... I suggest we rename the company from Omron, by transposing the first two letters for thinking that people will pay 1500 dollars for a robotic cat that is really nothing more than a glorified Furby. At least Aibo moves around...
You should see if your company will let you run VMWare. Its a lot cheaper than another laptop, especially if its just Win98 or Win95 (VMWare Lite or something? is all you need which I believe is free or very cheap)
Microsoft has plans to add to all of its future and existing (remember that clause that this agreement can be voided at any time by the vendor...) that users of Microsoft's products are not allowed use them to research other products provided by vendors other than Microsoft themselves or vendors on their preferred vendor list (otherwise known as the folks that pay them money to be on the list)
If this FrontPage EULA is legal, I see nothing stopping the above, do you? They're not monopolistic...
Technically speaking they're just extreme commuters. Telecommuters would imply that they fly up to space just to ssh back to a server sitting back at NASA.
Somebody should mod this up. I totally agree. There are lots of programs I like (Family Guy included). If they don't fit my schedule, I'll try to tape 'em, but when the schedule is so sporadic, I don't try to keep up with it and eventually lose interest in the programs.
Family Guy is just one such show in that list for me. Other ones that I love but lost track and interest involve Boston Public and Titus. Huh, pretty funny that they are all Fox shows... Idiots.
It would also need to be able to survive a fall of several miles against water, land whatever. If the impact could potentially occur over land, one might also want to measure this impact against spikey like objects that could potentially generate considerably more force per square inch at terminal velocity on impact(flag/light/telephone poles, verticle support beams of buildings, etc)
IANAME (materials engineer) but that sounds like a pretty tall order to this and try to keep this container within a reasonable size to be launched via rocket or some other mechanism. I'm also not an Aerospace engineer so I can't help there either.
But seriously, nobody makes money as an ISP unless you are one of the big ones. The industry is extremely competitive, and I wouldn't be surprised if the big boys are keeping prices so low so that the competition dies out, before jacking them up later so they aren't running at a loss.
Nowadays, dial is pretty much dying. You'd need to provide cable internet, which would probably mean that you need a cable company first. The other alternative is DSL, of course, but then your customers need to get DSL lines from the local telco, and you need to hook your network into the telco infrastructure as well. Since most telco's (at least my experience) run ISP's over their DSL lines as well, you'll probably find it hard to compete for price against them as well.
Okay, so on to what you would need. Customer management, hardware to run your services (e-mail, news, authentication, etc.) off of, lease some POP's (point of presence) since I'm assuming you aren't a telco either, and don't forget contracting out a vendor for customer support (unless you want to do it yourself). There's more, but I'm not going to do all your work for you, I'm just trying to make a point.
It's a tough industry. You'd almost be better off starting a company and reselling local and long distance services first (CLEC) then going off and creating a ISP off of that and hope to win the competetive ISP battle.
I think the main problem with OODMS is there is no consistancy to the design of them. You have two schools of thought basically, extended-relational the (path the major RDB vendors take for fairly obvious reasons) or to build a new foundation as as O2 (out of business), ObjectStore (I believe) and other folks have taken.
IMO, extended-relational has the best chance at success because at its core you have the solid relational mathematics developed by Codd so many years ago (a solid starting point). But has anybody used the OO features of Oracle 8i for instance. I have, and I thought it sucked. It seemed all they did was put an OO interface on relational tables. You could still access OO data via standard SQL so you couldn't guarantee encapsulation, etc. and all the other great promises of the OO paradigm.
I've also used O2. Very interesting appproach, but hardly solid. (and as I've mentioned, they've gone out of business) Each vendor builds the quailties of an OO database they feel are necessary and there is no consistancy among vendors (as in the RDB world). Products are either significantly immature, lack serious qualities required for a production DBMS, or just plain don't work. (Note: I don't necessarily think this is a bad approach to the design of an OODB, in that I felt these types of products preserved a lot of what OO was trying to do. Its just that nobody has been able to define an concise, solid theory (like the relational model) upon which to build these products)
So to answer the question, why don't I use a OODBMS? Simply because the technology isn't superior to my existing RDB yet. Only in certain niche solutions (engineering, BOM's, etc.) might I actually consider using such a product. I feel its a straight-forward example of right tool for the right job.
Obviously his encryption system is based on the one time pad theory. And of course the weak point of this algorithm is keeping the pad secret. His suggestion is that sender and receiver initialize to some point in a transfer stream from a satellite perhaps. But my question is, if I capture the initial handshake encrypted by conventional means and crack that (to get the starting point), the stream of random numbers being generated over a period of time, preferably sometime before the handshake starts until the transmission is done, what's to stop me from cracking it?
A bit more brute force, skip cracking the initial handshake. What if I just listen to the random number generator and start a brute force search starting with the first number before the handshake takes place and stopping sometime after transmission has ended. When you can "read" the message, you've cracked it...
Anyway, in the end, the goal is keeping the pad secret. To sound like a textbook, if Bob is on the Earth and Alice is on the moon, you need a pad that the eavesdropper Trudy cannot access. I'm not convinced that he has done this...
Of course the difference between OS/2 and Linux is that the OS/2 zealots did not have the source code for the OS. IBM pulled the plug, they eventually had to move on or bite the bullet (I'm sure somebody out there is still running it).
With Linux, if RedHat, Slackware, Calderra, Suse, Debian, etc. all went away tomorrow, we still have the source. As long as somebody is interested in using it, they can theoretically sustain themselves by making enhancemets/changes themselves.
Can't underestimate the power of that community developed software.
Microsoft could put out a gem of an OS tommorow and there is a pretty good chance I wouldn't get rid of my Linux box becuase of this principle. I feel for my needs (a developer) Linux provides what I need.
Likewise, I would think the same would hold true on the PPC platform. I've never used Linux PPC so I don't know how it compares to its x86 bretheren, but if a user has everything all set up and running to make themselves optimally efficient, why switch OS's?
Like many Apple ideas it might be a good one with poor timing. It should be interesting....
Yeah, I was a little disturbed by his remarks on Linux as being a sub-par throwback to the 70's.
UNIX is not for everyone. Its not an operating system I would give to my mother. The user interface is a bit harsh to non-computer types. At the same time, I am a software developer. I like UNIX not because it makes me feel cool or for bragging rights. I use it because the OS fits like a glove, for what I do.
There are tons of things UNIX and the various technologies surrounding the UNIX platform do for me in my daily life that make me 150% more productive than if I were on another platform. For those who never experienced it, I like VMS for similar reasons. (and I'm not the guy who's been doing it for the last 20 years, I've only been in the industry for 3 years in my mid-20's)
The problem is that no other modern OS I've used has provided me the tools I need out of the box that I get with Linux or any other variety of UNIX. Then again, I'm on slashdot, so I guess many of you already realize this this...
Oh yeah, one last thought. We had some hardware fail a week or so back resulting in some harsh data corruption. It took a day to bring the stuff back because of the tools and services available in the OS. If this had been a different operating system, we would have probably been dead for a week. And while you can get a lot of UNIX power-tools for your Windows desktop, in a panic situation, you don't want to have to find the software and hope it works.
Gimme a better OS Mr. Lanier if you'd like, but know that mine works fine... I do find it amazing that its still the best thing to come around in 30 years, but then again that speaks to the if its not broken don't fix it philosophy or the fact that it is a very good operating system for some.
Well said. You've addressed my sentiments on the industry exactly. Overtime once in a while is understandable and acceptable. I feel if one consistantly needs to work 50 or more hours (I feel even 50 is high) the group is either trying to bite off more than it can handle or is mismanaged and/or understaffed.
Do the folks working 70+ hours a week, realize that their grandiose salarys are effectively cut in half (as is their expected lifespan potentially)?
Somebody correct me I'm wrong but I believe that transistors/pixels etc. are often go dead in laptop screens and stuff. The thing is that they are so small and are typically spread out around the screen that you don't see the lack of light coming from an individual.
I always found it interesting to read the copyrights inside of books. Some explicitly state that you may not reproduce any part of the text without written consent of the publisher. Others state you may do so as long as it is for personal use, others state you can copy and distribute without charge. Some just protect diagrams and figures, etc.
It really depends on the publisher. I've noticed that it seems a lot of computer books have copyrights of the first flavor. So I guess in response, its really up to the person performing the copying to determine whether or not its an illegal act. Even with the first, if you contacted the publisher (who does that?) then if you hand it off to the copy facility they should copy it since you are not breaking the law. The only thing they could do is request proof of such authorization or something.
Congratulations Sun on finding a hole in GPL and exploiting the hell out of it. You should be proud. You've probably just turned several thousands of your nearest and dearest fans away from you for your blatent arrogance.
This is a very, very bad PR move if your trying to show how much you embrace the open source community. I'm sure in many folk's eyes at least the OSS community, (if they don't already think so) you've just shown yourself to be no better than our friends up in Redmond.
Why not do both. Get out and work, but find a job who will reimburse you for school. Your education is free and you make big bucks which can be nice at college
Also to support your point about making the bucks while the economy is smoking. I wish I could have got a job while I was at college. Investing a lot of the money at that young of age means that you are that much more rich at the time you graduate, retire, etc. Einstein was right compounding interest is one of the most powerful forces in the world... (or however he said it)
My personal viewpoint is that techies should get the formal college education (at least on the Computer Science/Engineering front). There's so much stuff out there that one might miss some of the very basic theoretical stuff thats not in man pages, fluff computer books, web pages, etc. I also feel the solid math emphasis that good programs put on students is priceless as well.
...of all the fun you can now have at Halloween. You can go as the faceless man and gross out your neighbors.
It could revolutionize the movie making industry as well. Think of the money they can save on expensive makeup for some characters as well as some of those CGI effects like you see in Hollowman....
I think the author needs to go back to school. He's redefining what an OS is. An operating system, is software that sits on top of hardware to make the hardware accessible to the application layer via services and what not, nothing more. Exactly what he said UNIX was, a kernel and services.
I think he clouds the terms of operating system with that of an operating environment. Is a CLI part of the OS? My opinion is no. Its an application layer program that interacts with system services to make doing stuff a lot easier. The same thing takes place with a GUI.
As for his comments of, look at all the programs a modern user needs that a kernel and CLI don't provide. Well DUH!!! Why do you think Linux distro's like RedHat come with all sorts of additional software. Is that the OS though? No.
And I don't care what Brother Bill says, there is no point that I can see with merging the browser in the operating system. Merging it with the GUI is another aspect.
The only thing that makes some UNIX's obsolete is the fact that they are not at the microkernel stage. Then again, I don't know that anybody has successfully pulled the microkernel thing off yet. NT had a chance, but then they started breaking their own rules...
But perhaps it would be useful in a marketing/technical visioning type of position.
It might be useful to find out why certain systems failed and others thrive from a market standpoint. Record what features crippled one system and which were a real advantage.
Don't know for sure though. My guess is that some industry leader out there is doing it (M$, Oracle, Sun, HP, IBM, etc.) More of a businessy/marketing position though...
Slashdot Mirror
... I suggest we rename the company from Omron, by transposing the first two letters for thinking that people will pay 1500 dollars for a robotic cat that is really nothing more than a glorified Furby. At least Aibo moves around...
You should see if your company will let you run VMWare. Its a lot cheaper than another laptop, especially if its just Win98 or Win95 (VMWare Lite or something? is all you need which I believe is free or very cheap)
Funny, I seem to remember all these planes taking off of carrier decks with the words US NAVY stamped on them.
Microsoft has plans to add to all of its future and existing (remember that clause that this agreement can be voided at any time by the vendor...) that users of Microsoft's products are not allowed use them to research other products provided by vendors other than Microsoft themselves or vendors on their preferred vendor list (otherwise known as the folks that pay them money to be on the list)
If this FrontPage EULA is legal, I see nothing stopping the above, do you? They're not monopolistic...
Technically speaking they're just extreme commuters. Telecommuters would imply that they fly up to space just to ssh back to a server sitting back at NASA.
Family Guy is just one such show in that list for me. Other ones that I love but lost track and interest involve Boston Public and Titus. Huh, pretty funny that they are all Fox shows... Idiots.
It would be easy to write a shell script that used some awk/grep/sed to bump the log files for the Microsoft web site up against the download site...
Oh wait, thats right....
(sorry couldn't resist. I'm really trying to curb this MS bashing thing, its just a hard habit to kick)
IANAME (materials engineer) but that sounds like a pretty tall order to this and try to keep this container within a reasonable size to be launched via rocket or some other mechanism. I'm also not an Aerospace engineer so I can't help there either.
Nowadays, dial is pretty much dying. You'd need to provide cable internet, which would probably mean that you need a cable company first. The other alternative is DSL, of course, but then your customers need to get DSL lines from the local telco, and you need to hook your network into the telco infrastructure as well. Since most telco's (at least my experience) run ISP's over their DSL lines as well, you'll probably find it hard to compete for price against them as well.
Okay, so on to what you would need. Customer management, hardware to run your services (e-mail, news, authentication, etc.) off of, lease some POP's (point of presence) since I'm assuming you aren't a telco either, and don't forget contracting out a vendor for customer support (unless you want to do it yourself). There's more, but I'm not going to do all your work for you, I'm just trying to make a point.
It's a tough industry. You'd almost be better off starting a company and reselling local and long distance services first (CLEC) then going off and creating a ISP off of that and hope to win the competetive ISP battle.
Sorry to rain on your parade...
IMO, extended-relational has the best chance at success because at its core you have the solid relational mathematics developed by Codd so many years ago (a solid starting point). But has anybody used the OO features of Oracle 8i for instance. I have, and I thought it sucked. It seemed all they did was put an OO interface on relational tables. You could still access OO data via standard SQL so you couldn't guarantee encapsulation, etc. and all the other great promises of the OO paradigm.
I've also used O2. Very interesting appproach, but hardly solid. (and as I've mentioned, they've gone out of business) Each vendor builds the quailties of an OO database they feel are necessary and there is no consistancy among vendors (as in the RDB world). Products are either significantly immature, lack serious qualities required for a production DBMS, or just plain don't work. (Note: I don't necessarily think this is a bad approach to the design of an OODB, in that I felt these types of products preserved a lot of what OO was trying to do. Its just that nobody has been able to define an concise, solid theory (like the relational model) upon which to build these products)
So to answer the question, why don't I use a OODBMS? Simply because the technology isn't superior to my existing RDB yet. Only in certain niche solutions (engineering, BOM's, etc.) might I actually consider using such a product. I feel its a straight-forward example of right tool for the right job.
A bit more brute force, skip cracking the initial handshake. What if I just listen to the random number generator and start a brute force search starting with the first number before the handshake takes place and stopping sometime after transmission has ended. When you can "read" the message, you've cracked it...
Anyway, in the end, the goal is keeping the pad secret. To sound like a textbook, if Bob is on the Earth and Alice is on the moon, you need a pad that the eavesdropper Trudy cannot access. I'm not convinced that he has done this...
With Linux, if RedHat, Slackware, Calderra, Suse, Debian, etc. all went away tomorrow, we still have the source. As long as somebody is interested in using it, they can theoretically sustain themselves by making enhancemets/changes themselves.
Can't underestimate the power of that community developed software.
Microsoft could put out a gem of an OS tommorow and there is a pretty good chance I wouldn't get rid of my Linux box becuase of this principle. I feel for my needs (a developer) Linux provides what I need.
Likewise, I would think the same would hold true on the PPC platform. I've never used Linux PPC so I don't know how it compares to its x86 bretheren, but if a user has everything all set up and running to make themselves optimally efficient, why switch OS's?
Like many Apple ideas it might be a good one with poor timing. It should be interesting....
Alas I must wonder if moderators have a sense of humor. This one put me on the floor. Sorry, no points today...
UNIX is not for everyone. Its not an operating system I would give to my mother. The user interface is a bit harsh to non-computer types. At the same time, I am a software developer. I like UNIX not because it makes me feel cool or for bragging rights. I use it because the OS fits like a glove, for what I do.
There are tons of things UNIX and the various technologies surrounding the UNIX platform do for me in my daily life that make me 150% more productive than if I were on another platform. For those who never experienced it, I like VMS for similar reasons. (and I'm not the guy who's been doing it for the last 20 years, I've only been in the industry for 3 years in my mid-20's)
The problem is that no other modern OS I've used has provided me the tools I need out of the box that I get with Linux or any other variety of UNIX. Then again, I'm on slashdot, so I guess many of you already realize this this...
Oh yeah, one last thought. We had some hardware fail a week or so back resulting in some harsh data corruption. It took a day to bring the stuff back because of the tools and services available in the OS. If this had been a different operating system, we would have probably been dead for a week. And while you can get a lot of UNIX power-tools for your Windows desktop, in a panic situation, you don't want to have to find the software and hope it works.
Gimme a better OS Mr. Lanier if you'd like, but know that mine works fine... I do find it amazing that its still the best thing to come around in 30 years, but then again that speaks to the if its not broken don't fix it philosophy or the fact that it is a very good operating system for some.
Do the folks working 70+ hours a week, realize that their grandiose salarys are effectively cut in half (as is their expected lifespan potentially)?
Somebody correct me I'm wrong but I believe that transistors/pixels etc. are often go dead in laptop screens and stuff. The thing is that they are so small and are typically spread out around the screen that you don't see the lack of light coming from an individual.
I always found it interesting to read the copyrights inside of books. Some explicitly state that you may not reproduce any part of the text without written consent of the publisher. Others state you may do so as long as it is for personal use, others state you can copy and distribute without charge. Some just protect diagrams and figures, etc.
It really depends on the publisher. I've noticed that it seems a lot of computer books have copyrights of the first flavor. So I guess in response, its really up to the person performing the copying to determine whether or not its an illegal act. Even with the first, if you contacted the publisher (who does that?) then if you hand it off to the copy facility they should copy it since you are not breaking the law. The only thing they could do is request proof of such authorization or something.
This is a very, very bad PR move if your trying to show how much you embrace the open source community. I'm sure in many folk's eyes at least the OSS community, (if they don't already think so) you've just shown yourself to be no better than our friends up in Redmond.
Pat those legal guys on the back...
Also to support your point about making the bucks while the economy is smoking. I wish I could have got a job while I was at college. Investing a lot of the money at that young of age means that you are that much more rich at the time you graduate, retire, etc. Einstein was right compounding interest is one of the most powerful forces in the world... (or however he said it)
My personal viewpoint is that techies should get the formal college education (at least on the Computer Science/Engineering front). There's so much stuff out there that one might miss some of the very basic theoretical stuff thats not in man pages, fluff computer books, web pages, etc. I also feel the solid math emphasis that good programs put on students is priceless as well.
It could revolutionize the movie making industry as well. Think of the money they can save on expensive makeup for some characters as well as some of those CGI effects like you see in Hollowman....
I think he clouds the terms of operating system with that of an operating environment. Is a CLI part of the OS? My opinion is no. Its an application layer program that interacts with system services to make doing stuff a lot easier. The same thing takes place with a GUI.
As for his comments of, look at all the programs a modern user needs that a kernel and CLI don't provide. Well DUH!!! Why do you think Linux distro's like RedHat come with all sorts of additional software. Is that the OS though? No.
And I don't care what Brother Bill says, there is no point that I can see with merging the browser in the operating system. Merging it with the GUI is another aspect.
The only thing that makes some UNIX's obsolete is the fact that they are not at the microkernel stage. Then again, I don't know that anybody has successfully pulled the microkernel thing off yet. NT had a chance, but then they started breaking their own rules...
Then again, maybe I'm too much of a purist....
It might be useful to find out why certain systems failed and others thrive from a market standpoint. Record what features crippled one system and which were a real advantage.
Don't know for sure though. My guess is that some industry leader out there is doing it (M$, Oracle, Sun, HP, IBM, etc.) More of a businessy/marketing position though...