Here at my office we've got a legacy system from the 80s now running on an UltraSPARC-IIi. We had a clone system set up for backup and then the original's HD died so now there's just the clone, and we've been having some trouble getting the original going again. We're running Solaris 7 (Oct 1998 release) on the working machine, but I've only got the install media for the next version, the Aug 1999 release. The legacy system appears to be sensitive to the underlying OS and I want to make an exact clone. If anybody has Solaris 7 (SunOS 5.7) Oct 1998 install disks, I'll make an offer on 'em. Otherwise if you know anything about Sparcs, Solaris, etc and you can help me, there'd be a reward. Contact me at clark AT thirteen DOT net.
Sorry, don't have a hard source online. I was talking to a woman who works at the ESA a few weeks ago and she told me. I assume it was fairly localized to the Kosovo area but still enough to cause inconvenience.
During the war in Kosovo, the US turned off GPS over much of Europe, for tactical military reasons. Naturally, this is bothersome to legitimate Europeans who have come to rely on GPS. So it makes sense that they would want to build their own system.
I know it's too late for this comment to get noticed, but just thought I'd share a spam experience from AOL. I got myself an AOL screen name, oh probably over a year ago, but I have NEVER used it for mail of any kind, nor told anyone of its existence. For a good while I never received any mail at the address, spam or otherwise. Then, about four months or so ago, I received a message from AOL support with some information about my account. From then on, the spam started. So now while I get probably less spam than your average hotmail account, I still get a reasonably healthy supply for an address I never used and have never exposed on any web site or mailing list, about 10 or 20 messages a week.
So I can only conclude that AOL is exposing its own customers to spam simply by sending them account notices. Nice.
Re:Advice to the Not Listening
on
Good to Great
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· Score: 1
I think the point is to have an over-arching vision before you start hiring people, so you have SOMETHING to hire them for, but not to necessarily work out every detail of that vision. You should have a core philosphy, a core idea of This Is What Company X Is About, this is What We Do Well. But leave it up to the smart employees as to how they want to implement it. If the leadership is good and the plan is sound, the smart people will catch on quickly to how they can advance the project.
You do make a good point though, one that the article glossed over.
The enXyme project attempts to map XML data onto a relational database schema. The goal is to allow complex, specific queries of XML data. It's not easy to capture ALL of XML, with all its possibilities, but you can do parts of it. The project already has a basic XML schema parser, a script that takes an XML schema and generates a series of sql CREATE statements that reflect the hierarchy described by the schema.
I guess a pure XML database like the ones mentioned in the article would be better at this, but the advantage is that relational dbs are already in wide use.
I still have yet to adopt either gnome or kde as my religion, I've been playing more sort of wait-and-see. At home I use gnome, at work I've been using kde. I'm not someone who likes to take a lot of time configuring desktops, I tend to just use the default. But I definitely like kde (this is under mandrake 8.0)--one thing I love is mouse-to-focus, click-to-top. It seems the most intuitive to me. In gnome I have mouse to focus, but I have to click on the title bar (often buried) to get top. I probably could configure it somewhere but I haven't taken the time to bother. The other thing I like is how kde reacts when I select a link--the little menu of choices is definitely what I was wanting without knowing I wanted it. I also like Konqueror a lot. Javascript doesn't always work quite right, but as with just about every browser to some degree. Nice work kde.
NN:It's not where the lies come from - whether it's a silly website or a recognised authority - it's the absence of the filters. That's why again a more popular kind of filtering, where the people looking at the information can actually help filter it, is a very, very important approach for the future. It's not done very much but it could solve issues of pornography, it could solve credibility issues of the kind you just mentioned.
OK, an interview like this is probably not the place to expect a well thought out solution to the filtering problem, but this is another in a series of vague unsupported ideas he throws out there. What does this mean? How would this system work? It's easy to say that "popular kind of filtering, where the people looking at the information can actually help filter it" is a good idea, but are there any difficulties with it? Why hasn't it been implemented already? Let's hear it, Negroponte, that would be more interesting than throwaway platitudes.
Here in France you can get essentially anonymous GSM service using a prepaid mobicarte or SFR SIM card. They asked me my name and they have it in a database somewhere, and they might have asked me for id, I don't recall, but at any rate it wasn't any form of id officially recognized in France such as a passport, so it could easily have been false. The handset is your standard handset of course, so it's not disposable, unless you're wealthy, but as far as I know nothing stops you from buying as many handsets as you want anonymously.
This is a actually a good question and it's the first thing I thought of before I checked out the page. Of course it's a display of aggregate data, so there is very little exposure of individuals' private searches, but still, how far does that argument go? Is it only because google has tens of thousands of users (more?) per day that it is ok for them to aggregate their data? What if it were a little search engine that only had 5 users per day, and they did the same thing? Then the top 5 misspelled searches would reveal how bad a speller I am. Hmm.
I did a summer internship as a Software Design Engineer in Test at MS a few years ago. I found it kinda weak. The interview process was really rigorous, they make you jump through all sorts of hoops, solve programming and logic problems etc. But the work itself I found held little of the excitement of the interviews. It didn't have the challenge I wanted, I felt overqualified for the work. I felt like they were trying to sucker me into to working there with all kinds of benefits, free bike, free sodas, subsidized car and apartment, gym membership, etc, but really the work was not fulfilling.
the author comes across as almost a "Lisp apologist" which may turn people off from looking at Lisp.
I disagree--I think he makes a pretty strong argument in favor of Lisp. Makes me want to start reading up on Lisp.
I think also the more important point he makes is that we often get stuck in the mode of thinking that goes along with whatever language we are most comfortable in. Once x language worked well in solving y problem, we tend to think it must be best for solving every problem. But the point he makes is to take a step back and look at the languages out there and keep an open mind.
True, music is not like software in that you don't normally "upgrade" or "patch" music, ie, create derived works that are improvements on the original. However, say you (unknown artist) write Cool Song, and release it under the Open Music License. Then Puff Daddy takes Cool Song and makes the hip-hop version of Cool Song (for free). His version will have to be under the Open Music License, and he will have to credit you for Cool Song. So now everyone will think that you are cool since you wrote the song that Puff Daddy's megahit is based on. So you could potentially benefit from a derived work.
Check out this article:
http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/04/16/1 931237&mode=nocomment
It describes a system for defeating AOL's block of jabber.com & the jabber client. Pretty cool!
I really think pine is the winner on this one. For one, we have a generation of college students that basically think that pine IS Unix. I used to work as a "Computing Assistant" at my college, and whenever I tried to explain to some user how to do something with their Unix account, they would say "You mean I do this in pine?" "No," I'd say. "You have to quit pine first." OK, so maybe that's not a Good Thing, but it is testament to the usability of pine that thousands of more or less clueless users are able to use it with no problem. And it is the only CLI app they use.
And it doesn't stop there. Pine has introduced all these non-techie college students to the beauty and power of telnet--they can check their mail from home now, using the exact same familiar program, with a simple one line command! Furthermore, now all these people know how to use a Unix based text editor: whenever I need to tell somebody to edit one of their files, I just tell them to use pico. "Oh!" they say. "I can handle this!" You try explaining to someone over the phone how to use vi or emacs. Good luck.
Therefore, because of the overall useability of pine, coupled with its spill-over into other areas of useability, I think it deserves the award for best non-graphical UI.
This post contains spoilers. Please don't read it if you haven't seen the movie and plan to and care about suspense.
I enjoyed Any Given Sunday. What I thought was cool about the movie was that the characters were not pure good or pure bad. Coach D'Amato is generally sympathetic, but it is clear that he is living in the past much of the time, and making the team suffer for it. Willie Beamen is a great character because you really want him to succeed (just because he's generally a cool guy and the 3rd string off-the-bench phenomenon) but he gets so incredibly cocky that you just know he's going to pay for it. LL Cool J's character Julian gets less exploration in the movie, but he has two sides as well--on the one hand, he is just looking for money and endorsements and resents Beamen getting all the attention. On the other hand, at times he has more team spirit than Beamen, and also in that play that loses the first game (Willie's first game) he is accused of wanting to get his yardage bonus, but really it is Coach D'Amato's fault for calling the play. Another interesting character is that of Dr. Harvey (James Woods). He is generally a prick, but he has a point in his last speech: yes it is unethical not to tell Shark the truth about his injuries, but he is right in saying that Shark would want to play anyway, and this way he preserves Shark's confidence, which is essential to his playing. If Shark knows that he could die if he gets hit the wrong way, he may hesitate at the key instant. Along this line, one thing that annoyed me was that Shark then doesn't end up having any ill-effects from this. He just gets lucky. Cameron Diaz's character was also two sided. She is basically just a ruthless money-hungry manipulator, but she has a point in most of her arguments with D'Amato. He is living in the past, etc.
After all these cool characters, the lame thing in the movie is that they all just suddenly realize that they've been jerks. Like Beamen is in the huddle and he says "Oh yeah, forget about all that stuff I said. Wasn't me." OK, problem solved! Or when Diaz's character apologizes to her mom. Problem solved! Or when Julian jumps out of bounds instead of going for the touchdown. Oh, now he's seen the light and is a team player. The movie sets up these cool conflicts in the characters, and then they all get resolved just like that at the end.
Overall, I thought the cinematography was excellent, and I liked the integration of the soundtrack in the movie. Things like the part where Beamen is talking to the sportswriter interspersed with other scenes were just great. And in spite of the fact that it was basically like every other sports movie in that they have the Big Suspenseful Game at the end (gee, will they win it?), it actually is exciting and fun to watch.
I agree. Fermat's Enigma is a beautifully written account of the history of Fermat's Last Theorem. He talks about who Taniyama and Shimura were and when and how they did their work, and in a general sense, how it relates to Fermat's Theorem. Without having to know that much math, you get a real sense of what the mathematical process is like. Singh covers Euler, Gauss, and even has a section about Alan Turing and the first code-cracking computers in WWII. A great read. Clark
Slashdot Mirror
Here at my office we've got a legacy system from the 80s now running on an UltraSPARC-IIi. We had a clone system set up for backup and then the original's HD died so now there's just the clone, and we've been having some trouble getting the original going again. We're running Solaris 7 (Oct 1998 release) on the working machine, but I've only got the install media for the next version, the Aug 1999 release. The legacy system appears to be sensitive to the underlying OS and I want to make an exact clone. If anybody has Solaris 7 (SunOS 5.7) Oct 1998 install disks, I'll make an offer on 'em. Otherwise if you know anything about Sparcs, Solaris, etc and you can help me, there'd be a reward. Contact me at clark AT thirteen DOT net.
Sorry, don't have a hard source online. I was talking to a woman who works at the ESA a few weeks ago and she told me. I assume it was fairly localized to the Kosovo area but still enough to cause inconvenience.
During the war in Kosovo, the US turned off GPS over much of Europe, for tactical military reasons. Naturally, this is bothersome to legitimate Europeans who have come to rely on GPS. So it makes sense that they would want to build their own system.
I know it's too late for this comment to get noticed, but just thought I'd share a spam experience from AOL. I got myself an AOL screen name, oh probably over a year ago, but I have NEVER used it for mail of any kind, nor told anyone of its existence. For a good while I never received any mail at the address, spam or otherwise. Then, about four months or so ago, I received a message from AOL support with some information about my account. From then on, the spam started. So now while I get probably less spam than your average hotmail account, I still get a reasonably healthy supply for an address I never used and have never exposed on any web site or mailing list, about 10 or 20 messages a week.
So I can only conclude that AOL is exposing its own customers to spam simply by sending them account notices. Nice.
I think the point is to have an over-arching vision before you start hiring people, so you have SOMETHING to hire them for, but not to necessarily work out every detail of that vision. You should have a core philosphy, a core idea of This Is What Company X Is About, this is What We Do Well. But leave it up to the smart employees as to how they want to implement it. If the leadership is good and the plan is sound, the smart people will catch on quickly to how they can advance the project.
You do make a good point though, one that the article glossed over.
The enXyme project attempts to map XML data onto a relational database schema. The goal is to allow complex, specific queries of XML data. It's not easy to capture ALL of XML, with all its possibilities, but you can do parts of it. The project already has a basic XML schema parser, a script that takes an XML schema and generates a series of sql CREATE statements that reflect the hierarchy described by the schema.
I guess a pure XML database like the ones mentioned in the article would be better at this, but the advantage is that relational dbs are already in wide use.
I still have yet to adopt either gnome or kde as my religion, I've been playing more sort of wait-and-see. At home I use gnome, at work I've been using kde. I'm not someone who likes to take a lot of time configuring desktops, I tend to just use the default. But I definitely like kde (this is under mandrake 8.0)--one thing I love is mouse-to-focus, click-to-top. It seems the most intuitive to me. In gnome I have mouse to focus, but I have to click on the title bar (often buried) to get top. I probably could configure it somewhere but I haven't taken the time to bother. The other thing I like is how kde reacts when I select a link--the little menu of choices is definitely what I was wanting without knowing I wanted it. I also like Konqueror a lot. Javascript doesn't always work quite right, but as with just about every browser to some degree. Nice work kde.
NN:It's not where the lies come from - whether it's a silly website or a recognised authority - it's the absence of the filters. That's why again a more popular kind of filtering, where the people looking at the information can actually help filter it, is a very, very important approach for the future. It's not done very much but it could solve issues of pornography, it could solve credibility issues of the kind you just mentioned.
OK, an interview like this is probably not the place to expect a well thought out solution to the filtering problem, but this is another in a series of vague unsupported ideas he throws out there. What does this mean? How would this system work? It's easy to say that "popular kind of filtering, where the people looking at the information can actually help filter it" is a good idea, but are there any difficulties with it? Why hasn't it been implemented already? Let's hear it, Negroponte, that would be more interesting than throwaway platitudes.
Here in France you can get essentially anonymous GSM service using a prepaid mobicarte or SFR SIM card. They asked me my name and they have it in a database somewhere, and they might have asked me for id, I don't recall, but at any rate it wasn't any form of id officially recognized in France such as a passport, so it could easily have been false. The handset is your standard handset of course, so it's not disposable, unless you're wealthy, but as far as I know nothing stops you from buying as many handsets as you want anonymously.
I said users, not hits. So it is hundreds of thousands maybe no?
This is a actually a good question and it's the first thing I thought of before I checked out the page. Of course it's a display of aggregate data, so there is very little exposure of individuals' private searches, but still, how far does that argument go? Is it only because google has tens of thousands of users (more?) per day that it is ok for them to aggregate their data? What if it were a little search engine that only had 5 users per day, and they did the same thing? Then the top 5 misspelled searches would reveal how bad a speller I am. Hmm.
I did a summer internship as a Software Design Engineer in Test at MS a few years ago. I found it kinda weak. The interview process was really rigorous, they make you jump through all sorts of hoops, solve programming and logic problems etc. But the work itself I found held little of the excitement of the interviews. It didn't have the challenge I wanted, I felt overqualified for the work. I felt like they were trying to sucker me into to working there with all kinds of benefits, free bike, free sodas, subsidized car and apartment, gym membership, etc, but really the work was not fulfilling.
the author comes across as almost a "Lisp apologist" which may turn people off from looking at Lisp.
I disagree--I think he makes a pretty strong argument in favor of Lisp. Makes me want to start reading up on Lisp.
I think also the more important point he makes is that we often get stuck in the mode of thinking that goes along with whatever language we are most comfortable in. Once x language worked well in solving y problem, we tend to think it must be best for solving every problem. But the point he makes is to take a step back and look at the languages out there and keep an open mind.
True, music is not like software in that you don't normally "upgrade" or "patch" music, ie, create derived works that are improvements on the original. However, say you (unknown artist) write Cool Song, and release it under the Open Music License. Then Puff Daddy takes Cool Song and makes the hip-hop version of Cool Song (for free). His version will have to be under the Open Music License, and he will have to credit you for Cool Song. So now everyone will think that you are cool since you wrote the song that Puff Daddy's megahit is based on. So you could potentially benefit from a derived work.
Check out this article: http://www.newsforge.com/article.pl?sid=01/04/16/1 931237&mode=nocomment
It describes a system for defeating AOL's block of jabber.com & the jabber client. Pretty cool!
I really think pine is the winner on this one. For one, we have a generation of college students that basically think that pine IS Unix. I used to work as a "Computing Assistant" at my college, and whenever I tried to explain to some user how to do something with their Unix account, they would say "You mean I do this in pine?" "No," I'd say. "You have to quit pine first." OK, so maybe that's not a Good Thing, but it is testament to the usability of pine that thousands of more or less clueless users are able to use it with no problem. And it is the only CLI app they use.
And it doesn't stop there. Pine has introduced all these non-techie college students to the beauty and power of telnet--they can check their mail from home now, using the exact same familiar program, with a simple one line command! Furthermore, now all these people know how to use a Unix based text editor: whenever I need to tell somebody to edit one of their files, I just tell them to use pico. "Oh!" they say. "I can handle this!" You try explaining to someone over the phone how to use vi or emacs. Good luck.
Therefore, because of the overall useability of pine, coupled with its spill-over into other areas of useability, I think it deserves the award for best non-graphical UI.
Clark
--
Finding a job shouldn't be work.
This post contains spoilers. Please don't read it if you haven't seen the movie and plan to and care about suspense.
I enjoyed Any Given Sunday. What I thought was cool about the movie was that the characters were not pure good or pure bad. Coach D'Amato is generally sympathetic, but it is clear that he is living in the past much of the time, and making the team suffer for it. Willie Beamen is a great character because you really want him to succeed (just because he's generally a cool guy and the 3rd string off-the-bench phenomenon) but he gets so incredibly cocky that you just know he's going to pay for it. LL Cool J's character Julian gets less exploration in the movie, but he has two sides as well--on the one hand, he is just looking for money and endorsements and resents Beamen getting all the attention. On the other hand, at times he has more team spirit than Beamen, and also in that play that loses the first game (Willie's first game) he is accused of wanting to get his yardage bonus, but really it is Coach D'Amato's fault for calling the play. Another interesting character is that of Dr. Harvey (James Woods). He is generally a prick, but he has a point in his last speech: yes it is unethical not to tell Shark the truth about his injuries, but he is right in saying that Shark would want to play anyway, and this way he preserves Shark's confidence, which is essential to his playing. If Shark knows that he could die if he gets hit the wrong way, he may hesitate at the key instant. Along this line, one thing that annoyed me was that Shark then doesn't end up having any ill-effects from this. He just gets lucky. Cameron Diaz's character was also two sided. She is basically just a ruthless money-hungry manipulator, but she has a point in most of her arguments with D'Amato. He is living in the past, etc.
After all these cool characters, the lame thing in the movie is that they all just suddenly realize that they've been jerks. Like Beamen is in the huddle and he says "Oh yeah, forget about all that stuff I said. Wasn't me." OK, problem solved! Or when Diaz's character apologizes to her mom. Problem solved! Or when Julian jumps out of bounds instead of going for the touchdown. Oh, now he's seen the light and is a team player. The movie sets up these cool conflicts in the characters, and then they all get resolved just like that at the end.
Overall, I thought the cinematography was excellent, and I liked the integration of the soundtrack in the movie. Things like the part where Beamen is talking to the sportswriter interspersed with other scenes were just great. And in spite of the fact that it was basically like every other sports movie in that they have the Big Suspenseful Game at the end (gee, will they win it?), it actually is exciting and fun to watch.
Clark
--
Finding a job shouldn't be work.
I agree. Fermat's Enigma is a beautifully written account of the history of Fermat's Last Theorem. He talks about who Taniyama and Shimura were and when and how they did their work, and in a general sense, how it relates to Fermat's Theorem. Without having to know that much math, you get a real sense of what the mathematical process is like. Singh covers Euler, Gauss, and even has a section about Alan Turing and the first code-cracking computers in WWII. A great read.
Clark
--
Finding a job shouldn't be work.