Donald Trump (iirc) did this a time or two: interview with all the best firms in the area to disqualify them by conflict.
But guess how many firms are willing to interview him now?
The problem is that there are just too many firms out there to do this with, and the amounts that they will expect for that type of retainer rule it out even for the Microsofts of the world.
Plain cold fact of life: there's about as much money to be made by being on the other side from microsoft as there is from being on microsoft's side, and it will be rather expensive to convince a major firm to give up that potential business--if most firms do it, then the firms that are left get *all* of the business on the other side.
The problem is that Qualye wasn't as dumb as he sounded, and Gore is (as dumb as Quale sounded). Qualye recognized when he said something stupid (leading to the "I stand behind all my misstatements" quip), while Gore sets his staff out to defend them . . . .
check out the coverage from the trial. Economicsts who have studied the pricing have estimated that it *is* a monopoly price, or at least is substantially above the market price.
However, note that there is a single monopoly profit ot be had--the market is for computers running office software, and the same monopoly profit can be extracted from dos, office, or a combination of the two, but the monopoly profit remains the same either way.
Not that there's anything wrong with a good ham sandwich, but if if I'm going to suffer through another microsoft product, I'm holding hout for the pastrami sandiwch. Course, fatty pastrami, and chewy unfiltered beer to wash it down. (And if it doesn't make me belch, it was too mild:)
hawk, who didn't actually hate windows 95 untilhe had to spend a day using it last month.
Assuming that you're correct (which would shock me if true), it remains that to get that figure requires classifying most of the lawyers in the rest of the world as something else (or from a different angle, counting U.S. lawyers that wouldn't be counted as lawyers if they were in other countries).
I don't have all the details, but it seems to me that it came up a couple of months ago in alt.folkore.computers, from one of the people who actually encountered them. I want to say (but I'm not certain) that something about the environment was allowing the rings to crack.
I think it came up in one of the "worst equipment of all time" type discussions, along with the ibm strip reader that shuffled when it put the magnetic strips back . . .
Some old systems used to really lose bits. There were a couple of models of core memory that quite literally dropped their little rings over time, accumulating a pile at the bottom. Fortunately, core tended to have spare banks . . .
>Did you know that the US has like 4% of the >world's population but over 50% of the world's >lawyers?
This and similar figures just aren't true. To take one where I've seen the actual figures, it's commonly repeated and believed that there are less lawyers in Japan than the U.S. Maybe in absolute numbers, but not on a per capita bases. Japan has roughly the same proportion being trained as lawyers, but the majority do not become licensed for the courtroom and general practice, but instead work in-house. In the U.S., virtually all of us take bar examinations and receive general licenses, and work for ourselves, prosecuting authorities, or law firms. (But then, I knew one who graduated from Stanford and never took the bar, instead teaching high school math [independently wealthy, though], and two more who became housewives after a few years of practice. And I closed most of my practice and picked up a Ph.D.)
I read the novella years before the novell. It just focused on the school, not the family issues. The story is much more effective in that format.
If I ever write a famous short story, remind me not to turn it into a novel:) The only one I can think of that improved is Katherine Kurtz first series.
The Bully of Barkham Street
on
Ender's Shadow
·
· Score: 2
by Beverly Clearly. It tells the same story as one of the Henry Huggins books, but from the "bully"'s perspective--including the taunting from the "victim" in the other book.
It ends up as a different story, for some reason:)
The Bully of Barkham Street
on
Ender's Shadow
·
· Score: 2
by Beverly Clearly. It tells the same story as one of the Henry Huggins books, but from the "bully"'s perspective--including the taunting from the "victim" in the other book.
The Iowa game is also (primarily?) an academic research project. Particularly, it is experimental economics, which works by getting people to make choices and reveal their preferences by using real money.
When someone buys into the Iowa game, they get a share in each candidate for each dollar they put in. They can then buy and sell at any price, and can leave bids at multiple prices for automatic execution if anyone offers (e.g., I'll take 100 at 40c, 200 at 35c, and 1000 at 25c).
After the election, every share is paid by the percentage of the vote: 35% becomes 35c, so exactly one dollar is paid in return.
"surprisingly accurate" to describe the results predicted is an understatement. I don't think they've ever been off by more than 2%.
During Perot's first run, someone bought in with $500 (rather than the typical $20), to support Perot. He sold everything else, then bought Perot, driving the price up. Right until the $500 ran out, at which point the price *immediately* dropped back to the pre-binge levels.
hawk, wearing his Ph.D. economist hat for the moment
>I thought you only had world series with US and >maybe Canada. Silly me:)
The "World" in "World Series" does not imply "global champion." World was the name of the newpapaer that sponsored the series between the champions of the two leagues (American & National) in order to sell more papers, and slapped it's name on the series. The paper is long gone, but the name remains.
I needed to wrap text around figures, and the older latex package wasn't cutting it (losing the figures, but still giving them numbers).
So I set off to alta vista (still on it's DEC promo mission), and did a search for something like "latex and wrap"
It took me a while to figure out why I got inundated with porn . . . seems LaTeX is spelled with the same letters as that funny rubber. But why people would develop a sexual fetish for it . . .
>It's nice to see widespread use an idea that's >been around since the apple II.
Now wait a minute, that's overstating it a bit.
Each slot in the apple II had a 256 byte region reserved for ROM, with a decoded enable so the card didn't need to know which slot it it occupied. There was also a 2k area it could bank-switch, shared with other cards.
But to launch these drivers, you had to type
PR#6
for example, telling it to send output to card 6. This launched the driver. In the case of card 6, this usually booted dos, then returned output to 0, the screen (even though there was a card 0, which was sort of special). There was also a corresponding IN# command.
Later, with the II+, the autostart ROM's would automatically try slot 6 (or was it all slots???)
The overall design was amazing, and easy to homebrew hardware to fit. I have three waiting for me (IIe's, unfortanately; I'd rather original II's): one to run a railroad, one for the kids, and one for spare parts.
I haven't tried to use an ext2 partition under FreeBSD for over a year (two years?). When I did it wouldfrom time to time include random garbage as part of disk writes. This is a bad thing:)
Linux is no friendlier to ufs. Compile your system with ufs support, and suddenly the ufs partition 3 slices appear before your ext2 partitions in partition 4, and you attempt to mount the ufs slices as ext2 partitions. KA-BLAM! Trashed partition tables when you go back to BSD. Even if you remember to move them, you'll probably forget about this some time when you pull out an old rescue disk, and BOOM.
Also, I found that FreeBSD would complain aobut the labels in the linux extended partitions, which caused a panic on boot about 20% of the time. I finally removed the linux extended partition.
Mmm, and just using UFS for shared partitions doesn't work, either. They don't get fsck'd properly under linux, and I couldn't find a way to manually fsck them.
The only filesystem that they both seem to get along with is dos. I finally resorted to tarballs on a dos partition to exchange files:(
The Orchard Supply Harware chain wanted to open a store near San Jose. Turned out that there was already a store with the same name, older than registered trademark. They paid several times what the little mon'n'pop store was otherwise worth.
The Mirage, in Las Vegas. Turned out that there was already a little flea-bite motel with essentially the same name. They paid millions just to take the name off.
Disclaimer: IIAL, but this is not legal advice. See an attorney licenced in your area if you need some.
That said: litigating these for the little guy would be expensive. With a few years of hindsight, the approach I'd take (as a little guy) would be to find a fresh lawyer starting his practice, or who wants to start one. Cut a contingency deal with him, and possibly lend him office space as part of the deal. Supply him with clerical stuf.
***AND*** = don't miss this, lest disaster strike!
*pay* for a seasoned attorney to help him out. Generally, fresh lawywers takes space in suites with other lawyers, and knowledge freely flows (not like it used to; advertising killed that). But this kind of involvement is a lot more than the friendly exchange of ideas and advice. *do not* scrimp here. Nor should you expect the young lawyer to foot these fees (creates a major disincentive to ask the questions).
Yes, it will still cost a lot. But structuring this creatively can work out well for both you and the new attorney, who wouldn't have the experience (or resources) to handle a case like this without the old warhorse.
(But don't look at me to be that warhorse. I only do antitrust & other economic issues any more).
Digital has been writing and selling top-flight Fortran compilers for a *long* time, for assorted platforms. They make substantial revenues from it, and it's not just a way to sell hardware (it didn't come with DU, you paid extra for it).
A c compiler would be another story, it's (for all intents and purposes) part of unix that is necessary for a system. Fortran is necessary for certain uses of systems.
Giving away the code now would be giving away *decades* of expertise. It might ultimately be worth their doing this. Otoh, it precludes a lot of their long term options.
I'd expect that it is *very* simple. It was already possible to use it on DU to compile, and then run the executables on alpha Linux. From that, I'm going to take a swag that it's not written in Fortran, or it would have been trivial, rather than simple:)
Isn't ths already available in the documentation for the processor? I'd be stunned if digital hasn't disclosed the information to figure out how to keep the processor busy. The question isn't what order is best, but *how* to turn your source into a useful order, which would seem to be the compiler alone.
If you're using Fortran, you are, most likely, bashing numbers (My dissertation wasn't number crunching, but bashing them into submission:).
This is also in a market where your are *planning* on spending $1k to $2k for your compiler & libraries.
The question isn't, "which is fastest for my platform," but "which is fastest for my budget."
The real question *is* "how does the fastest x86 compiler on the best x86 I can get my paws on compare the the fastest alpha compiler on the fastest alpha I can afford."
Two and a half years ago, our answer to that was Absoft (Nag's compiler generates c, then uses the host c compiler). The difference at the time wasn't the hardware, but that we would have had to buy digital unix to run digital's fortran. Had this compiler been available then, we almost certainly would have gone alpha. (There would also have been political complications if we had been running DU outside of ISU's Vincent system, but my boss had tenure, so . ..)
Anyway, folks don't generally buy the fortran compiler to run on hardware they already have; fortran is a major factor in determining which hardware. No, the answer may not be the same next week:) If we could have waited two weeks to order, we could have had dual 400's rather than dual 333's (which probably would have edged out the alpha). But the money would have expired, so we bought what we could.
doc hawk
epilogue: It turned out that we *really* could have used the 64 bits rather than 32--absoft uses pieces from cray, which bit addresses, meaning that 32 bit addressing limited arrays of derived types to.25gb, and I needed about.4 . ..)
Slashdot Mirror
Donald Trump (iirc) did this a time or two: interview with all the best firms in the area to disqualify them by conflict.
But guess how many firms are willing to interview him now?
The problem is that there are just too many firms out there to do this with, and the amounts that they will expect for that type of retainer rule it out even for the Microsofts of the world.
Plain cold fact of life: there's about as much money to be made by being on the other side from microsoft as there is from being on microsoft's side, and it will be rather expensive to convince a major firm to give up that potential business--if most firms do it, then the firms that are left get *all* of the business on the other side.
hawk, esq.
The problem is that Qualye wasn't as dumb as he sounded, and Gore is (as dumb as Quale sounded). Qualye recognized when he said something stupid (leading to the "I stand behind all my misstatements" quip), while Gore sets his staff out to defend them . . . .
check out the coverage from the trial. Economicsts who have studied the pricing have estimated that it *is* a monopoly price, or at least is substantially above the market price.
However, note that there is a single monopoly profit ot be had--the market is for computers running office software, and the same monopoly profit can be extracted from dos, office, or a combination of the two, but the monopoly profit remains the same either way.
Not that there's anything wrong with a good ham sandwich, but if if I'm going to suffer through another microsoft product, I'm holding hout for the pastrami sandiwch. Course, fatty pastrami, and chewy unfiltered beer to wash it down. (And if it doesn't make me belch, it was too mild :)
hawk, who didn't actually hate windows 95 untilhe had to spend a day using it last month.
Assuming that you're correct (which would shock me if true), it remains that to get that figure requires classifying most of the lawyers in the rest of the world as something else (or from a different angle, counting U.S. lawyers that wouldn't be counted as lawyers if they were in other countries).
I don't have all the details, but it seems to me that it came up a couple of months ago in alt.folkore.computers, from one of the people who actually encountered them. I want to say (but I'm not certain) that something about the environment was allowing the rings to crack.
I think it came up in one of the "worst equipment of all time" type discussions, along with the ibm strip reader that shuffled when it put the magnetic strips back . . .
Some old systems used to really lose bits. There were a couple of models of core memory that quite literally dropped their little rings over time, accumulating a pile at the bottom. Fortunately, core tended to have spare banks . . .
>Did you know that the US has like 4% of the
>world's population but over 50% of the world's
>lawyers?
This and similar figures just aren't true. To take one where I've seen the actual figures, it's commonly repeated and believed that there are less lawyers in Japan than the U.S. Maybe in absolute numbers, but not on a per capita bases. Japan has roughly the same proportion being trained as lawyers, but the majority do not become licensed for the courtroom and general practice, but instead work in-house. In the U.S., virtually all of us take bar examinations and receive general licenses, and work for ourselves, prosecuting authorities, or law firms. (But then, I knew one who graduated from Stanford and never took the bar, instead teaching high school math [independently wealthy, though], and two more who became housewives after a few years of practice. And I closed most of my practice and picked up a Ph.D.)
hawk, esq.
I read the novella years before the novell. It just focused on the school, not the family issues. The story is much more effective in that format.
:) The only one I can think of that improved is Katherine Kurtz first series.
If I ever write a famous short story, remind me not to turn it into a novel
by Beverly Clearly. It tells the same story as one of the Henry Huggins books, but from the "bully"'s perspective--including the taunting from the "victim" in the other book.
:)
It ends up as a different story, for some reason
by Beverly Clearly. It tells the same story as one of the Henry Huggins books, but from the "bully"'s perspective--including the taunting from the "victim" in the other book.
The Iowa game is also (primarily?) an academic research project. Particularly, it is experimental economics, which works by getting people to make choices and reveal their preferences by using real money.
When someone buys into the Iowa game, they get a share in each candidate for each dollar they put in. They can then buy and sell at any price, and can leave bids at multiple prices for automatic execution if anyone offers (e.g., I'll take 100 at 40c, 200 at 35c, and 1000 at 25c).
After the election, every share is paid by the percentage of the vote: 35% becomes 35c, so exactly one dollar is paid in return.
"surprisingly accurate" to describe the results predicted is an understatement. I don't think they've ever been off by more than 2%.
During Perot's first run, someone bought in with $500 (rather than the typical $20), to support Perot. He sold everything else, then bought Perot, driving the price up. Right until the $500 ran out, at which point the price *immediately* dropped back to the pre-binge levels.
hawk, wearing his Ph.D. economist hat for the moment
>I thought you only had world series with US and
>maybe Canada. Silly me:)
The "World" in "World Series" does not imply "global champion." World was the name of the newpapaer that sponsored the series between the champions of the two leagues (American & National) in order to sell more papers, and slapped it's name on the series. The paper is long gone, but the name remains.
I needed to wrap text around figures, and the older latex package wasn't cutting it (losing the figures, but still giving them numbers).
So I set off to alta vista (still on it's DEC promo mission), and did a search for something like "latex and wrap"
It took me a while to figure out why I got inundated with porn . . . seems LaTeX is spelled with the same letters as that funny rubber. But why people would develop a sexual fetish for it . . .
>It's nice to see widespread use an idea that's
>been around since the apple II.
Now wait a minute, that's overstating it a bit.
Each slot in the apple II had a 256 byte region reserved for ROM, with a decoded enable so the card didn't need to know which slot it it occupied. There was also a 2k area it could bank-switch, shared with other cards.
But to launch these drivers, you had to type
PR#6
for example, telling it to send output to card 6. This launched the driver. In the case of card 6, this usually booted dos, then returned output to 0, the screen (even though there was a card 0, which was sort of special). There was also a corresponding IN# command.
Later, with the II+, the autostart ROM's would automatically try slot 6 (or was it all slots???)
The overall design was amazing, and easy to homebrew hardware to fit. I have three waiting for me (IIe's, unfortanately; I'd rather original II's): one to run a railroad, one for the kids, and one for spare parts.
hawk, who misses the 8 bit machines
I haven't tried to use an ext2 partition under FreeBSD for over a year (two years?). When I did it wouldfrom time to time include random garbage as part of disk writes. This is a bad thing :)
:(
Linux is no friendlier to ufs. Compile your system with ufs support, and suddenly the ufs partition 3 slices appear before your ext2 partitions in partition 4, and you attempt to mount the ufs slices as ext2 partitions. KA-BLAM! Trashed partition tables when you go back to BSD. Even if you remember to move them, you'll probably forget about this some time when you pull out an old rescue disk, and BOOM.
Also, I found that FreeBSD would complain aobut the labels in the linux extended partitions, which caused a panic on boot about 20% of the time. I finally removed the linux extended partition.
Mmm, and just using UFS for shared partitions doesn't work, either. They don't get fsck'd properly under linux, and I couldn't find a way to manually fsck them.
The only filesystem that they both seem to get along with is dos. I finally resorted to tarballs on a dos partition to exchange files
Why didn't I notice this until I'd posted 3 comments?
Which this isn't :)
A couple I can think of offhand:
The Orchard Supply Harware chain wanted to open a store near San Jose. Turned out that there was already a store with the same name, older than registered trademark. They paid several times what the little mon'n'pop store was otherwise worth.
The Mirage, in Las Vegas. Turned out that there was already a little flea-bite motel with essentially the same name. They paid millions just to take the name off.
Disclaimer: IIAL, but this is not legal advice. See an attorney licenced in your area if you need some.
That said: litigating these for the little guy would be expensive. With a few years of hindsight, the approach I'd take (as a little guy) would be to find a fresh lawyer starting his practice, or who wants to start one. Cut a contingency deal with him, and possibly lend him office space as part of the deal. Supply him with clerical stuf.
***AND*** = don't miss this, lest disaster strike!
*pay* for a seasoned attorney to help him out. Generally, fresh lawywers takes space in suites with other lawyers, and knowledge freely flows (not like it used to; advertising killed that). But this kind of involvement is a lot more than the friendly exchange of ideas and advice. *do not* scrimp here. Nor should you expect the young lawyer to foot these fees (creates a major disincentive to ask the questions).
Yes, it will still cost a lot. But structuring this creatively can work out well for both you and the new attorney, who wouldn't have the experience (or resources) to handle a case like this without the old warhorse.
(But don't look at me to be that warhorse. I only do antitrust & other economic issues any more).
I would have sworn when I read the title yesterday that we were talking about Fortran. Never mind. I'll wait for the Fortran release to get excited
Digital has been writing and selling top-flight Fortran compilers for a *long* time, for assorted platforms. They make substantial revenues from it, and it's not just a way to sell hardware (it didn't come with DU, you paid extra for it).
A c compiler would be another story, it's (for all intents and purposes) part of unix that is necessary for a system. Fortran is necessary for certain uses of systems.
Giving away the code now would be giving away *decades* of expertise. It might ultimately be worth their doing this. Otoh, it precludes a lot of their long term options.
I'd expect that it is *very* simple. It was already possible to use it on DU to compile, and then run the executables on alpha Linux. From that, I'm going to take a swag that it's not written in Fortran, or it would have been trivial, rather than simple :)
Isn't ths already available in the documentation for the processor? I'd be stunned if digital hasn't disclosed the information to figure out how to keep the processor busy. The question isn't what order is best, but *how* to turn your source into a useful order, which would seem to be the compiler alone.
If you're using Fortran, you are, most likely, bashing numbers (My dissertation wasn't number crunching, but bashing them into submission
This is also in a market where your are *planning* on spending $1k to $2k for your compiler & libraries.
The question isn't, "which is fastest for my platform," but "which is fastest for my budget."
The real question *is* "how does the fastest x86 compiler on the best x86 I can get my paws on compare the the fastest alpha compiler on the fastest alpha I can afford."
Two and a half years ago, our answer to that was Absoft (Nag's compiler generates c, then uses the host c compiler). The difference at the time wasn't the hardware, but that we would have had to buy digital unix to run digital's fortran. Had this compiler been available then, we almost certainly would have gone alpha. (There would also have been political complications if we had been running DU outside of ISU's Vincent system, but my boss had tenure, so . .
Anyway, folks don't generally buy the fortran compiler to run on hardware they already have; fortran is a major factor in determining which hardware. No, the answer may not be the same next week
doc hawk
epilogue: It turned out that we *really* could have used the 64 bits rather than 32--absoft uses pieces from cray, which bit addresses, meaning that 32 bit addressing limited arrays of derived types to
I won't give it "excellent," but "fair."
"Good" would be sanctioned issued (at least entirely covering the fees incurred in litigation.
"Excellent" would be a public bawling out by the judge, along with a formal referal to the bar association.