The mouse was useful years ago, long before it was really marketable, um, people didn't even have computers, but once they did, then it was in line for marketability.
You misunderstand my point. Think about it this way: if you have no computer, is a mouse useful to you? The answer is of course no. Nothing is "useful" per se; usefulness can only be evaluated in context. A mouse without a computer is generally useless. That is why I say "cool" and "useful" are different. A mouse can be cool if you know what a computer is and know what a mouse is, but if you don't own a computer anyway, why would you buy a mouse?
Not only is that quote non-sensical, it's disrespectful to the anti-fascists who fought died to keep the world safe from tyranny.
The point is, you have to be careful that people who cloak themselves in anti-fascism aren't simply another type of fascist themselves.
Example: Communists fought Fascists, but in practice there was little difference between Nazism and Stalinism. If you're counting victims, Stalinism was actually worse!
In my experience, for computers there is an initial power surge that is maybe 2-3x normal draw, and lasts anywhere from 20 seconds to a couple of minutes.
My workstation starts up with both fans running full power, then when the OS comes on line and realizes it has only one CPU (out of potential 2) and one graphics board (out of a potential 3) it switches the fans down to half speed (it may even switch one of them off altogether).
On higher end machines, the OS support getting actual fan rpm with a syscall:-)
I was also interested to note that high CPU usage produces measurable extra power usage. On a dual-processor P3/733 system, each processor pulls an extra 10 watts under load.
Well, there is definitely more electrical activity in a busy system - for example, rather than just heartbeating and mostly idle, there will constant activity on the bus, between the I/O devices, within the CPU. The thing that really wastes power on my laptop is maintaining the 802.11b link while the machine isn't using the network - sometimes I'll pop the PCMCIA card out if I'm working, gets me up from just over 4 to just under 5 hours of battery.
The fact of the matter is that the market is a horrible, horrible place for brilliantly useful ideas to thrive if they aren't (tadaaaaa!) marketable...
But if something is useful then by definition it is marketable, because it creates value by the very fact that it is useful to people... however "cool" and "useful" are not synonyms.
If they can't turn enough of a profit to not only feed you, your employees, your landlord (if you're brick and mortar), and your shareholders, then it's not gonna play.
If people aren't (at least) willing to pay for it, then from their perspective it is not useful (note: it still may be cool). It should be obvious that something that is useful to person X may not be useful to person Y. It's perfectly possible to admire something for its technical elegance, yet not buy it because it doesn't do anything that you want it to do. See my recent journal entry on iPod for an example of this: it's very cool, but I won't buy one until it has what I want.
But that sweet deal is gone, boys and girls, and it's probably never coming back.
Don't be so pessimistic, my friend. The economy boom-busts in approximate 10-year cycles. There was a boom in the 80s that gave rise to the word "yuppie", there was another in the late 90s that gave us dotcoms, there'll be another in the mid to late 00s. Just sit tight. And in that one, you'll know the score: make hay while the sun shines and make sure you've a nest egg for the early '10s bust.
Now, for Linkin Park, these guys have no room to bitch. They got noticed by UPLOADING SONGS IN DIGITAL FORMAT and posting on other bands' web forums asking their fans to try out their music. And now their bitching about the same-style format that got them where they are today. What a whiny bunch of prats.
Nothing new under the sun, my friend. How do you think Metallica built a cult following back in the day? Through the bootleg scene... they positively encouraged fans to tape live shows and trade the tapes. Hell, I was there.
Now Metallica are coasting along on past glories... from the Black Album onwards, everything they've done has been complete rubbish. James Hetfield tells the old-skool fans to fuck off, and Lars Ulrich, that petulant little runt, whines that bootleggers are stealing the bread from his mouth. That's what he does, he doesn't complain or rant, or even bitch, he just whines.
On principle, I'm gonna download me some Metallica. I won't listen to it, but I'll just keep it there on my HD, so I can smirk whenever I read them and their whining every time this topic comes up. Figure I'll do my best to get copies to anyone who wants 'em, if anyone does.
Pish-posh to the idiots who say being a Perl programmer somehow taints you. Please. Bad programming habits can occur in any language...
Not to the same extent. I'm not saying that Perl is a bad language, but it is one of a family of languages including TCL and shell that are best used for small, throw-away programs that just do one thing. Example: if you want to manipulate/etc/passwd how would you do it? Most perl programmers would read it and split() on:. I've done the same myself if I just want to do a job like say build a list of usernames and GCOS for another application. But there is actually a proper API to do it, getpwent(). Why use it when the hack method is so much easier, tho'? When all you have is a regexp parser, everything looks like a string. And if all you have is an associative array, everything looks like a hashtable.
A C programmer wouldn't even think like that, instead he or she would automatically look for an API to do whatever they wanted to do. A C programmer wanting a custom data structure would think "linked list of structs", which can be a variable sized array, a b-tree, a web, whatever you want them to be.
The problem with perl is that there is no one right way to do anything, many techniques can be as valid as each other. Perl programmers say that is a strength, and if you're just coding for yourself, it is. But if you're writing as part of a team, or code that will havbe several maintainers over its lifespan, then you will find that everyone has their own opinion on what is the "best" way, and those opinions won't match your own. That's fine in an academic debate, but not so good when there's a product to maintain 10 years after it was originally written.
I don't mean to single out Perl and its relations particularly. C++ can be as bad. I remember one project where one programmer thought of a particular data structure as a stream, and overloaded >> to iterate over it from beginning to end. Another however thought of it as a stack, and in his code >> retrieved the last item, then deleted it from the main list. Both were valid from the points of views of those programmers, and the project manager couldn't make a judgement call as to which was "right". That was way back in the day, and whoever's maintaining it now (if they haven't rewritten it) has to remember that the same operator means very different things in different places! Get it wrong and you'll get the data you expect in reverse order and may or may not destroy it in the process!
Some languages are better than others for larger projects. In my experience, both Java and Python are a good compromise between easy to write and easy to maintain.
If you get a job in a larger group, don't be discouraged.
I'd say go to the larger team for your first programming job - they're more likely to have the time, money and inclination to train you properly, and the skills you will learn (programming is only one of the skills a good programmer must have) will transfer far better than a small team where you are likely to become "all programmer".
I went from programming to system administration and back again several times. If you know how computers work, it's not much of a leap to programming them.
Some of the skills transfer, but I have noticed in myself and others sometimes the personality does not. System administration involves a wide variety of small tasks, each of which has "closure". There is a beginning and an end to system administration tasks, even if they're routine, like starting a rollout of a patch, then it being complete. You need to have lots of knowledge, but you need to maintain very little context because tasks are discrete.
Programming is different - tasks are a lot less likely to end cleanly. You might work on a project full time for a few months, think it's done, then a few months after that you have to come back to it to patch it, add a feature, port it to a different OS or something. It's a few large tasks rather than lots of small ones. It requires a narrower but deeper kind of knowledge - you might spend all your time using one language working on one codebase, for years at a stretch.
In short, you need to think about how your personality measures job satisfaction. Do you like variety and completion, or do you like depth and potentially everlasting projects? (I know people who've been working on the same codebase for 15+ years, but that's what they like and they're happy doing that).
Let them. The economic implications of this are kind of silly. I mean $4.00 per blank CD? Sounds like something Greece would try to pull.
Those who think this is about music are missing the point. The truth is, "cradle to grave" social programmes are bankrupting Sweden. The levy on CDs is a tax grab, plain and simple. It just so happens that some politician thinks that file sharers are wealthier than the average Swede and can therefore be squeezed a little more. I doubt notions of freedom and copyright even crossed their minds.
In the OS/2 days, there was an internal segment of IBM that loved OS/2 and promoted OS/2 while at the same time another segment of IBM was doing almost everything in their power to destroy OS/2. Schizophrenia at IBM is not unheard of.
What actually happened was this: there were two business units (among many) in IBM, one made the IBM PC, one made OS/2. Both units had their pwn P&L - they were responsible for their own money, in other words. Both were also responsible for reporting back to head office with profits, and if they didn't, they would be responsible for reducing headcount.
Essentially, the OS/2 group said to the PC group, could you help us meet our targets by preinstalling OS/2 on everything? And the PC group replied, we can't do that, because we have our own targets to meet, and a large chunk of those targets we can only meet by selling to people who want MS preinstalled.
Now, maybe head office could have stepped in at that point, and rejigged the targets - fewer PC sales, more OS/2 sales, but they didn't (probably too busy counting the money from mainframe sales). So it wasn't that the PC people wanted to kill OS/2 for the sheer hell of it - they just didn't want OS/2 to endanger their own survival.
No offense, but you struggle because you're a slashbot and don't know what you're talking about. All communication in and out of a dealing room is recorded. This is so a customer can call up and do a trade on the phone, and then can't "DK" - deny later making the trade. Also, it means that traders can't pass on information they shouldn't to outside.
Traders want everything to be recorded. Those tapes can keep you out of jail.
they could still use their mobile phone or some other mechanism.
Mobile phones are blocked inside dealing rooms. And even if they weren't, even being seen using one would get you in trouble. Sure you can pop down to Starbucks and make a call from there - in the 10 minutes it took you to walk down there, the market's moved, any information you might be sneaking out is probably obsolete.
Doesn't there come a point where you have to acknowledge that not all communication that takes place at a place of work is 'owned' (in a responsibility-for sense) by the employer?
Like I say, you don't know what you're talking about. Sure a dealer can make a personal phone call, if he gets time, the bank don't care, they just think he's schmoozing a customer. The only time the tapes are listened to is if something comes to court. This protects everyone involved, the customer, the dealer and the bank.
Email is easy because you just mirror it on a server. You'd need some sort of complicated transparent proxy to log normal IMs, and that wouldn't work with encrypted conversations.
Brokers aren't going to be using just some random IM client they downloaded from the web, they'll be using something like this which looks and feels like a regular IM client (MSN in this case) but is designed for the need of the finance business, with logging to a server, encryption, directory services etc.
No, blame NASA for overspending earlier in the project. NASA wanted a blank cheque from the taxpayer. If NASA demonstrated the ability to bring large projects in on time and within budget, they'd find it a lot easier to get money from the appropriations committee. All Bush said was look, we can't keep giving you more and more money if you can't show us anything for it.
This will do a lot more good than harm. Space travel suffers from some extreme eliteism, justified or not - and if the average joe doesn't see people who don't have 50 initials after their name going up, they are and will lose interest in space exploration.
You are exactly right. Imagine if a government banned private citizens from owning or operating cars, yet used their taxes to build roads and buy cars for the exclusive use of unelected government officials. That is exactly what NASA are their supporters want to do with space - make it their exclusive preserve, with unlimited funding from the taxpayer and zero accountability.
Did you know there were originally 3 separate plans for the space station? Plans A and B called for expensive, difficult, in-orbit assembly of small parts. Plan C called for building the whole thing on the ground, strapping it to the back of a shuttle booster assembly in place of the shuttle, then sending it up in one piece to orbit where it would unfold/inflate/etc. The three plans were put before an independant panel at MIT to choose the best. The MIT brainiacs chose C: it was cheaper, easier, bigger, better equipped and it would have set a precendent for using the shuttle boosters as a heavy-lift platform.
But the government, in the shape of Al Gore and his minions, shot that plan right down, and told NASA to adopt plan A. Plan C was too cheap and involved too little pork for the home states - and would force the government to justify why the expensive shuttle programme was continuing at the expense of real science and exploration.
Space exploration won't happen for real until there is real accountability - and that means organizations that can justify their spending in terms of real results, like He3 mining on the moon or prospecting for minerals on Mars. The ISS is useless - its crew will spend most of their time just maintaining it, there's something like 1/2 person-day/day available for actual work! The sooner NASA is disbanded, the better!
America is so free then why was there slavery in this land? And even in the last 50 years rights of black people have been 2nd rate.
You know, slavery isn't uniquely American. For centuries there have been empires with slaves, the Persians, the Ottomans, the Chinese, the Romans and many many more.
What is unique about America in particular and Western culture in general is that the slaveowners and potential slaveowners fought for the freedom of slaves. Ever heard of that little thing called the American Civil War? Hundreds of thousands of whites died so that blacks could be free.
know slavey and black right is sliding off topic but I think it shows how the general population can still think that things are great when they are not.
On ther contrary, it is on topic. It illustrates (assuming you are American) just how ignorant the average American is of the true accomplishments of your country. And you do know that China still has slave labour?
And if a journalist would get fired for witing his opinion, wouldn't that be oppression?
No, because it's not the government doing it. All an editor can do is fire a reporter, and there's nothing to stop that reporter going to a rival newspaper and competing with his former employer. An editor can't have that reporter thrown in jail or anything.
Some journalists are hired to write "op ed", and some are hired to write accurate factual accounts. If a journalist does the former but was hired for the latter, then it's bias and the journalist should be fired for misconduct!
to answer your question. i'm not going to waste my time acting as your research gimp but even if there is no headline screaming "good guy sent to jail after sms conviction" it doesn't mean that people haven't been spied upon, arrested or even imprisoned based partly on the evidence gained from sms messages.
Right, "just because it never happened, doesn't mean it never happened." You liberals are all the same - you whine like babies about a free and open society, but you will believe and say anything to protect a communist dictatorship.
it's an accepted fact that echelon exists (presuming the BBC is an ok source for you?). do you honestly think it doesn't handle sms?
Police forces have used surveillance on criminals since long before electronic communication even existed. What's your point?
What's so terrible about that? Why would you bias yourself (and waste a LOT of time) by poring over someone's code before writing your own? You may subconsciously emulate what they've done, and taint any originality you might have started with.
That's like saying "why waste time reading the law, it might give you ideas for crimes to commit".
and that is different from the US and the UK how exactly? maybe they search for different words but the principle is the same.
I invite you to post a link from a reputable news site (say the FT or NY Times) reporting that a single innocent person has been arrested or imprisoned in the US or EU as a result of interception of SMS messages.
Go on.
Use google to help you, if you like.
Use Lexis/nexis if you have access to it.
You won't find one because guess what, it never happened. Nothing that has ever happened in the US or UK even compares to what is par for the course in China or North Korea.
I know you think you're a "rebel" but guess what, criticizing the government is a trend, nothing more. It's what all the cool kids are doing these days. And you can't even see that you're being led by the nose as part of the crowd.
Btw, The US also has censorship problems. Just look at how american news sources acted over Iraq - did a single mainsteam journalist criticize the government's plan?
You're talking nonsense. The very fact that you can freely criticize the government without fear of a visit from the secret police is proof that you are not being oppressed.
I'll flip it around: of the journalists who did criticize the government's plan, how many are in gulags now? I'll answer:
None, because in the West we have a little thing called freedom of speech, and
We don't have any gulags anyway. You're thinking of the Chinese, the North Koreans, the old Soviet Empire, the old Iraq, etc.
So mainstream journalists supported the President. Look at any opinion poll and you'll see that the majority of ordinary Americans did too. You haven't proven anything apart from the fact that journalists are people too!
Orthogonal Persistence = leave machine on indefinitely. What happens when errors and/or data corruption occur in core? Planned maintenance involving powering down the machine?
No it doesn't - it just means that from the perspective of an application, there is no difference between malloc() and open(). You ask for some storage, you get it (unless something goes wrong, of course). You read and write to your bit of storage. At some point it may be in main memory, in some cases it will be on disk. The OS takes care of moving things around, you never see it. In Unix, there are the concepts of main memory, the file cache, the swap space, the file system. On (say) an AS/400 these distinctions simply don't exist outside of the kernel - all disk is swap space, all memory is cache, all memory is allocated from swap, and all cache is flushed when a program exits.
Basically turn everything into memory mappings...and that limits your data size to your address sizes. May not be a problem with 64-bit addressing, but storage is growing exponentially.
64-bit is something new in the PC world, but in the world of professional computing, 64-bit has been around for a long time.
And backups? Seperating data from instructions? Sharing data across heteregeguous systems? Or is the plan EROS everywhere?
IBM solved all of these problems decades ago. I always smirk when Unix people in general and Linux people in particular think they're just inventing something that IBM had back in the 80s:-)
Dr Hans Blix, chief UN weapons inspector was heard to comment "We have received intelligence that IBM has ammassed a huge stockpile of patents of mass infringement. In the hand of the elite Special Legal Guard, these PMIs can be deployed anywhere in the world with only 45 minutes notice."
"SCO, a small lawsuit-producing country located on IBMs borders, is reportedly being eyed by IBM for annexation."
An IBM general later commented "We will level their cities, slaughter their firstborns and sow their fields with salt. Are there any questions?"
Actually, we use binary because we can't really build anything else (there are no positions between "on" and "off", thus we are essentially limited, at this point in time, to base-2 computers). Base-3 computers exist, but they are really binary at heart so it's pretty pointless.
As this article explains, the real difficulty was in fabricating trinary components. By the time the techniques were good enough, everyone had already bet the farm on binary. Knuth was also a fan of ternary, with values -1, 0 and 1.
Slashdot Mirror
The mouse was useful years ago, long before it was really marketable, um, people didn't even have computers, but once they did, then it was in line for marketability.
You misunderstand my point. Think about it this way: if you have no computer, is a mouse useful to you? The answer is of course no. Nothing is "useful" per se; usefulness can only be evaluated in context. A mouse without a computer is generally useless. That is why I say "cool" and "useful" are different. A mouse can be cool if you know what a computer is and know what a mouse is, but if you don't own a computer anyway, why would you buy a mouse?
Not only is that quote non-sensical, it's disrespectful to the anti-fascists who fought died to keep the world safe from tyranny.
The point is, you have to be careful that people who cloak themselves in anti-fascism aren't simply another type of fascist themselves.
Example: Communists fought Fascists, but in practice there was little difference between Nazism and Stalinism. If you're counting victims, Stalinism was actually worse!
In my experience, for computers there is an initial power surge that is maybe 2-3x normal draw, and lasts anywhere from 20 seconds to a couple of minutes.
:-)
My workstation starts up with both fans running full power, then when the OS comes on line and realizes it has only one CPU (out of potential 2) and one graphics board (out of a potential 3) it switches the fans down to half speed (it may even switch one of them off altogether).
On higher end machines, the OS support getting actual fan rpm with a syscall
I was also interested to note that high CPU usage produces measurable extra power usage. On a dual-processor P3/733 system, each processor pulls an extra 10 watts under load.
Well, there is definitely more electrical activity in a busy system - for example, rather than just heartbeating and mostly idle, there will constant activity on the bus, between the I/O devices, within the CPU. The thing that really wastes power on my laptop is maintaining the 802.11b link while the machine isn't using the network - sometimes I'll pop the PCMCIA card out if I'm working, gets me up from just over 4 to just under 5 hours of battery.
The fact of the matter is that the market is a horrible, horrible place for brilliantly useful ideas to thrive if they aren't (tadaaaaa!) marketable...
But if something is useful then by definition it is marketable, because it creates value by the very fact that it is useful to people... however "cool" and "useful" are not synonyms.
If they can't turn enough of a profit to not only feed you, your employees, your landlord (if you're brick and mortar), and your shareholders, then it's not gonna play.
If people aren't (at least) willing to pay for it, then from their perspective it is not useful (note: it still may be cool). It should be obvious that something that is useful to person X may not be useful to person Y. It's perfectly possible to admire something for its technical elegance, yet not buy it because it doesn't do anything that you want it to do. See my recent journal entry on iPod for an example of this: it's very cool, but I won't buy one until it has what I want.
But that sweet deal is gone, boys and girls, and it's probably never coming back.
Don't be so pessimistic, my friend. The economy boom-busts in approximate 10-year cycles. There was a boom in the 80s that gave rise to the word "yuppie", there was another in the late 90s that gave us dotcoms, there'll be another in the mid to late 00s. Just sit tight. And in that one, you'll know the score: make hay while the sun shines and make sure you've a nest egg for the early '10s bust.
Now, for Linkin Park, these guys have no room to bitch. They got noticed by UPLOADING SONGS IN DIGITAL FORMAT and posting on other bands' web forums asking their fans to try out their music. And now their bitching about the same-style format that got them where they are today. What a whiny bunch of prats.
Nothing new under the sun, my friend. How do you think Metallica built a cult following back in the day? Through the bootleg scene... they positively encouraged fans to tape live shows and trade the tapes. Hell, I was there.
Now Metallica are coasting along on past glories... from the Black Album onwards, everything they've done has been complete rubbish. James Hetfield tells the old-skool fans to fuck off, and Lars Ulrich, that petulant little runt, whines that bootleggers are stealing the bread from his mouth. That's what he does, he doesn't complain or rant, or even bitch, he just whines.
On principle, I'm gonna download me some Metallica. I won't listen to it, but I'll just keep it there on my HD, so I can smirk whenever I read them and their whining every time this topic comes up. Figure I'll do my best to get copies to anyone who wants 'em, if anyone does.
Pish-posh to the idiots who say being a Perl programmer somehow taints you. Please. Bad programming habits can occur in any language...
/etc/passwd how would you do it? Most perl programmers would read it and split() on :. I've done the same myself if I just want to do a job like say build a list of usernames and GCOS for another application. But there is actually a proper API to do it, getpwent(). Why use it when the hack method is so much easier, tho'? When all you have is a regexp parser, everything looks like a string. And if all you have is an associative array, everything looks like a hashtable.
Not to the same extent. I'm not saying that Perl is a bad language, but it is one of a family of languages including TCL and shell that are best used for small, throw-away programs that just do one thing. Example: if you want to manipulate
A C programmer wouldn't even think like that, instead he or she would automatically look for an API to do whatever they wanted to do. A C programmer wanting a custom data structure would think "linked list of structs", which can be a variable sized array, a b-tree, a web, whatever you want them to be.
The problem with perl is that there is no one right way to do anything, many techniques can be as valid as each other. Perl programmers say that is a strength, and if you're just coding for yourself, it is. But if you're writing as part of a team, or code that will havbe several maintainers over its lifespan, then you will find that everyone has their own opinion on what is the "best" way, and those opinions won't match your own. That's fine in an academic debate, but not so good when there's a product to maintain 10 years after it was originally written.
I don't mean to single out Perl and its relations particularly. C++ can be as bad. I remember one project where one programmer thought of a particular data structure as a stream, and overloaded >> to iterate over it from beginning to end. Another however thought of it as a stack, and in his code >> retrieved the last item, then deleted it from the main list. Both were valid from the points of views of those programmers, and the project manager couldn't make a judgement call as to which was "right". That was way back in the day, and whoever's maintaining it now (if they haven't rewritten it) has to remember that the same operator means very different things in different places! Get it wrong and you'll get the data you expect in reverse order and may or may not destroy it in the process!
Some languages are better than others for larger projects. In my experience, both Java and Python are a good compromise between easy to write and easy to maintain.
If you get a job in a larger group, don't be discouraged.
I'd say go to the larger team for your first programming job - they're more likely to have the time, money and inclination to train you properly, and the skills you will learn (programming is only one of the skills a good programmer must have) will transfer far better than a small team where you are likely to become "all programmer".
I went from programming to system administration and back again several times. If you know how computers work, it's not much of a leap to programming them.
Some of the skills transfer, but I have noticed in myself and others sometimes the personality does not. System administration involves a wide variety of small tasks, each of which has "closure". There is a beginning and an end to system administration tasks, even if they're routine, like starting a rollout of a patch, then it being complete. You need to have lots of knowledge, but you need to maintain very little context because tasks are discrete.
Programming is different - tasks are a lot less likely to end cleanly. You might work on a project full time for a few months, think it's done, then a few months after that you have to come back to it to patch it, add a feature, port it to a different OS or something. It's a few large tasks rather than lots of small ones. It requires a narrower but deeper kind of knowledge - you might spend all your time using one language working on one codebase, for years at a stretch.
In short, you need to think about how your personality measures job satisfaction. Do you like variety and completion, or do you like depth and potentially everlasting projects? (I know people who've been working on the same codebase for 15+ years, but that's what they like and they're happy doing that).
Let them. The economic implications of this are kind of silly. I mean $4.00 per blank CD? Sounds like something Greece would try to pull.
Those who think this is about music are missing the point. The truth is, "cradle to grave" social programmes are bankrupting Sweden. The levy on CDs is a tax grab, plain and simple. It just so happens that some politician thinks that file sharers are wealthier than the average Swede and can therefore be squeezed a little more. I doubt notions of freedom and copyright even crossed their minds.
In the OS/2 days, there was an internal segment of IBM that loved OS/2 and promoted OS/2 while at the same time another segment of IBM was doing almost everything in their power to destroy OS/2. Schizophrenia at IBM is not unheard of.
What actually happened was this: there were two business units (among many) in IBM, one made the IBM PC, one made OS/2. Both units had their pwn P&L - they were responsible for their own money, in other words. Both were also responsible for reporting back to head office with profits, and if they didn't, they would be responsible for reducing headcount.
Essentially, the OS/2 group said to the PC group, could you help us meet our targets by preinstalling OS/2 on everything? And the PC group replied, we can't do that, because we have our own targets to meet, and a large chunk of those targets we can only meet by selling to people who want MS preinstalled.
Now, maybe head office could have stepped in at that point, and rejigged the targets - fewer PC sales, more OS/2 sales, but they didn't (probably too busy counting the money from mainframe sales). So it wasn't that the PC people wanted to kill OS/2 for the sheer hell of it - they just didn't want OS/2 to endanger their own survival.
I struggle to see the value in this.
No offense, but you struggle because you're a slashbot and don't know what you're talking about. All communication in and out of a dealing room is recorded. This is so a customer can call up and do a trade on the phone, and then can't "DK" - deny later making the trade. Also, it means that traders can't pass on information they shouldn't to outside.
Traders want everything to be recorded. Those tapes can keep you out of jail.
they could still use their mobile phone or some other mechanism.
Mobile phones are blocked inside dealing rooms. And even if they weren't, even being seen using one would get you in trouble. Sure you can pop down to Starbucks and make a call from there - in the 10 minutes it took you to walk down there, the market's moved, any information you might be sneaking out is probably obsolete.
Doesn't there come a point where you have to acknowledge that not all communication that takes place at a place of work is 'owned' (in a responsibility-for sense) by the employer?
Like I say, you don't know what you're talking about. Sure a dealer can make a personal phone call, if he gets time, the bank don't care, they just think he's schmoozing a customer. The only time the tapes are listened to is if something comes to court. This protects everyone involved, the customer, the dealer and the bank.
Email is easy because you just mirror it on a server. You'd need some sort of complicated transparent proxy to log normal IMs, and that wouldn't work with encrypted conversations.
Brokers aren't going to be using just some random IM client they downloaded from the web, they'll be using something like this which looks and feels like a regular IM client (MSN in this case) but is designed for the need of the finance business, with logging to a server, encryption, directory services etc.
The US is many things, but stingy with foreign aid it is not.
Blame Bush. He took away the funding.
No, blame NASA for overspending earlier in the project. NASA wanted a blank cheque from the taxpayer. If NASA demonstrated the ability to bring large projects in on time and within budget, they'd find it a lot easier to get money from the appropriations committee. All Bush said was look, we can't keep giving you more and more money if you can't show us anything for it.
This will do a lot more good than harm. Space travel suffers from some extreme eliteism, justified or not - and if the average joe doesn't see people who don't have 50 initials after their name going up, they are and will lose interest in space exploration.
You are exactly right. Imagine if a government banned private citizens from owning or operating cars, yet used their taxes to build roads and buy cars for the exclusive use of unelected government officials. That is exactly what NASA are their supporters want to do with space - make it their exclusive preserve, with unlimited funding from the taxpayer and zero accountability.
Did you know there were originally 3 separate plans for the space station? Plans A and B called for expensive, difficult, in-orbit assembly of small parts. Plan C called for building the whole thing on the ground, strapping it to the back of a shuttle booster assembly in place of the shuttle, then sending it up in one piece to orbit where it would unfold/inflate/etc. The three plans were put before an independant panel at MIT to choose the best. The MIT brainiacs chose C: it was cheaper, easier, bigger, better equipped and it would have set a precendent for using the shuttle boosters as a heavy-lift platform.
But the government, in the shape of Al Gore and his minions, shot that plan right down, and told NASA to adopt plan A. Plan C was too cheap and involved too little pork for the home states - and would force the government to justify why the expensive shuttle programme was continuing at the expense of real science and exploration.
Space exploration won't happen for real until there is real accountability - and that means organizations that can justify their spending in terms of real results, like He3 mining on the moon or prospecting for minerals on Mars. The ISS is useless - its crew will spend most of their time just maintaining it, there's something like 1/2 person-day/day available for actual work! The sooner NASA is disbanded, the better!
America is so free then why was there slavery in this land? And even in the last 50 years rights of black people have been 2nd rate.
You know, slavery isn't uniquely American. For centuries there have been empires with slaves, the Persians, the Ottomans, the Chinese, the Romans and many many more.
What is unique about America in particular and Western culture in general is that the slaveowners and potential slaveowners fought for the freedom of slaves. Ever heard of that little thing called the American Civil War? Hundreds of thousands of whites died so that blacks could be free.
know slavey and black right is sliding off topic but I think it shows how the general population can still think that things are great when they are not.
On ther contrary, it is on topic. It illustrates (assuming you are American) just how ignorant the average American is of the true accomplishments of your country. And you do know that China still has slave labour?
And if a journalist would get fired for witing his opinion, wouldn't that be oppression?
No, because it's not the government doing it. All an editor can do is fire a reporter, and there's nothing to stop that reporter going to a rival newspaper and competing with his former employer. An editor can't have that reporter thrown in jail or anything.
Some journalists are hired to write "op ed", and some are hired to write accurate factual accounts. If a journalist does the former but was hired for the latter, then it's bias and the journalist should be fired for misconduct!
to answer your question. i'm not going to waste my time acting as your research gimp but even if there is no headline screaming "good guy sent to jail after sms conviction" it doesn't mean that people haven't been spied upon, arrested or even imprisoned based partly on the evidence gained from sms messages.
Right, "just because it never happened, doesn't mean it never happened." You liberals are all the same - you whine like babies about a free and open society, but you will believe and say anything to protect a communist dictatorship.
it's an accepted fact that echelon exists (presuming the BBC is an ok source for you?). do you honestly think it doesn't handle sms?
Police forces have used surveillance on criminals since long before electronic communication even existed. What's your point?
What's so terrible about that? Why would you bias yourself (and waste a LOT of time) by poring over someone's code before writing your own? You may subconsciously emulate what they've done, and taint any originality you might have started with.
That's like saying "why waste time reading the law, it might give you ideas for crimes to commit".
of course Linus is going to have little regard for software patents. He's a European and that's one bit of stupidity we have yet to import from the US
Correct me if I'm wrong (altho' I'm pretty sure I'm not) but you are constrained by the law of the country you are in, not the country you are from.
If Linus is found to have broken a US law while in the US he can be arrested by US authorities and thrown in a US jail, before being deported.
and that is different from the US and the UK how exactly? maybe they search for different words but the principle is the same.
I invite you to post a link from a reputable news site (say the FT or NY Times) reporting that a single innocent person has been arrested or imprisoned in the US or EU as a result of interception of SMS messages.
Go on.
Use google to help you, if you like.
Use Lexis/nexis if you have access to it.
You won't find one because guess what, it never happened. Nothing that has ever happened in the US or UK even compares to what is par for the course in China or North Korea.
I know you think you're a "rebel" but guess what, criticizing the government is a trend, nothing more. It's what all the cool kids are doing these days. And you can't even see that you're being led by the nose as part of the crowd.
You're talking nonsense. The very fact that you can freely criticize the government without fear of a visit from the secret police is proof that you are not being oppressed.
I'll flip it around: of the journalists who did criticize the government's plan, how many are in gulags now? I'll answer:
So mainstream journalists supported the President. Look at any opinion poll and you'll see that the majority of ordinary Americans did too. You haven't proven anything apart from the fact that journalists are people too!
Orthogonal Persistence = leave machine on indefinitely. What happens when errors and/or data corruption occur in core? Planned maintenance involving powering down the machine?
:-)
No it doesn't - it just means that from the perspective of an application, there is no difference between malloc() and open(). You ask for some storage, you get it (unless something goes wrong, of course). You read and write to your bit of storage. At some point it may be in main memory, in some cases it will be on disk. The OS takes care of moving things around, you never see it. In Unix, there are the concepts of main memory, the file cache, the swap space, the file system. On (say) an AS/400 these distinctions simply don't exist outside of the kernel - all disk is swap space, all memory is cache, all memory is allocated from swap, and all cache is flushed when a program exits.
Basically turn everything into memory mappings...and that limits your data size to your address sizes. May not be a problem with 64-bit addressing, but storage is growing exponentially.
64-bit is something new in the PC world, but in the world of professional computing, 64-bit has been around for a long time.
And backups? Seperating data from instructions? Sharing data across heteregeguous systems? Or is the plan EROS everywhere?
IBM solved all of these problems decades ago. I always smirk when Unix people in general and Linux people in particular think they're just inventing something that IBM had back in the 80s
Next they'll be getting the U.N. involved!
Dr Hans Blix, chief UN weapons inspector was heard to comment "We have received intelligence that IBM has ammassed a huge stockpile of patents of mass infringement. In the hand of the elite Special Legal Guard, these PMIs can be deployed anywhere in the world with only 45 minutes notice."
"SCO, a small lawsuit-producing country located on IBMs borders, is reportedly being eyed by IBM for annexation."
An IBM general later commented "We will level their cities, slaughter their firstborns and sow their fields with salt. Are there any questions?"
We will slaughter all the penquins and have them for dinner
I've never had penguin, but puffin is quite tasty if cooked right.
Actually, we use binary because we can't really build anything else (there are no positions between "on" and "off", thus we are essentially limited, at this point in time, to base-2 computers). Base-3 computers exist, but they are really binary at heart so it's pretty pointless.
As this article explains, the real difficulty was in fabricating trinary components. By the time the techniques were good enough, everyone had already bet the farm on binary. Knuth was also a fan of ternary, with values -1, 0 and 1.