or, rather, the illusion of segmenting, was the other huge hidden charm point of the x86.
It allowed us to fool ourselves into thinking we could virtualize the application on commodity hardware way back when. So we could start small and the hardware would help us move up.
It didn't matter that the hardware didn't really help after all for most apps. It gave the engineers courage to go to the bean counters and say, "Let's start small, with something we know we can handle."
Specification overkill is what really killed the 68K. Nobody dared spec it unless the spec-ed to include the kitchen sink. Otherwise the bean-counters were constantly nagging them about why they couldn't use the supposedly cheaper "standard".
But, yeah, your point on having enough RAM to fill a 256 bit address space is quite relevant.
We really don't know enough about the function of the mind to be safe in assuming any specific number of bits-per-neuron and thinking we're down.
Even when we get the neural mass figured out, we have to start accounting for the hormonal system, and then the rest of the body. Thinking is not all we do, and much of the non-cerebral stuff feeds back into the cerebral.
in the marketplace, but not in the machine. (At least not on my application mix.)
And, no, emulated PPC on iNTEL is never faster, unless you are talking about faster in emulation on a 2+GHz Core 2 Duo as opposed to a 1 GHz G4. And then just barely, maybe, sometimes, but not very often.
IBM and Motorola/Freescale wouldn't make the notebook "G5" because they were focused on something else, and because Apple kept asking for the latest fads in addition to processors that worked well for their application areas.
For some reason, the suits have always biased the market for iNTEL. If it's not the "standard", it is not good enough to be just as good on the average. It has to be twice as good in every case, or the bean counters say the "standard" is somehow cheaper.
If the voter with no special needs is handed a felt-tip and a paper ballot, all he needs to vote is three walls and a curtain. The machinery can be saved for the people who really need them.
I know there will always be people who don't believe "in" enlightened self-interest, but it is not in your own self-interest to deliberately (How should I put this politely?) defecate in your own water supply.
You started by playing around with the scripts that the real blackhats built and left lying around. Then one of them contacts you (Because he naturally left a call-home in your script and has been "keeping an eye on you" -- but not much of an eye. Don't kid yourself.) and suggests you help him collect a bot army.
Now you've learned how to get a bot army, and you have a small army of your own. Trouble is, small armies aren't profitable. So you start the moving from script-jockey (The blackhats don't want to insult you, so they don't call you kiddie to your face.) to script-remodeller. But you have to eat, so when your blackhat suggests you try a little extortion, it sounds interesting.
What he doesn't tell you is that he is leading you to run interference for him while he goes after bigger fish. He tells you how to get into some foreign bank and set up accounts that have a very ephemeral existence, then stands back and watches you, and waits for you to either prove you're on top of this game or get arrested.
In the meantime, the money you are sucking out of the economy is not available to do the kind of dev work you'd prefer.
(1) Shares steadily decline to $10 in 2010. (Assuming management has no magic to bring it back flat or back to growth.)
(2) Shares shoot up to (almost) $40 for a week, drop below what they are now as I-cahn't-keep-my-fingers-out-of-other-people's-pockets and his ilk sell theirs off, then essentially disappear completely as Microsoft mismanages the merger.
You think Microsoft can properly manage it while keeping Yahoo as a separate company? You think Microsoft can inflate their search company's "value" with Yahoo's customers?(Sans tech. Be serious.)
But as far as the customer base goes, should Microsoft ever take Yahoo over, I'll be one ex-customer. No way I want Microsoft mishandling my mail. And I'm not particularly unique about that, either. I have some relatives who are ex- hotmail.com, now on Yahoo, who would also move in a heartbeat.
Buying the Microsoft "bail-out" had only one possible result for Yahoo -- being bailed entirely out of the industry. Permanently.
I-cahn't is just a financial bully thinking he has a chance to abuse the courts to his profit.
The stock buyback was to make them less vulnerable to the stockholders. That has been mentioned by others.
Nations produce value.
Any time a company stops producing value (or at least producing the illusion of value), the rules change.
Remember, they have been one of the sources of income for the money market accounts that you suggest putting their assets in. If they quit making (the illusion of) money, that's one major input to the money market accounts that quits performing.
Now, go to your bank and ask why they wouldn't allow you to invest more than a few million in a money market account with them.
If you get your mind wrapped around the realities of that much, just to really take the wind out of your imaginative sails, go find out how much a salary of 30,000 a year costs a company in support and infrastructure.
Then go back and do the math.
There is no magic in having lots of money.
Microsoft has to start performing for real, or they will end up on the block for real. And with no buyers, because it becomes more and more clear that they have never had or sold anything of value. Illusions, all.
Illusions can only make so much money before they start disintegrating under their own weight, and Microsoft has hit that limit.
We really need mod points for stupidness. Or perhaps obtuseness, although obtuseness, especially obviously deliberate obtuseness, is really hard to differentiate from trolling.
I take it you really are one of those that simply can't believe there are people for whom popularity contests are irrelevant?
The first language I learned was BASIC. (I almost learned 8080 assembler and half-learned TI calculator about a year before that, but didn't quite get there.)
After that, I started learning 6800 assembler the bottom-up way (playing with a prototyping board with a monitor/debug ROM). Wired a BASIC onto the board, but I wanted a high-level language. I took Pascal and ForTran at the same time, IIRC, at the local college, and the professor mentioned that I might be able to find a FORTH to load onto it. (He also recommended a floppy drive, which recommendation I studiously ignored.) I got a listing of a 6800 implementation of fig-FORTH and loaded it by hand (saved it to tape). Learned CoBOL and RPG (Report Program Generator, not Role Playing Game) in the meantime.
I thought I understood programming after that. Went to the big U and ended up in CS. (Stupid move.) Learned C and became unable to program in a timely manner. Had to re-implement FORTH in 6809 to finally graduate.
I'm not sure whether it was C that screwed me up or FORTH.
I know I can't program CoBOL any more, and I know that I have lost more than one job because of the time I spent learning to use the tools of C to build modular programs in college. Can't program CoBOL because it's just too much work to convince myself to keep track of all the games you have to play to emulate locality of reference in CoBOL to get UI screens to respond reasonably to user input. I also have problems working with legacy C source code built by high-school-grads who are untrained in modularization, etc., and are plenty willing to burn themselves out keeping track of thousands of globals while churning out close to a thousand lines of C a day. (Copy-paste and change a few globals that should have been parameters, etc.) The code the other guys wrote reminded me of nothing more than CoBOL. Couldn't compete, either, when the managers wanted me to pump out the same number of the same kinds of lines and somehow "add in" the value of my advanced degree.
(huh? This industry is crazy. Mad. Kind of like the rest of the world, I guess.)
I like FORTH. I don't really know much about Smalltalk, except what I may have absorbed studying Objective C and playing with Squeak, but I don't buy it when anyone argues in favor of complicated languages. It seems to me that they (you?) are primarily arguing the equivalent of that C should be written like CoBOL, according to some baroque set of inherited rules that probably had more to do with the tools that were once (but are no longer being) commonly used than with the problem being solved.
So, what are you saying? Is high-school algebra, with its precedence rules, the best algebra, just because modern mathematicians have used it for a long time (until, of course, they dig into the really useful stuff)?
A lot of subcultures may make a big thing about conformity, but even when the majority are in some meaningful sense "good", being different does not require being bad. The world is way too complex, and so are people.
Typical mistake in amateur philosophy, don't feel too bad about it. The key is this: it is good for you and me to have different jobs. Otherwise, we'd both be in each other's way and there'd be another job, that one of us could be doing, not getting done.
And it isn't just jobs. Thin of the old "nursery rhyme", Jack Sprat.
However, seeking the popular deviations instead of seeking within is never a good idea. The correct answer is "Don't try to be different. Just don't try to be the same. As trite is it is, the blue genie was right. Be yourself."
As someone who believes that industry has been far too wasteful of far too many things for far too many decades, I see at the whole "global warming" crusade in pretty much the same way as I see Greenpeace and Soukagakkai and Scientology.
Out of balance.
A day late and a hundred dollars short.
Barking up the wrong tree. Searching under the lamppost where they think there's light instead of in the shadows where the wallet was dropped.
Running around screaming the obvious answers instead of stopping to dig for the real meanings to things.
In the best light, getting excited about a single micro-diamond of truth when there are large pearls, rubies, amethysts, sapphires, beryls, all sorts of things of value just lying around being ignored. In the worst light, riding the handiest hobby horse of a true principle because it makes them feel empowered.
If you really think global warming is simply a matter of reducing greenhouse gases, fine. You start. Turn off your computer, go get a poster, and demonstrate somewhere. The worst you'll generate doing that is a little methane. Be sure to walk or bike there, of course. (Not knocking footpower, I don't have a car, myself. Just reminding you.)
In the meantime, I'm going to put/. away and go work on some teaching materials on a computer that is definitely contributing to the global entropy by running energy piped from a nuclear reactor through a Rube Goldberg contraption of a scale that very few of previous centuries could have even begun to imagine. Lots of entropic processes here.
Helping teach kids to think for themselves instead of contributing to the economic and sociological entropy by buying packaged answers like the current fuss about global warming.
It's going to happen. It was already way too late before/. itself existed. If you want to solve the problem, however, screaming about it is not the best solution. There is plenty to do in learning to use less damaging technologies to get the necessary jobs done, in learning to leave the unnecessary jobs undone, in encouraging others to do the same from your example, and in preparing for when it all hits the fan. The more sane people there are when the waves and the droughts and the plagues hit, the more sane people there will be who survive.
And it really is a troll, whether you think you mean it so or not. Somebody brings it up here every time there is any way to manufacture an excuse for the question, and it really is not relevant most of the time, present context included.
The easy definition:
Religion is what you believe (except sometimes in the case that you claim to be atheist or agnostic) about the world around you and the universe in general, how it ticks and how it all came to be, the bases for determining good and evil and answering moral questions (especially the question of evil), and the bases for your choices of priorities.
Some of those who claim atheism or agnosticism ascribe the same thing to a system or a collection of systems of philosophies and/or cosmologies, which system or collection is constructed so as to avoid reference to superstition, or to a being or entity that would normally be called God
(Others simply use agnosticism and/or atheism as an excuse to not go to the bother of trying to figure out what they themselves believe or why. They claim it should all be obvious, and they tend to speak of science in religious tones, and it's no wonder why.)
A cult is the same thing (concepts, system/collection of philosophies, etc.) for the other guy, if it makes you uncomfortable, gets in your way, or takes something away from you that you, according to your religious or basic philosophical beliefs, believe to be your right.
That's the easy definition, and, while it is not correct, it is meaningful and useful if you let it cause you to think seriously about what you yourself believe and what you think you don't believe, and why.
That was the way it was explained to me by my then boss some ten years back. That's also the way I've seen it described in the newspapers. Didn't snip any articles, but you might try searching the newspaper sites. (My wife subscribes to the Daily Yomiuri. I suppose it's because they give her the Japanese ads in the English paper.)
Convert it to Romaji: furii-taimaazu... furiitaimaazu... furiita-imazu... furiita
Got it?
By the way, your description is neither satire nor exaggeration. The security side of it is no longer reality, but other than that, you're better than 90% accurate.
I'm one of those who have bailed.
I've seen some companies that have tried to do the right thing by their engineers, but they just get eaten by the next wave of college grads at the next startup willing to burn themselves out for the mirage of a permanent posh position. Only to get their company killed by the wave after next, two years down the road, about the time they've all hit the wall and simply can't compete any more. Those who stay in the industry go into management or go back after taking a break as free-timers to recuperate (never getting married), or do something equally self-destructive.
I place the blame squarely on Microsfot for setting the role model: selling broken dreams.
Slashdot Mirror
or, rather, the illusion of segmenting, was the other huge hidden charm point of the x86.
It allowed us to fool ourselves into thinking we could virtualize the application on commodity hardware way back when. So we could start small and the hardware would help us move up.
It didn't matter that the hardware didn't really help after all for most apps. It gave the engineers courage to go to the bean counters and say, "Let's start small, with something we know we can handle."
Specification overkill is what really killed the 68K. Nobody dared spec it unless the spec-ed to include the kitchen sink. Otherwise the bean-counters were constantly nagging them about why they couldn't use the supposedly cheaper "standard".
duality here --
time is all we've got,
and money is just an illusion.
It's all about your priorities. If you let the gaggle of salescritters down the hallway engineer your machinery, you have the situation we have today.
But, yeah, your point on having enough RAM to fill a 256 bit address space is quite relevant.
We really don't know enough about the function of the mind to be safe in assuming any specific number of bits-per-neuron and thinking we're down.
Even when we get the neural mass figured out, we have to start accounting for the hormonal system, and then the rest of the body. Thinking is not all we do, and much of the non-cerebral stuff feeds back into the cerebral.
keeping apples with apples, so to speak.
The big iron back then had already well broken the 64k barrier.
think bio
Or, more accurately, 1997 or thereabouts?
Steve was prescient about the market and about IBM and Motorola's attention span relative to desktops?
Remember, the x86 port was there for a long time.
Kicking butt on performance ...
in the marketplace, but not in the machine. (At least not on my application mix.)
And, no, emulated PPC on iNTEL is never faster, unless you are talking about faster in emulation on a 2+GHz Core 2 Duo as opposed to a 1 GHz G4. And then just barely, maybe, sometimes, but not very often.
IBM and Motorola/Freescale wouldn't make the notebook "G5" because they were focused on something else, and because Apple kept asking for the latest fads in addition to processors that worked well for their application areas.
For some reason, the suits have always biased the market for iNTEL. If it's not the "standard", it is not good enough to be just as good on the average. It has to be twice as good in every case, or the bean counters say the "standard" is somehow cheaper.
You'll find out how stupid in about a year.
IBM also tried it, but with the PPC.
EVerybody and their dog has tried it.
ARM is getting close.
Could that be the problem?
If the voter with no special needs is handed a felt-tip and a paper ballot, all he needs to vote is three walls and a curtain. The machinery can be saved for the people who really need them.
Presto! much shorter lines.
I know there will always be people who don't believe "in" enlightened self-interest, but it is not in your own self-interest to deliberately (How should I put this politely?) defecate in your own water supply.
You started by playing around with the scripts that the real blackhats built and left lying around. Then one of them contacts you (Because he naturally left a call-home in your script and has been "keeping an eye on you" -- but not much of an eye. Don't kid yourself.) and suggests you help him collect a bot army.
Now you've learned how to get a bot army, and you have a small army of your own. Trouble is, small armies aren't profitable. So you start the moving from script-jockey (The blackhats don't want to insult you, so they don't call you kiddie to your face.) to script-remodeller. But you have to eat, so when your blackhat suggests you try a little extortion, it sounds interesting.
What he doesn't tell you is that he is leading you to run interference for him while he goes after bigger fish. He tells you how to get into some foreign bank and set up accounts that have a very ephemeral existence, then stands back and watches you, and waits for you to either prove you're on top of this game or get arrested.
In the meantime, the money you are sucking out of the economy is not available to do the kind of dev work you'd prefer.
You lose.
Intelligent?
Okay, which is a better outcome for the company?
(1) Shares steadily decline to $10 in 2010. (Assuming management has no magic to bring it back flat or back to growth.)
(2) Shares shoot up to (almost) $40 for a week, drop below what they are now as I-cahn't-keep-my-fingers-out-of-other-people's-pockets and his ilk sell theirs off, then essentially disappear completely as Microsoft mismanages the merger.
You think Microsoft can properly manage it while keeping Yahoo as a separate company? You think Microsoft can inflate their search company's "value" with Yahoo's customers?(Sans tech. Be serious.)
But as far as the customer base goes, should Microsoft ever take Yahoo over, I'll be one ex-customer. No way I want Microsoft mishandling my mail. And I'm not particularly unique about that, either. I have some relatives who are ex- hotmail.com, now on Yahoo, who would also move in a heartbeat.
Buying the Microsoft "bail-out" had only one possible result for Yahoo -- being bailed entirely out of the industry. Permanently.
I-cahn't is just a financial bully thinking he has a chance to abuse the courts to his profit.
And, yes, it was a no-brainer. Just say no.
The stock buyback was to make them less vulnerable to the stockholders. That has been mentioned by others.
Nations produce value.
Any time a company stops producing value (or at least producing the illusion of value), the rules change.
Remember, they have been one of the sources of income for the money market accounts that you suggest putting their assets in. If they quit making (the illusion of) money, that's one major input to the money market accounts that quits performing.
Now, go to your bank and ask why they wouldn't allow you to invest more than a few million in a money market account with them.
If you get your mind wrapped around the realities of that much, just to really take the wind out of your imaginative sails, go find out how much a salary of 30,000 a year costs a company in support and infrastructure.
Then go back and do the math.
There is no magic in having lots of money.
Microsoft has to start performing for real, or they will end up on the block for real. And with no buyers, because it becomes more and more clear that they have never had or sold anything of value. Illusions, all.
Illusions can only make so much money before they start disintegrating under their own weight, and Microsoft has hit that limit.
We really need mod points for stupidness. Or perhaps obtuseness, although obtuseness, especially obviously deliberate obtuseness, is really hard to differentiate from trolling.
I take it you really are one of those that simply can't believe there are people for whom popularity contests are irrelevant?
The first language I learned was BASIC. (I almost learned 8080 assembler and half-learned TI calculator about a year before that, but didn't quite get there.)
After that, I started learning 6800 assembler the bottom-up way (playing with a prototyping board with a monitor/debug ROM). Wired a BASIC onto the board, but I wanted a high-level language. I took Pascal and ForTran at the same time, IIRC, at the local college, and the professor mentioned that I might be able to find a FORTH to load onto it. (He also recommended a floppy drive, which recommendation I studiously ignored.) I got a listing of a 6800 implementation of fig-FORTH and loaded it by hand (saved it to tape). Learned CoBOL and RPG (Report Program Generator, not Role Playing Game) in the meantime.
I thought I understood programming after that. Went to the big U and ended up in CS. (Stupid move.) Learned C and became unable to program in a timely manner. Had to re-implement FORTH in 6809 to finally graduate.
I'm not sure whether it was C that screwed me up or FORTH.
I know I can't program CoBOL any more, and I know that I have lost more than one job because of the time I spent learning to use the tools of C to build modular programs in college. Can't program CoBOL because it's just too much work to convince myself to keep track of all the games you have to play to emulate locality of reference in CoBOL to get UI screens to respond reasonably to user input. I also have problems working with legacy C source code built by high-school-grads who are untrained in modularization, etc., and are plenty willing to burn themselves out keeping track of thousands of globals while churning out close to a thousand lines of C a day. (Copy-paste and change a few globals that should have been parameters, etc.) The code the other guys wrote reminded me of nothing more than CoBOL. Couldn't compete, either, when the managers wanted me to pump out the same number of the same kinds of lines and somehow "add in" the value of my advanced degree.
(huh? This industry is crazy. Mad. Kind of like the rest of the world, I guess.)
I like FORTH. I don't really know much about Smalltalk, except what I may have absorbed studying Objective C and playing with Squeak, but I don't buy it when anyone argues in favor of complicated languages. It seems to me that they (you?) are primarily arguing the equivalent of that C should be written like CoBOL, according to some baroque set of inherited rules that probably had more to do with the tools that were once (but are no longer being) commonly used than with the problem being solved.
So, what are you saying? Is high-school algebra, with its precedence rules, the best algebra, just because modern mathematicians have used it for a long time (until, of course, they dig into the really useful stuff)?
assymetric. Download may be fast, upload not so fast.
On the other hand, ADSL may (depending on your drivers) help limit the damage of a "customer" getting slashdotted.
A lot of subcultures may make a big thing about conformity, but even when the majority are in some meaningful sense "good", being different does not require being bad. The world is way too complex, and so are people.
Typical mistake in amateur philosophy, don't feel too bad about it. The key is this: it is good for you and me to have different jobs. Otherwise, we'd both be in each other's way and there'd be another job, that one of us could be doing, not getting done.
And it isn't just jobs. Thin of the old "nursery rhyme", Jack Sprat.
However, seeking the popular deviations instead of seeking within is never a good idea. The correct answer is "Don't try to be different. Just don't try to be the same. As trite is it is, the blue genie was right. Be yourself."
Is it fun?
/. away and go work on some teaching materials on a computer that is definitely contributing to the global entropy by running energy piped from a nuclear reactor through a Rube Goldberg contraption of a scale that very few of previous centuries could have even begun to imagine. Lots of entropic processes here.
/. itself existed. If you want to solve the problem, however, screaming about it is not the best solution. There is plenty to do in learning to use less damaging technologies to get the necessary jobs done, in learning to leave the unnecessary jobs undone, in encouraging others to do the same from your example, and in preparing for when it all hits the fan. The more sane people there are when the waves and the droughts and the plagues hit, the more sane people there will be who survive.
As someone who believes that industry has been far too wasteful of far too many things for far too many decades, I see at the whole "global warming" crusade in pretty much the same way as I see Greenpeace and Soukagakkai and Scientology.
Out of balance.
A day late and a hundred dollars short.
Barking up the wrong tree. Searching under the lamppost where they think there's light instead of in the shadows where the wallet was dropped.
Running around screaming the obvious answers instead of stopping to dig for the real meanings to things.
In the best light, getting excited about a single micro-diamond of truth when there are large pearls, rubies, amethysts, sapphires, beryls, all sorts of things of value just lying around being ignored. In the worst light, riding the handiest hobby horse of a true principle because it makes them feel empowered.
If you really think global warming is simply a matter of reducing greenhouse gases, fine. You start. Turn off your computer, go get a poster, and demonstrate somewhere. The worst you'll generate doing that is a little methane. Be sure to walk or bike there, of course. (Not knocking footpower, I don't have a car, myself. Just reminding you.)
In the meantime, I'm going to put
Helping teach kids to think for themselves instead of contributing to the economic and sociological entropy by buying packaged answers like the current fuss about global warming.
It's going to happen. It was already way too late before
We're not talking about Apple releasing this next month.
We're talking about Apple buying psystar (or some similar company) next year and keeping them as a wholly-owned subsidiary.
Apple doesn't take a hit for being in the cheap market if Apple is not, itself, in the cheap market.
And it really is a troll, whether you think you mean it so or not. Somebody brings it up here every time there is any way to manufacture an excuse for the question, and it really is not relevant most of the time, present context included.
The easy definition:
Religion is what you believe (except sometimes in the case that you claim to be atheist or agnostic) about the world around you and the universe in general, how it ticks and how it all came to be, the bases for determining good and evil and answering moral questions (especially the question of evil), and the bases for your choices of priorities.
Some of those who claim atheism or agnosticism ascribe the same thing to a system or a collection of systems of philosophies and/or cosmologies, which system or collection is constructed so as to avoid reference to superstition, or to a being or entity that would normally be called God
(Others simply use agnosticism and/or atheism as an excuse to not go to the bother of trying to figure out what they themselves believe or why. They claim it should all be obvious, and they tend to speak of science in religious tones, and it's no wonder why.)
A cult is the same thing (concepts, system/collection of philosophies, etc.) for the other guy, if it makes you uncomfortable, gets in your way, or takes something away from you that you, according to your religious or basic philosophical beliefs, believe to be your right.
That's the easy definition, and, while it is not correct, it is meaningful and useful if you let it cause you to think seriously about what you yourself believe and what you think you don't believe, and why.
Not sure what your point is, but Is "free timer" English?
That was the way it was explained to me by my then boss some ten years back. That's also the way I've seen it described in the newspapers. Didn't snip any articles, but you might try searching the newspaper sites. (My wife subscribes to the Daily Yomiuri. I suppose it's because they give her the Japanese ads in the English paper.)
Convert it to Romaji: furii-taimaazu ... furiitaimaazu ... furiita-imazu ... furiita
Got it?
By the way, your description is neither satire nor exaggeration. The security side of it is no longer reality, but other than that, you're better than 90% accurate.
I'm one of those who have bailed.
I've seen some companies that have tried to do the right thing by their engineers, but they just get eaten by the next wave of college grads at the next startup willing to burn themselves out for the mirage of a permanent posh position. Only to get their company killed by the wave after next, two years down the road, about the time they've all hit the wall and simply can't compete any more. Those who stay in the industry go into management or go back after taking a break as free-timers to recuperate (never getting married), or do something equally self-destructive.
I place the blame squarely on Microsfot for setting the role model: selling broken dreams.
It would sure be nice to live in a society where everybody understood the stopping problem and what it means.
I mean, there's at least about 50% hope that, understanding the problem, they'd quit trying to use computers to solve the stopping problem.