise that they are destroyed or at least kept under very strict quarantine on the station. I mean, what if they get out? Wait, what's that noise? Oh NO THEY'RE BREAKING THROUGH! OMYGOD THEY'RE...AAAARGHBLBLBL !!! sadfgW^W$£^GR;;;;
Hmm. Maybe you're right as things stand but it sure looks like a trojan horse to me.
I almost agree, except...although the iPaq H5450 is still very expensive, the H3970 (which has only been out for about a year, if that long) has now dropped to a price point not dissimilar from competitors' top-of-the-range colour models.
The H3970 has a small flaw in that its bluetooth driver doesn't support a headset profile so you can't get it to talk to a bluetooth headset like Jabra's. I believe this has been rectified in the H5450 though.
My point rests upon the expectation that as successive iPaq models appear over the coming year the prices of these models will continue to drop and features like bluetooth will inevitably appear in competitors' mid-range models.
If the IBM reference design doesn't make it easy for manufacturers to incorporate bluetooth functionality in its earliest descendants then by the time they appear on the market (late this year I'd guess) they won't be able to compete very well against more mature designs like these iPaqs.
It's not the first time that a company has gotten a prototype to market only find that others have got there first with a better design. It's unusual for IBM though, I'll grant.
Yawn. Yet another "me too" PDA. Unfortunately it's behind even the *previous* generation of iPaqs, having no built-in Bluetooth and no CompactFlash slot either. Yes that's right folks, according to the specs it doesn't even support IBM's own microdrives.
IMO these two features are indispensable for the serious PDA user. Bluetooth so I can access the internet one-handed with my cellphone sitting inconspicuously on my hip, CompactFlash slot which holds a 1GB Microdrive with my entire CD collection ripped to MP3.
The new IBM design supports "SD", i.e. "Secure Digital". What fricking use is a big storage device if you can't store your MP3's on it?
Bluetooth needs to be built in rather than provided by a card because then you get in situations like wanting to download this large file straight onto the drive but you can't have both the Bluetooth device and the storage card fitted at the same time.
The Sharp Zaurus C700 would be interesting, if only it had built-in Bluetooth. But IBM's new design is underspecified and just too dull for words.
I agree Excession was largely unreadable, consisting, as it often did, of long rambling conversations of half-finished sentences and vague allusions to unknown events, between completely unnamed participants. How are you supposed to follow something like that? And the ending leaves one up in the air.
Personally I think Banks has lost it a bit. One must wonder if his brain might have gone soft - inevitable I suppose if he is anywhere near as fond of recreational drug use as his novels' characters are mostly.
Most people would consider Ken Macleod to be his natural successor (and like Banks his stuff is written in a very Scottish voice) but if Macleod is too political for you (it's unremittingly far-left in colour) or you've already read all his stuff then I strongly recommend Michael Marshall Smith (Only Forward, Spares) whose stuff has the same black "hidden horror just under the surface" flavour that the best Banks novels do.
Other than that, for a good read: Greg Egan (just about anything, especially Diaspora and Permutation City), Stephen Baxter (Voyage, Titan and the Manifold Series especially), Peter F Hamilton (Night's Dawn Trilogy). And if you haven't read Greg Bear's Eon and its sequel Eternity yet I urge you to go back read those too.
Should have been "Course heading, captain".
Can somebody please moderate me down for completely mistyping the fricking subject line? Jeez!
I hope the pilot remembers to attend the academy lecture on conservation of tractor beam power!
Well I'll be the first to admin that there are no hard and fast rules and that there is always the possibility of extenuating circumstances. Suit the technique to the problem.
But even so an exposition of such techniques should always come with a clearly visible warning such as: "this code is write-only and cannot be maintained by anyone except the author - or even by the original author himself after six months away from it".
Preferably in capitals inside a big frame of asterisks.
I agree with everything the above ac said. I wanted to be impressed but the film came across as more style than substance. It just doesn't deliver any clear message, not even emotively, beyond lampooning GWB and demonstrating that the US establishment is pretty much gearing up for war - which we all knew already.
As to the style - it's typical of todays film college grads. None of them seem capable of holding a camera still for more than a couple of seconds. Take the recent James Bond movie for example - those stuttering shots of the Aston Martin speeding over the snow & ice. WTF was that supposed to be?
Grump.
You had me going there for an instant. I took a look at that 'Chuck's Power Koding' page and it was clearly meant as a (bad) joke.
Trust me, you need to browse that thread at a threshold of or lower to see all the funny stuff...I've just read it again and I'm still laughing now :o))
Right on! Its the occasional thread like this what makes it worth coming back here every night. Here's another thread that's a hoot
In the UK there are ISPs that do not allow VoIP traffic. It's not legislated for, but it's still in the Terms of Service part of your contract with the ISP. The ISP is probably just honouring constraints forced upon them by the owner of the broadband network infrastructure between your house and the ISP, which is always a telco.
Fair comment. Though the perpetual chaotic inflation scenario is ultimately unsatisfying to me in that it either supposes there never was a beginning, which just seems preposterous, or else it just punts the question further and further back in time.
This Vilenkin I know nothing about. I'm off to have a look.
It's still an interesting intellectual exercise. Why would you want to stop people from attempting to form plausible cosmological theories? I think your remark was a little arrogant if you'll forgive me for saying so.
Yeah, but then what about before the birth of the parent universe? Or before the birth of it's parent? IMHO an ancestry for our universe which extends infinitely back in time is too like the steady state/continuous creation theories for comfort. It's far more ridiculously mind-boggling than a Universe with a definite beginning (whether that happens to be ours, or a remote ancestor of ours).
True enough. But Hawking's use of complex time *is* the neatest solution currently available which enables us to eliminate the awkward what-about-before-the-big-bang question that everybody asks at some point. It does so by postulating a spacetime geometry that makes the concept "before the big bang" similar to the definititely nonsensical "north of the north pole".
For those who wonder how this could work, check out the diagrams in Hawking's "A Brief History of Time".
Yeah yeah, yadda yadda. How many times have I heard this. But the acting in the original Star Trek was anything but wooden.
It never ceases to amaze me how so many people can blithely keep on repeating stuff they've heard from somewhere without ever checking for themselves to see if it was true.
Bruce, you apparently have no idea what you sound like here.
I know you have put yourself on the line for software freedom time and time again but just because you couldn't do any better on your own in this particular instance doesn't mean others shouldn't be able to try themselves.
In the first place the hippocampus (instrumental in the deposition of long-term memory) is not properly formed until about three years of age so it's thought that this will prevent formation of long-term episodic memory (memory of events) as is it understood in adults.
Secondly, both episodic memory and declarative memory (memory of things) depend upon having a cognitive framework within which they can be placed. It takes time and experience for that framework to get assembled and of course you can only remember things that you can understand (either properly or improperly) in some way. Things you can't make any sense out of at all will be remembered only vaguely, if at all.
Crying about it on slashdot gets you NOWHERE. You might as well be talking to yourself. Most people reading this already agree with you but very few people here would risk their comfort zone to be caught doing something about it.
This is the triumph of Western state power: the creation of a large, reasonably contented middle class, self-interested, lazy, apathetic, and motivated only to preserve (through inaction) as much of the status quo as possible.
After all if these people can't even manage to boycott movie tickets, DVD's and CD's for a while in order to help rein in growing rampant corporatism supported by a corrupt legislature, what chance is there that they will risk disenfranchisement/unemployment/police beatings/prison in order to preserve a bunch of freedoms which in practice are largely abstract and theoretical anyway?
Sure but I understand why he would have made that error if it's been a while since he read it. Over time, the impression the book leaves you with is that the state's monitoring is so pervasive and so relentlessly effective that they might as well be monitoring your thoughts. It's not for nothing that the ultimate crime is "thoughtcrime", and it's clear from several passages in the book that weaker characters are effectively motivated by terror to be genuinely *trying* to force their thoughts into the proper shape demanded by the authorities. Indeed during Winston's torture by O'Brien, the theme of the passage is very much one of O'Brien as teacher and Winston as student - O'Brien will settle for nothing less that Winston's *genuine* belief that the number of fingers on display is what he is told it is, and Winston's peristent failure to do so is being treated as a personal failure on his part by both parties.