SCOX is down to $3.66 today. Yesterday was a new 52-week low. From May to early August, the price hovered around $5. But now it's
well below that point. Nothing SCO says or does seems to push the price up any more. Recall that at the peak of the litigation hype, it was around $20. The all-time high was over $100, but that was right after the IPO in 2000.
The current price is roughly consistent with their cash position, now that they've paid off BayStar.
There's an earnings call on August 31, and then we'll know how well, or badly, SCO did this quarter. SCO has lately been issuing press releases for many minor events, and none of them mention substantial revenue. So there probably isn't any new income.
Meanwhile, many of the various motions in SCO vs IBM will be heard in September. If IBM wins any of them, SCO is toast. If IBM doesn't win any of them, IBM is no worse off.
There's a bright side to this. Spam sent in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act is easy to filter.
With a legitimate subject line and sender, most spam filters will immediately recognize spam and make it go away.
"Final Report of the Louisiana Purchase Exposition Commission"?
Still, I look forward to the day when someone starts digitizing the Mechanics Institute Library in San Francisco. It's a beautiful private library one can join. The books are in excellent condition, and there are century old original editions on the shelves.
But it's the magazine collection that's stunning.
They have Popular Mechanics in bound volumes, all the way back to the beginning, when it was a serious scientific journal. All the major railroad magazines from the heyday of railroading.
Every issue of Electric Railway Journal (the trade magazine of streetcars). Few other libraries kept that stuff.
OpenOffice has all the right stuff now. It even works reasonably well. What it needs now is a big push to clean up the dirty laundry problems. The menu system needs to be cleaned up. For example, there are "insert" and "format" menus, but not everything in "insert" is in "format". The user interface is full of inconsistencies like that.
And, let's face it, OpenOffice's version of Clippy really sucks.
It's come so far. Remember the original StarOffice "desktop"? With some serious usability improvements, OpenOffice really could displace Word.
Someone remarked the other day, possibly on this very board, along the lines of "the C++ standardisation committee is now full of template-loving metaprogramming fans" who are more concerned with fixing their pet superlibraries than they are with fixing the more glaring flaws in C++ as a modern programming language. I'm sure anyone who follows developments around the language, particularly the serious Usenet groups, will see at least an element of truth in that claim.
Yes. The top priority of the C++ standards committee is adding obscure template features few would trust in production code. There's active hostility to any attempt to increase the safety of the language. There's denial, led by Strostrup, that C++ has major problems.
The latest thing over there is to introduce a really clever lock-free thread synchronization concept.
It improves performance slightly at the cost of making concurrent programming as complex as distributed multiprocessor cache design.
Some serious effort should be given to working through the IEEE to redirect, or remove if necessary, the existing C++ committee.
A. I never had carpal tunnel syndrome. I had hand problems.
Q. Are you able to code now?
A. Yes. Because it turns out my problem is not carpal tunnel syndrome, and the things that help it are not things that help carpal tunnel syndrome. It turns out for me a keyboard with a light touch is what I need, and I have keyboards with a light touch so I can now do my own typing. But I couldn't for a number of years. When I found suitable keyboards, and they're not funny shaped keyboards or anything, they're ordinary shaped keyboards, they just have keys you don't have to push very hard.
Now here's the ultimate geek keyboard, from the Symbolics 3600 LISP machine. This is what Stallman wanted before he got carpal tunnel. Designed for EMACS, it has six shift keys:
SHIFT, CONTROL, SYMBOL, META, SUPER, and HYPER.
They can be used in combination, allowing 64 different shift modes, which can be applied to any key on the keyboard. You can then bind any of these combinations to any function in EMACS.
This was called the "Space Cadet" keyboard at MIT. Stanford had keyboards for SAIL with four shift keys: SHIFT, CONTROL, META, and TOP. MIT wanted to one-up Stanford. Hence this gadget.
I own three "integrated development environments for Java". Support has been dropped for all of them.
The Swing/AWT mess.
The lousy GUI performance.
CLASSPATH
Libraries that come and go. Remember Java 3D?
Garbage collection stalls.
Nobody uses applets any more.
Write once, debug everywhere. Try uploading Java servelets to a hosting service provider.
The language itself isn't that bad. It's Sun that's the problem. Java is a classic dot-bomb product - launched with great fanfare, given away, and heavily promoted. Of course it sucks.
I use Mozilla on Windows 2000, Windows XP, QNX 6.21, and Red Hat Linux.
There are a few generic problems that never seem to get fixed. These appear on all platforms.
Mozilla doesn't multitask very well. While mail is downloading, browsing stalls for tens of seconds.
Sometimes it goes into long compute loops.
"XUL.mfl" becomes corrupted after crashes, and must be deleted before Mozilla is usable again.
Big mail folders choke the mail system.
All of these problems have been around for years, and never seem to get fixed.
The big problem seems to be that Mozilla has a homebrew database for its internal data, and it's a lousy database.
The Navy vs. the Night Monsters. It's one of those old "monsters on isolated island" movies. The ending, though... The people get to a radio. They call in an air strike. No more monsters. Problem solved.
Actually, the real problems in "robot ethics" come from the need to predict the consequences of actions. A robot needs enough predictive ability to
determine whether an action could cause harm. Until there's predictive ability, ethical decisions are impossible.
Many of the problems in tort law revolve around such issues. Look up the doctrine of the "last clear chance" for some classic insights.
As usual, defensive measures are aimed at the last war. We're going to be stuck with air transport paranoia until somebody tries another kind of terrorist attack.
It's probably going to come out in a few years that al-Queda is down to a dozen guys with cell phones, making calls once in a while to rattle the US.
Incidentally, if you haven't read bin Laden's writings, do so. His stated plan was to use terrorism to make western civilization more oppressive and thus less attractive. Bush is playing right along.
There seems to be an effort to keep SCOX from closing below 4. But it's not likely to be any more successful than the efforts to support the price at 5, 10, and 14 were.
When the dust settles, the GPL will be in great shape. SCO won't be. The lesson that businesses need to take from this is that trying to buck the GPL is hazardous to your business future.
Down in the "below sub-prime lending market" ("Bad Credit? No Credit?") there's OnTime.
Pay or the car won't start.
No data link, though; when you pay, you get a 6-digit code to punch in.
The next step up is PowerPay, with a one-way wireless link.
"The PowerPay user interface enables operators to enter payment activity and the solution will automatically control customer vehicle usage through the dispatch of appropriate wireless controls."
Finally, we get PassTrax, with GPS and a two-way link.
They know where you are, and they can turn the car off.
I was thinking along these lines a few years ago, when I did some work with the GLOW toolkit, which offers a portable GUI built on top of OpenGL. Once 3D hardware got reasonably good, that approach worked fine. It was clear that much of the complexity of existing window systems was now unnecessary.
The main job of the window system at the OS and graphics card level is protection - keeping each application locked inside its own windows. Everything else, as Gosling points out, really should be done by the application.
More important, though, is that it is time for window systems to become real time. You should never wait for the window system, and you should never see any artifacts of the window system. Any card that can run even older video games can do this.
Maximum Leader Ashcroft announced that today's terrorism alert level is reddish-orange. Travel across state lines is prohibited.
Two tourists were accidently shot dead today near the White House when they pointed a camera at the limo of the Secretary for State Security.
The disposable bodysuits required for air travel will be available in new colors this fall.
Toothpaste has been removed from the permitted carry-on items list due to a potential terrorist threat.
Gasoline isn't rationed, but it costs $21/gallon. It's tax deductable as a business expense.
The E-mail "security fee" is being raised from $0.50 to $0.75 per message, to cover the increased costs of reading and censorship by Homeland Security. Spam is down to 0.001% of all E-mail.
Homeland Security announced today that 96.3% of road intersections in the US were equipped with surveillance cameras, and that 100% coverage would be achieved within two years.
Information about behavior patterns as obtained from cell phone locators and surveillance cameras will now be made available to college admissions officers, employers, insurance companies, and military recruiters.
International
Cleanup of the wreckage of Seoul, after the nuclear war between North and South Korea, has been halted again due to higher than expected radioactivity.
Yesterday,
Israel sent robot bulldozers into the Jenin refugee camp to crush the homes of "terrorist sympathizers".
China announced that their moon base personnel would have to serve longer tours due to budget cuts.
The IP address "67.42.142.160" is a server (mas-6000-server.swccnm.com) at the Southwest Counseling Center in Las Cruces, NM. It's in forward, but not reverse, DNS.
Their "Chief IT officer" is Eugene Haley, 505-647-2876, "eughal@trailnet.com". Someone might want to tell him he has a problem.
They've probably been rooted.
A "MAS 6000" is a Mitel Networks 6000 Managed Applications Server, which is a prepackaged Red Hat Linux server, usually in a 1U rackmount unit. "The 6000 MAS is simple to use and requires little or no IT expertise to install and manage," says the vendor. It provides a "firewall", E-mail, and other standard server functions. It's a "network appliance". The installation instructions actually say to put it in a closet and disconnect the keyboard. It's supposed to be secure out of the box.
This whole thing depends on "taking the camera back to the store". What's wrong with this picture?
There's a desperate, last-ditch attempt by the camera industry to re-introduce consumables into a product that no longer needs them. Expensive incompatible flash memory cards, expensive special paper for inkjet printers, and, of course, the "printer ink" industry
all fit this model. They're just delaying the inevitable.
Incidentally, the inkjet situation should open up in a few years. Key patents are approaching expiration. The basic bubblejet patent expired this year.
A key point here is that the original intent of the RISC designers was to design simple CPUs that would execute one instruction per clock. That was achieved. Early Alpha and MIPS machines represent that approach in its purest form.
Then came the Intel Pentium Pro. It took 3000 people to design. It was far more complicated than any previous microprocessor, or, for that matter, most mainframe CPUs. And it executed more than one instruction per clock, while dealing with all the horrors of the x86 instruction set. Many people had thought that impossible. Intel did it. Actually, several acres of engineers in tiny cubicles in Santa Clara did it. It was an amazing achievement that something designed by 3000 people actually worked well.
The Pentium Pro was expensive to make, because it was a multi-chip module. But as soon as it became possible to fit the cache and Pentium Pro CPU on one chip,
Intel came out with that as the Pentium II, and later, the Pentium III. Those took over the industry, relegating the RISC parts to niche markets.
Inertial fusion, as funded by DOE, is a bomb program. It's aimed at studying pulsed fusion events for bombs, not the continuous reactions needed for a power plant. DOE admits this:
"Currently, much of our research plays a key role in the DOE's Stockpile Stewardship Program to maintain the U.S. nuclear deterrent without performing underground nuclear testing."
Slashdot Mirror
The current price is roughly consistent with their cash position, now that they've paid off BayStar. There's an earnings call on August 31, and then we'll know how well, or badly, SCO did this quarter. SCO has lately been issuing press releases for many minor events, and none of them mention substantial revenue. So there probably isn't any new income.
Meanwhile, many of the various motions in SCO vs IBM will be heard in September. If IBM wins any of them, SCO is toast. If IBM doesn't win any of them, IBM is no worse off.
There's a bright side to this. Spam sent in compliance with the CAN-SPAM act is easy to filter. With a legitimate subject line and sender, most spam filters will immediately recognize spam and make it go away.
Still, I look forward to the day when someone starts digitizing the Mechanics Institute Library in San Francisco. It's a beautiful private library one can join. The books are in excellent condition, and there are century old original editions on the shelves.
But it's the magazine collection that's stunning. They have Popular Mechanics in bound volumes, all the way back to the beginning, when it was a serious scientific journal. All the major railroad magazines from the heyday of railroading. Every issue of Electric Railway Journal (the trade magazine of streetcars). Few other libraries kept that stuff.
And, let's face it, OpenOffice's version of Clippy really sucks.
It's come so far. Remember the original StarOffice "desktop"? With some serious usability improvements, OpenOffice really could displace Word.
Yes. The top priority of the C++ standards committee is adding obscure template features few would trust in production code. There's active hostility to any attempt to increase the safety of the language. There's denial, led by Strostrup, that C++ has major problems.
The latest thing over there is to introduce a really clever lock-free thread synchronization concept. It improves performance slightly at the cost of making concurrent programming as complex as distributed multiprocessor cache design.
Some serious effort should be given to working through the IEEE to redirect, or remove if necessary, the existing C++ committee.
A. I never had carpal tunnel syndrome. I had hand problems.
Q. Are you able to code now?
A. Yes. Because it turns out my problem is not carpal tunnel syndrome, and the things that help it are not things that help carpal tunnel syndrome. It turns out for me a keyboard with a light touch is what I need, and I have keyboards with a light touch so I can now do my own typing. But I couldn't for a number of years. When I found suitable keyboards, and they're not funny shaped keyboards or anything, they're ordinary shaped keyboards, they just have keys you don't have to push very hard.
This was called the "Space Cadet" keyboard at MIT. Stanford had keyboards for SAIL with four shift keys: SHIFT, CONTROL, META, and TOP. MIT wanted to one-up Stanford. Hence this gadget.
The language itself isn't that bad. It's Sun that's the problem. Java is a classic dot-bomb product - launched with great fanfare, given away, and heavily promoted. Of course it sucks.
That's probably going to work for about a month, until the spam programs are updated.
All of these problems have been around for years, and never seem to get fixed. The big problem seems to be that Mozilla has a homebrew database for its internal data, and it's a lousy database.
The Navy vs. the Night Monsters. It's one of those old "monsters on isolated island" movies. The ending, though... The people get to a radio. They call in an air strike. No more monsters. Problem solved.
Actually, the real problems in "robot ethics" come from the need to predict the consequences of actions. A robot needs enough predictive ability to determine whether an action could cause harm. Until there's predictive ability, ethical decisions are impossible.
Many of the problems in tort law revolve around such issues. Look up the doctrine of the "last clear chance" for some classic insights.
It's probably going to come out in a few years that al-Queda is down to a dozen guys with cell phones, making calls once in a while to rattle the US.
Incidentally, if you haven't read bin Laden's writings, do so. His stated plan was to use terrorism to make western civilization more oppressive and thus less attractive. Bush is playing right along.
When the dust settles, the GPL will be in great shape. SCO won't be. The lesson that businesses need to take from this is that trying to buck the GPL is hazardous to your business future.
"Oh, no!"
You can save and play both the Flash file and the QuickTime file. Full-screen, even. What's the problem?
The next step up is PowerPay, with a one-way wireless link. "The PowerPay user interface enables operators to enter payment activity and the solution will automatically control customer vehicle usage through the dispatch of appropriate wireless controls."
Finally, we get PassTrax, with GPS and a two-way link. They know where you are, and they can turn the car off.
Long Live Big Brother!
I was thinking along these lines a few years ago, when I did some work with the GLOW toolkit, which offers a portable GUI built on top of OpenGL. Once 3D hardware got reasonably good, that approach worked fine. It was clear that much of the complexity of existing window systems was now unnecessary.
The main job of the window system at the OS and graphics card level is protection - keeping each application locked inside its own windows. Everything else, as Gosling points out, really should be done by the application.
More important, though, is that it is time for window systems to become real time. You should never wait for the window system, and you should never see any artifacts of the window system. Any card that can run even older video games can do this.
Maximum Leader Ashcroft announced that today's terrorism alert level is reddish-orange. Travel across state lines is prohibited.
Two tourists were accidently shot dead today near the White House when they pointed a camera at the limo of the Secretary for State Security.
The disposable bodysuits required for air travel will be available in new colors this fall. Toothpaste has been removed from the permitted carry-on items list due to a potential terrorist threat.
Gasoline isn't rationed, but it costs $21/gallon. It's tax deductable as a business expense.
The E-mail "security fee" is being raised from $0.50 to $0.75 per message, to cover the increased costs of reading and censorship by Homeland Security. Spam is down to 0.001% of all E-mail.
Homeland Security announced today that 96.3% of road intersections in the US were equipped with surveillance cameras, and that 100% coverage would be achieved within two years.
Information about behavior patterns as obtained from cell phone locators and surveillance cameras will now be made available to college admissions officers, employers, insurance companies, and military recruiters.
Cleanup of the wreckage of Seoul, after the nuclear war between North and South Korea, has been halted again due to higher than expected radioactivity.
Yesterday, Israel sent robot bulldozers into the Jenin refugee camp to crush the homes of "terrorist sympathizers".
China announced that their moon base personnel would have to serve longer tours due to budget cuts.
A "MAS 6000" is a Mitel Networks 6000 Managed Applications Server, which is a prepackaged Red Hat Linux server, usually in a 1U rackmount unit. "The 6000 MAS is simple to use and requires little or no IT expertise to install and manage," says the vendor. It provides a "firewall", E-mail, and other standard server functions. It's a "network appliance". The installation instructions actually say to put it in a closet and disconnect the keyboard. It's supposed to be secure out of the box.
There is at least one known FTP buffer overflow vulnerability for this system, but FTP must be enabled for it to work. Similarly, there's an SSH vulnerability, but SSH must be enabled for it to work.
This whole thing depends on "taking the camera back to the store". What's wrong with this picture?
There's a desperate, last-ditch attempt by the camera industry to re-introduce consumables into a product that no longer needs them. Expensive incompatible flash memory cards, expensive special paper for inkjet printers, and, of course, the "printer ink" industry all fit this model. They're just delaying the inevitable.
Incidentally, the inkjet situation should open up in a few years. Key patents are approaching expiration. The basic bubblejet patent expired this year.
Stallman is a brilliant legal theorist. Actually, he's a better legal theorist than he is a programmer.
Then came the Intel Pentium Pro. It took 3000 people to design. It was far more complicated than any previous microprocessor, or, for that matter, most mainframe CPUs. And it executed more than one instruction per clock, while dealing with all the horrors of the x86 instruction set. Many people had thought that impossible. Intel did it. Actually, several acres of engineers in tiny cubicles in Santa Clara did it. It was an amazing achievement that something designed by 3000 people actually worked well.
The Pentium Pro was expensive to make, because it was a multi-chip module. But as soon as it became possible to fit the cache and Pentium Pro CPU on one chip, Intel came out with that as the Pentium II, and later, the Pentium III. Those took over the industry, relegating the RISC parts to niche markets.
"Currently, much of our research plays a key role in the DOE's Stockpile Stewardship Program to maintain the U.S. nuclear deterrent without performing underground nuclear testing."