One interesting aspect of this kind of election is that it starts to resemble the viewer-elections we see on reality shows. We are starting to see something that looks like instant democracy. Now, what's cool about this is that it breaks the back of the traditional political system.
The problem is that it breaks everything else too. With instant voting, the US would have nuked Kabul hours after September 11th... totally missing those responsible and slaughtering millions of (relative) innocents. Latency in the system is there for a reason.
I've noticed that those famous and/or powerful people who are not corrupt are invariably those elected by rapid popular vote, namely superstars of pop, sports, and so on.
There is one lesson that Tony Blair and New Labour learned too late: it is easy to be incorruptible when you have no real power. That's why, in Opposition, they could be "whiter than white", but as soon as they were in power, the scandals came rolling in. If the celebrities you mentioned had any real influence beyond entertainment, they would be at least as corruptible as anyone else.
Hint: any celebrity that has endorsed any product has a price.
A long, slow election process just gives all parties time to negotiate with interest groups. Slow elections generate corrupt politicians, and the semi-permanent election process we see in certain countries just creates completely corrupt political parties.
The weaker the government, the better it is for everyone. There's only really a problem if government is both strong and corrupt.
Electing politicians like this is going to annoy the established political parties. It's also going to raise a generation of politicians who have popular support but no real political network. But it's hard to see what the impact of this will be.
Populism requires short-term thinking, and is invariably a disaster in the long run. Argentina's economy lies in ruins because of the populist decisions made by Peron (don't blame the IMF, they wouldn't have even gotten involved if Peron hadn't started Argentina's economy on the downward spiral, altho' they certainly haven't made anything better).
Octave, and all but the very latest version (i.e., of some months ago) of MATLAB are interpreters, and therefore very slow on everything with loops. Granted, there is a lot you can do with some expressions in MATLAB, but anything more complicated than eigenvectors is going to need a loop, and thus will be slowed by the interpreter.
You've been able to compile MATLAB for a while now (MEX file, IIRC). And the point of MATLAB is that you have to think in terms of vectors - you would never loop over an array, you would perform the calculation on the array as a vector, which gets you straight into optimized routines in the MATLAB core.
The proof of K's speed lies in KDB, a database written entirely in K.
It looks like an interesting product - I'll definitely take a closer look once it goes MT and 64-bit. Seems a little strange to me that it wasn't built like that from the ground up, since it seems to rely so heavily on clever data structures and virtual memory caching. (Altho' I do note that the slave processes share memory, which is the way Oracle does it if you don't want MT).
Also, I'm unconvinced the inverse design will work well on sparse data. In every deal there are usually plenty of unused fields on the ticket, unless you fully normalize. It works well enough with rows, you just place all the nullable columns after the non-nullable, and Oracle will simply skip over them to the next-row marker in physical storage. Inverse tables will be fast for simple aggregates, not so sure how well they would perform for complicated multi-table joins and groups with many predicates.
The hardest part is really translating correctly the text, taking into account the particularities of every language, the customs,... and obviously, keeping the translated version up to date.
It's not always as simple as substituting words. For example, a page layout or dialog box that looks great in English may look terrible in German because the average word length is greater. Don't even get me started on languages that don't go in the same direction!
My experience of building applications that work in n languages (I've done >14 languages before, including non Western European character sets) is that you have to start thinking about it from day 0. It's very difficult to retrofit internationalization onto an existing application.
People who are buying Macs are willing to pay more because they believe they're getting their money's worth.
Well, there are two types of Mac user. Type A are like Unix workstation users, they don't really care very much about computers for their own sake, they just want something to run their one or two key apps on.
Type B, easily recognized by their black polo-neck sweaters and overwhelming sense of smugness, are the other kind. They self-consciously buy Macs for the express purpose of sneering at PC users or indeed, anyone else they can.
Type A are Apple's cash cows, but Type B's are responsible for all the bad press Mac users get, even tho' they are the minority.
It seems like more and more corporations are putting profit margins before people...
People like you make me laugh. You rant about corporations and call for more laws to control them, but you don't even realize that the government that makes your precious regulations is sponsoring this research. From the article:
A NASA-funded team led by Morris Benjaminson, at Touro College
You blame everything bad in the world on "corporations" but you're no more developed intellectually than savages who blame "witchcraft". You'd be pathetic if there weren't so many of you.
I can't help but think of the Simpsons episode where the Mayor leaves town and a group of "learned" scholars (i.e. Lisa, Dr. Hibbard, the Professor, comic-book guy, etc) take over...with hilarious results.
Indeed, but I was thinking more along the lines of Victorian Britain. Government by privileged elite saw the creation of probably the greatest empire in history - the so-called democracy since then has seen Britain's power and influence collapse.
Hey, hey... at least the Guardian tries to report *news* rather than pointless celebrity gossip.
The Guardian isn't in the news business, it's in the opinion business (same as the Daily Mail). The people who read them pay for pre-digested opinion - they choose their own broad political position (or choose not to choose it but to mimic their parents or peers), then rely on their newspaper to fill in the cracks for them.
At least the Guardian tried to bring about (essentially) the fall of the monarchy under the EU equal rights act.
Nothing sells newspapers like a little controversy.
Oh, and it felled Aitken (yay!).
So what? Any newspaper can claim to have ousted any number of politicians. I wonder if the Guardian helped to get rid of Peter Mandelson or any of New Labour? The Daily Mail (which I am picking on because it seems to be politically opposite to the Guardian) has its own targets.
And, more to the point, the Guardian is the only UK newspaper to be legally owned by its readers
LOL, and those are the same people who rant about shareholders being evil!
Hence it doesn't wage wars against other newspapers, it just reports.
If you want news, get it from somewhere that just reports plain facts - like Dow Jones, AP or Reuters - and think up the editorial for yourself. Don't read what amounts to little more than propaganda and kid yourself that you're informed.
Surely though in this age of education for all, where there are publicly funded schools, cheaply available newspapers and 24 hour news coverage, with freedom of the press & of speech, there's more reason than ever to assume everyone voting has at least adequate means of understanding the issues.
I'm not so sure. Anyone who makes a habit of reading the Guardian has pretty much abandoned any claim they might have had on independent, rational thought - but fortunately, so has anyone who makes a habit of reading the Daily Mail, and the two groups should hopefully cancel each other out. But two equal and opposite groups of idiots don't equal one larger group of sensible decision-makers.
Parliament has bungled so many times, they cannot truly be regarded as experts in rule. What, then, is the value in handing the controls over your life to a group of people who will only ask your opinion on things every few years, and whose interests rarely coincide with yours? Surely that's as unstable as running things yourself directly?
I'm basically a libertarian, with a bit of plutocrat and a bit of timocrat. My basic political belief is in the absolute minimum of government, and that decisions about spending public money should be made by the people who paid the money, not those who receive it. I consider New Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems to be no different from one another - they differ only on the details, all three are about government controlling every aspect of a citizen's life, supported by heavy taxation.
There need to be hard limits on what a government can and cannot regulate, but as we have seen in the US, a Constitution isn't all that it's cracked up to be. The British House of Lords is a good thing, IMHO, because those people plan in terms of their grandchildren, not in terms of the next election. Anyone desiring to become a professional politican has automatically disqualified themselves.
What we really need are a small group of civil servants to administer the country, but with no direct political power, and the political power to rest in the hands of people who are already accomplished in their own professions, and who can only serve one term. Perhaps politicians should be randomly chosen from a pool of people who have taken courses in history, economics, etc. The current system, i.e. "I'm voting the way I've always done" or "I'll vote for that Tony Blair, he's got a nice smile" is fundamentally broken, and will collapse under its own weight if it isn't destroyed by the libertarian-plutocrats beforehand.
but these days we have the technology to enable the much larger numbers of citizens in our cities to all vote. Remember also that the ability to vote doesn't neccessarily mean the voter will vote either - they'll tend to vote only on matters that concern them directly, much as US Senators and UK MPs do now, but at least then we'd have proper democracy - rule of the people by the people, instead of rule/(mis)representation of the people by a privileged minority.
Ah, but the Athenians could assume that everyone with a vote fully understood the issues and we can't make anything like that assumption today. For example, most people vote the way their parents did, who vote the way their parents did. That's why in Britain we see people who still proclaim their undying hatred for Margaret Thatcher voting for her political and intellectual heir Tony Blair, and people who loved Thatcher voting against him. Also, voting was mandatory in Athens - neglecting to vote was punishable by whipping with ropes.
Consider also the redistributive nature of the tax system. There is a sizeable fraction of the population who will vote for any politician promising largesse, because those voters know that they will never have to pay for it themselves. You cannot maintain a democracy if the balance of power lies in the hands of people who don't care what the government costs!
Democracy lasts until 51% of the population realize that they can legally enslave the other 49%, and politicians realize they can bribe the voters with the taxpayer's money, since the two groups don't completely overlap - there are plenty of nominal taxpayers who are actually net recipents of public money.
Rule by priveleged minority works well if (and only if) the interests of the elite and the interests of the nation are aligned. The elite enjoy their position and the proles benefit from the services of an informed and capable elite. The present system of letting anyone regardless of their knowledge or experience have the same say is dangerously unstable.
Assuming that the posting wasn't intended as flamebait, in the U. S. the term "polytechnic" is NOT "synonymous with poor-quality education." It is mostly just an indication that the school DOES have a long history.
It must be one of those words that has a slightly different meaning in British and American English. In Britain, a poly (or these days ex-poly) is where you would go if you couldn't get into a real university. They're known for churning out "media studies" and other such made-up subject graduates by the bucketload.
The article says it was built with ibm power4 chips operating at 1ghz. What I am wondering is this - if the US gov't decides to get upset about this will they prohibit IBM from selling power4 chips to the company that makes these supercomputers?
Why would they? Unlike Pakistan, an Islamic military dictatorship, India is a secular constitutional democracy. A strong India stabilizes the whole region - otherwise Pakistan would be the only nuclear-armed state in the area. Anything that makes India more self-sufficient should be welcomed by the US government.
I tend to agree with the original poster, however I fail to see how differing ideas within a company would signal its decline.
Differing ideas are one thing, differing cultures are something else. Traditionally, Microsoft have had a reputation for being very adademic and meritocratic in their decision making. Ideas are exchanged and debated, and eventually the best one wins (in theory at least). That assumes that everyone is basically moving towards the same goal, and while they have their own ideas on how to get there, their egos aren't tied up in having their personal idea be the chosen one. What matters is the goal.
But what if some people aren't so much interested in the goal per se, as they are in building their own little empire on the way to the goal? An old-skool Microserf will fully expect to argue the case, then sit back, and let the idea be considered on its merits. They won't be able to cope with a senior manager who does not have the best interests of the organization as a whole in mind. That's what I mean by a culture clash.
Possibly one of their biggest strengths (other than their monopoly) would be differing ideas among upper management.
It was when the senior management was largely comprised of Microsoft lifers who joined in the early days of the company and had worked their way up. But it's very different when those people find themselves competing with professional managers brought in as lateral hires.
Windows is a generic term. Trademarking windows is like me going and trademarking "wiper blades." It's a generic term already in common use, just like windows was. It shouldn't matter if my wiperblades company gets 90% market share, I picked a generic term.
That's a can of worms, tho'. Advanced Micro Devices? Hmm, a generic name for a company making... advanced micro devices. IBM? A generic name for an international company making... business machines. Cisco? Hmm, they happen to be based in San Francisco, so can that be trademarked? See where I'm going with this?
The only safe option is to use a made-up word, like Compaq or Nvidea.
One of my history teachers taught us that the Greeks used to have a phrase something along the lines of "Those whom the God's would destroy, they first make proud."
I think it was "they first drive mad". Hubris is what brought a mortal to their attention in the first place. Didn't like the competition, see.
This all comes down to control. What Bill wants, Bill gets, at least within his own company. You can bet your life that if Gates wanted to do something within the company, they'd turn on a dime, just the way they did back in 1995 to support Internet stuff
Yes and no. The dissonance between the two cultures could be a sign that the "cult of Bill" is waning. An autocratic leader can only be effective if everyone "drinks the koolaid". It's very hard to fight an entrenched culture, and many CEOs have failed because they couldn't get buy-in from the rank and file. I've seen this first hand, when ordinary staffers made no secret of their contempt for senior management... it's the death knell for a company.
Perhaps Microsoft are running out of the old-skool staff and the new blood they're hiring doesn't automatically defer to Bill on every decision. I'd imagine that Microsoft people are very poor at playing the sort of corporate political games that are taken for granted elsewhere, the old Microsoft culture actively discouraged it. If they've hired a bunch of people who are politically adept, they will be very difficult to control.
There is so much missing in NT compared to Unix. No VFS-like filesystem, no symbolic links, no device nodes, no setuid/setgid, no privilege sets in the filesystem
If by VFS you mean VxFS, then NTFS does that. Symlinks are fully supported (POSIX) but simply aren't used by Explorer. Device nodes are there, called Reparse Points, you can hook executables into the filesystem via a callback mechanism. A reparse point could actually be a hardware device like in Unix, of you can do cool DOMAIN/OS like stuff. For example, it would be easy to create a/etc/passwd reparse point, that looked like a text file, but when you edit it, it transparently reads and writes the real user accounts on the PDC. Setuid and setgid are all there, under the name "Run as", and NTFS ACLs are far ahead of the primitive rwxrwxrwx permission system that Unix gives you.
Why don't they throw it all away and build a REAL unix instead of bending some wannabe-unix-stuff round a broken Kernel/API design?
Heh, I bet you think Unix is the ultimate OS, don't you? Spend some time with zOS, VMS or even old DOMAIN/OS and you'll see what a real OS can do. Unix is a decade or more behind compared to those.
See "Silicon Snake Oil" by Clifford Stoll in which he arrives at a similar conclusion.
Indeed. Stoll's thesis is that between the ages of 6 and 16, computers are useless in education, and that the money would better be spent on actually taking the kids to a museum (or wherever) than simply giving them a CD-ROM about dinosaurs.
At my secondary school, there were loads of computers (RM Nimbus mostly). I don't think anyone learned anything useful from them, beyond how to type and use a word processor - but those skills aren't much use unless you have something you want to write about, they aren't ends in themselves, and what was lacking was actual teaching that should have led to that.
Fortunately, I opted out of a classroom education as much as possible and joined the Cadet Regiment. As such, I firmly believe that kids would learn more and enjoy themselves more out on the plains learning to navigate by the stars, hunt tanks, catch rabbits and polish boots than sitting in a classroom carrying out what amounts to to secretarial work.
Didn't support implmentations of more advanced scripting tools like perl or python.
Actually, Microsoft paid for ActiveState to port Perl to Windows.
Note that many apps produce binary data, even when there is no clear need for it.
That's because Microsoft's way of saving things to disk is just to persist the COM object that represents your Word document (or whatever) in RAM. It's more accurate to say that MS don't convert documents to text when there's no clear need for it.
So, if one needs to use perl or something similar to handle Windows data, one usually needs an interface or some tweaking on files.
That's what COM, OLE2 and COM+ are for. The scriptability of Office and other Microsoft apps is really surprising. You can write a trivial VBscript to query SQL Server, graph the results in Excel and paste them into a Powerpoint presentation, all automagically.
And, due to the fact that Windows lacks established standards for (almost) similar kinds of data, one needs to deal with different tools to deal with each piece of data.
You will find that COM et al are very well documented. Remember that to a significant fraction of the developer world, perhaps even a majority, Microsoft is the standard.
Sometimes, the format of different versions of one and the same program varies so radically, that one is forced to deal with different interfaces for each version.
Doesn't matter - the COM interface is the same! In Unix you would have to rewrite your parser if the format changed!
Frankly, with all the mess they created, perl and many other tools will never be able to have a fullscale use on Windows like in *NIX.
Have a look at the Win32 modules in ActivePerl. You might be surprised at how complete they are.
Even if we ignore that detail, unemployment still depends on many economic factors that remain more favourable in the UK (fingers crossed) than they are elsewhere in Europe. I don't see that you can reasonably argue that our low unemployment is caused, or even mostly caused, by the sort of working conditions we're discussing.
The idea behind the French 35-hr week was that if people had to work fewer hours, companies would have to take on more people to do the same work. This was a mistake on two levels. Firstly, the French tax system disproportionally penalizes companies for taking on more staff, and secondly, there is a limit to how much economic stimulus can be delivered by deliberately restricting economic activity!
The UK has the longest hours and lowest statutory minimum holiday entitlement of any EU member state, yet it also has almost the lowest productivity by any major benchmark.
That's true, but we also do have the lowest unemployment - 2-3% compared with 9-10% in France and Germany. Care to explain that?
Slashdot Mirror
One interesting aspect of this kind of election is that it starts to resemble the viewer-elections we see on reality shows. We are starting to see something that looks like instant democracy. Now, what's cool about this is that it breaks the back of the traditional political system.
The problem is that it breaks everything else too. With instant voting, the US would have nuked Kabul hours after September 11th... totally missing those responsible and slaughtering millions of (relative) innocents. Latency in the system is there for a reason.
I've noticed that those famous and/or powerful people who are not corrupt are invariably those elected by rapid popular vote, namely superstars of pop, sports, and so on.
There is one lesson that Tony Blair and New Labour learned too late: it is easy to be incorruptible when you have no real power. That's why, in Opposition, they could be "whiter than white", but as soon as they were in power, the scandals came rolling in. If the celebrities you mentioned had any real influence beyond entertainment, they would be at least as corruptible as anyone else.
Hint: any celebrity that has endorsed any product has a price.
A long, slow election process just gives all parties time to negotiate with interest groups. Slow elections generate corrupt politicians, and the semi-permanent election process we see in certain countries just creates completely corrupt political parties.
The weaker the government, the better it is for everyone. There's only really a problem if government is both strong and corrupt.
Electing politicians like this is going to annoy the established political parties. It's also going to raise a generation of politicians who have popular support but no real political network. But it's hard to see what the impact of this will be.
Populism requires short-term thinking, and is invariably a disaster in the long run. Argentina's economy lies in ruins because of the populist decisions made by Peron (don't blame the IMF, they wouldn't have even gotten involved if Peron hadn't started Argentina's economy on the downward spiral, altho' they certainly haven't made anything better).
Now look where US is... trying to build *more* nukes and pissing off everyone in the world except Bin Laden.
The US is increasing its stockpile of nukes? Got a source for this? Because nukes aren't much use against terrorists.
Octave, and all but the very latest version (i.e., of some months ago) of MATLAB are interpreters, and therefore very slow on everything with loops. Granted, there is a lot you can do with some expressions in MATLAB, but anything more complicated than eigenvectors is going to need a loop, and thus will be slowed by the interpreter.
You've been able to compile MATLAB for a while now (MEX file, IIRC). And the point of MATLAB is that you have to think in terms of vectors - you would never loop over an array, you would perform the calculation on the array as a vector, which gets you straight into optimized routines in the MATLAB core.
I prefer programming in C++ because I find it easier to just take responsibility for my memory.
:-)
auto_ptr is your friend
The proof of K's speed lies in KDB, a database written entirely in K.
It looks like an interesting product - I'll definitely take a closer look once it goes MT and 64-bit. Seems a little strange to me that it wasn't built like that from the ground up, since it seems to rely so heavily on clever data structures and virtual memory caching. (Altho' I do note that the slave processes share memory, which is the way Oracle does it if you don't want MT).
Also, I'm unconvinced the inverse design will work well on sparse data. In every deal there are usually plenty of unused fields on the ticket, unless you fully normalize. It works well enough with rows, you just place all the nullable columns after the non-nullable, and Oracle will simply skip over them to the next-row marker in physical storage. Inverse tables will be fast for simple aggregates, not so sure how well they would perform for complicated multi-table joins and groups with many predicates.
Interesting numbers. Have you considered benchmarking Octave or rlab also? (Or is there a native MATLAB for Linus now?)
The hardest part is really translating correctly the text, taking into account the particularities of every language, the customs,... and obviously, keeping the translated version up to date.
It's not always as simple as substituting words. For example, a page layout or dialog box that looks great in English may look terrible in German because the average word length is greater. Don't even get me started on languages that don't go in the same direction!
My experience of building applications that work in n languages (I've done >14 languages before, including non Western European character sets) is that you have to start thinking about it from day 0. It's very difficult to retrofit internationalization onto an existing application.
People who are buying Macs are willing to pay more because they believe they're getting their money's worth.
Well, there are two types of Mac user. Type A are like Unix workstation users, they don't really care very much about computers for their own sake, they just want something to run their one or two key apps on.
Type B, easily recognized by their black polo-neck sweaters and overwhelming sense of smugness, are the other kind. They self-consciously buy Macs for the express purpose of sneering at PC users or indeed, anyone else they can.
Type A are Apple's cash cows, but Type B's are responsible for all the bad press Mac users get, even tho' they are the minority.
People like you make me laugh. You rant about corporations and call for more laws to control them, but you don't even realize that the government that makes your precious regulations is sponsoring this research. From the article:
You blame everything bad in the world on "corporations" but you're no more developed intellectually than savages who blame "witchcraft". You'd be pathetic if there weren't so many of you.
I can't help but think of the Simpsons episode where the Mayor leaves town and a group of "learned" scholars (i.e. Lisa, Dr. Hibbard, the Professor, comic-book guy, etc) take over...with hilarious results.
Indeed, but I was thinking more along the lines of Victorian Britain. Government by privileged elite saw the creation of probably the greatest empire in history - the so-called democracy since then has seen Britain's power and influence collapse.
Hey, hey... at least the Guardian tries to report *news* rather than pointless celebrity gossip.
The Guardian isn't in the news business, it's in the opinion business (same as the Daily Mail). The people who read them pay for pre-digested opinion - they choose their own broad political position (or choose not to choose it but to mimic their parents or peers), then rely on their newspaper to fill in the cracks for them.
At least the Guardian tried to bring about (essentially) the fall of the monarchy under the EU equal rights act.
Nothing sells newspapers like a little controversy.
Oh, and it felled Aitken (yay!).
So what? Any newspaper can claim to have ousted any number of politicians. I wonder if the Guardian helped to get rid of Peter Mandelson or any of New Labour? The Daily Mail (which I am picking on because it seems to be politically opposite to the Guardian) has its own targets.
And, more to the point, the Guardian is the only UK newspaper to be legally owned by its readers
LOL, and those are the same people who rant about shareholders being evil!
Hence it doesn't wage wars against other newspapers, it just reports.
If you want news, get it from somewhere that just reports plain facts - like Dow Jones, AP or Reuters - and think up the editorial for yourself. Don't read what amounts to little more than propaganda and kid yourself that you're informed.
Surely though in this age of education for all, where there are publicly funded schools, cheaply available newspapers and 24 hour news coverage, with freedom of the press & of speech, there's more reason than ever to assume everyone voting has at least adequate means of understanding the issues.
I'm not so sure. Anyone who makes a habit of reading the Guardian has pretty much abandoned any claim they might have had on independent, rational thought - but fortunately, so has anyone who makes a habit of reading the Daily Mail, and the two groups should hopefully cancel each other out. But two equal and opposite groups of idiots don't equal one larger group of sensible decision-makers.
Parliament has bungled so many times, they cannot truly be regarded as experts in rule. What, then, is the value in handing the controls over your life to a group of people who will only ask your opinion on things every few years, and whose interests rarely coincide with yours? Surely that's as unstable as running things yourself directly?
I'm basically a libertarian, with a bit of plutocrat and a bit of timocrat. My basic political belief is in the absolute minimum of government, and that decisions about spending public money should be made by the people who paid the money, not those who receive it. I consider New Labour, the Conservatives and the Lib Dems to be no different from one another - they differ only on the details, all three are about government controlling every aspect of a citizen's life, supported by heavy taxation.
There need to be hard limits on what a government can and cannot regulate, but as we have seen in the US, a Constitution isn't all that it's cracked up to be. The British House of Lords is a good thing, IMHO, because those people plan in terms of their grandchildren, not in terms of the next election. Anyone desiring to become a professional politican has automatically disqualified themselves.
What we really need are a small group of civil servants to administer the country, but with no direct political power, and the political power to rest in the hands of people who are already accomplished in their own professions, and who can only serve one term. Perhaps politicians should be randomly chosen from a pool of people who have taken courses in history, economics, etc. The current system, i.e. "I'm voting the way I've always done" or "I'll vote for that Tony Blair, he's got a nice smile" is fundamentally broken, and will collapse under its own weight if it isn't destroyed by the libertarian-plutocrats beforehand.
but these days we have the technology to enable the much larger numbers of citizens in our cities to all vote. Remember also that the ability to vote doesn't neccessarily mean the voter will vote either - they'll tend to vote only on matters that concern them directly, much as US Senators and UK MPs do now, but at least then we'd have proper democracy - rule of the people by the people, instead of rule/(mis)representation of the people by a privileged minority.
Ah, but the Athenians could assume that everyone with a vote fully understood the issues and we can't make anything like that assumption today. For example, most people vote the way their parents did, who vote the way their parents did. That's why in Britain we see people who still proclaim their undying hatred for Margaret Thatcher voting for her political and intellectual heir Tony Blair, and people who loved Thatcher voting against him. Also, voting was mandatory in Athens - neglecting to vote was punishable by whipping with ropes.
Consider also the redistributive nature of the tax system. There is a sizeable fraction of the population who will vote for any politician promising largesse, because those voters know that they will never have to pay for it themselves. You cannot maintain a democracy if the balance of power lies in the hands of people who don't care what the government costs!
Democracy lasts until 51% of the population realize that they can legally enslave the other 49%, and politicians realize they can bribe the voters with the taxpayer's money, since the two groups don't completely overlap - there are plenty of nominal taxpayers who are actually net recipents of public money.
Rule by priveleged minority works well if (and only if) the interests of the elite and the interests of the nation are aligned. The elite enjoy their position and the proles benefit from the services of an informed and capable elite. The present system of letting anyone regardless of their knowledge or experience have the same say is dangerously unstable.
Assuming that the posting wasn't intended as flamebait, in the U. S. the term "polytechnic" is NOT "synonymous with poor-quality education." It is mostly just an indication that the school DOES have a long history.
It must be one of those words that has a slightly different meaning in British and American English. In Britain, a poly (or these days ex-poly) is where you would go if you couldn't get into a real university. They're known for churning out "media studies" and other such made-up subject graduates by the bucketload.
The article says it was built with ibm power4 chips operating at 1ghz. What I am wondering is this - if the US gov't decides to get upset about this will they prohibit IBM from selling power4 chips to the company that makes these supercomputers?
Why would they? Unlike Pakistan, an Islamic military dictatorship, India is a secular constitutional democracy. A strong India stabilizes the whole region - otherwise Pakistan would be the only nuclear-armed state in the area. Anything that makes India more self-sufficient should be welcomed by the US government.
Apologies to all those hoping for yet another witty one-liner here, but this story is so ridiculous that I can't think even of one!
I tend to agree with the original poster, however I fail to see how differing ideas within a company would signal its decline.
Differing ideas are one thing, differing cultures are something else. Traditionally, Microsoft have had a reputation for being very adademic and meritocratic in their decision making. Ideas are exchanged and debated, and eventually the best one wins (in theory at least). That assumes that everyone is basically moving towards the same goal, and while they have their own ideas on how to get there, their egos aren't tied up in having their personal idea be the chosen one. What matters is the goal.
But what if some people aren't so much interested in the goal per se, as they are in building their own little empire on the way to the goal? An old-skool Microserf will fully expect to argue the case, then sit back, and let the idea be considered on its merits. They won't be able to cope with a senior manager who does not have the best interests of the organization as a whole in mind. That's what I mean by a culture clash.
Possibly one of their biggest strengths (other than their monopoly) would be differing ideas among upper management.
It was when the senior management was largely comprised of Microsoft lifers who joined in the early days of the company and had worked their way up. But it's very different when those people find themselves competing with professional managers brought in as lateral hires.
Windows is a generic term. Trademarking windows is like me going and trademarking "wiper blades." It's a generic term already in common use, just like windows was. It shouldn't matter if my wiperblades company gets 90% market share, I picked a generic term.
That's a can of worms, tho'. Advanced Micro Devices? Hmm, a generic name for a company making... advanced micro devices. IBM? A generic name for an international company making... business machines. Cisco? Hmm, they happen to be based in San Francisco, so can that be trademarked? See where I'm going with this?
The only safe option is to use a made-up word, like Compaq or Nvidea.
One of my history teachers taught us that the Greeks used to have a phrase something along the lines of "Those whom the God's would destroy, they first make proud."
I think it was "they first drive mad". Hubris is what brought a mortal to their attention in the first place. Didn't like the competition, see.
This all comes down to control. What Bill wants, Bill gets, at least within his own company. You can bet your life that if Gates wanted to do something within the company, they'd turn on a dime, just the way they did back in 1995 to support Internet stuff
Yes and no. The dissonance between the two cultures could be a sign that the "cult of Bill" is waning. An autocratic leader can only be effective if everyone "drinks the koolaid". It's very hard to fight an entrenched culture, and many CEOs have failed because they couldn't get buy-in from the rank and file. I've seen this first hand, when ordinary staffers made no secret of their contempt for senior management... it's the death knell for a company.
Perhaps Microsoft are running out of the old-skool staff and the new blood they're hiring doesn't automatically defer to Bill on every decision. I'd imagine that Microsoft people are very poor at playing the sort of corporate political games that are taken for granted elsewhere, the old Microsoft culture actively discouraged it. If they've hired a bunch of people who are politically adept, they will be very difficult to control.
There is so much missing in NT compared to Unix. No VFS-like filesystem, no symbolic links, no device nodes, no setuid/setgid, no privilege sets in the filesystem
/etc/passwd reparse point, that looked like a text file, but when you edit it, it transparently reads and writes the real user accounts on the PDC. Setuid and setgid are all there, under the name "Run as", and NTFS ACLs are far ahead of the primitive rwxrwxrwx permission system that Unix gives you.
If by VFS you mean VxFS, then NTFS does that. Symlinks are fully supported (POSIX) but simply aren't used by Explorer. Device nodes are there, called Reparse Points, you can hook executables into the filesystem via a callback mechanism. A reparse point could actually be a hardware device like in Unix, of you can do cool DOMAIN/OS like stuff. For example, it would be easy to create a
Why don't they throw it all away and build a REAL unix instead of bending some wannabe-unix-stuff round a broken Kernel/API design?
Heh, I bet you think Unix is the ultimate OS, don't you? Spend some time with zOS, VMS or even old DOMAIN/OS and you'll see what a real OS can do. Unix is a decade or more behind compared to those.
See "Silicon Snake Oil" by Clifford Stoll in which he arrives at a similar conclusion.
Indeed. Stoll's thesis is that between the ages of 6 and 16, computers are useless in education, and that the money would better be spent on actually taking the kids to a museum (or wherever) than simply giving them a CD-ROM about dinosaurs.
At my secondary school, there were loads of computers (RM Nimbus mostly). I don't think anyone learned anything useful from them, beyond how to type and use a word processor - but those skills aren't much use unless you have something you want to write about, they aren't ends in themselves, and what was lacking was actual teaching that should have led to that.
Fortunately, I opted out of a classroom education as much as possible and joined the Cadet Regiment. As such, I firmly believe that kids would learn more and enjoy themselves more out on the plains learning to navigate by the stars, hunt tanks, catch rabbits and polish boots than sitting in a classroom carrying out what amounts to to secretarial work.
Didn't support implmentations of more advanced scripting tools like perl or python.
Actually, Microsoft paid for ActiveState to port Perl to Windows.
Note that many apps produce binary data, even when there is no clear need for it.
That's because Microsoft's way of saving things to disk is just to persist the COM object that represents your Word document (or whatever) in RAM. It's more accurate to say that MS don't convert documents to text when there's no clear need for it.
So, if one needs to use perl or something similar to handle Windows data, one usually needs an interface or some tweaking on files.
That's what COM, OLE2 and COM+ are for. The scriptability of Office and other Microsoft apps is really surprising. You can write a trivial VBscript to query SQL Server, graph the results in Excel and paste them into a Powerpoint presentation, all automagically.
And, due to the fact that Windows lacks established standards for (almost) similar kinds of data, one needs to deal with different tools to deal with each piece of data.
You will find that COM et al are very well documented. Remember that to a significant fraction of the developer world, perhaps even a majority, Microsoft is the standard.
Sometimes, the format of different versions of one and the same program varies so radically, that one is forced to deal with different interfaces for each version.
Doesn't matter - the COM interface is the same! In Unix you would have to rewrite your parser if the format changed!
Frankly, with all the mess they created, perl and many other tools will never be able to have a fullscale use on Windows like in *NIX.
Have a look at the Win32 modules in ActivePerl. You might be surprised at how complete they are.
Even if we ignore that detail, unemployment still depends on many economic factors that remain more favourable in the UK (fingers crossed) than they are elsewhere in Europe. I don't see that you can reasonably argue that our low unemployment is caused, or even mostly caused, by the sort of working conditions we're discussing.
The idea behind the French 35-hr week was that if people had to work fewer hours, companies would have to take on more people to do the same work. This was a mistake on two levels. Firstly, the French tax system disproportionally penalizes companies for taking on more staff, and secondly, there is a limit to how much economic stimulus can be delivered by deliberately restricting economic activity!
The UK has the longest hours and lowest statutory minimum holiday entitlement of any EU member state, yet it also has almost the lowest productivity by any major benchmark.
That's true, but we also do have the lowest unemployment - 2-3% compared with 9-10% in France and Germany. Care to explain that?