Proving yet again that you can write COBOL in any language.
Seriously tho, the resulting code can't be all that great for a true Java programmer to maintain after the conversion - at its heart it would still be organized in a non-OOP (procedural) manner, which would certainly require some cross-thinking.
Without going into details, I got my start as a software engineer by hacking into a well known corporate system and being offered a job. I didn't get caught, but rather let them know about it (in a very nice way!) This was more than 20 years ago now, so I dare say the climate towards benign systems hacking is probably a tad more hostile today. Intent and methods probably saved my bacon, even then.
I find it interesting that operating systems are more and more being treated like applications. Traditionally the OS was responsible for managing resources (Disk, Memory, etc.), controlling security, and coordinating activities (queues, jobs, etc.) Today the Windows OS is responsible for browsing the web, playing music, recording TV, and plotting world domination (OK, I added that last one...) Why should these things be included in the "operating system" mix? I would argue that even a windowing system is borderline (see X).
Hey, I had a portal.com account -- cup.portal.com to be precise.
I used an Amiga to access that machine over PPP, and before that UUCP. Prior to that it was UUCP to a DEC associates' VAX, and two hops to DECVAX. Pretty good turnaround on usenet too. It was that UUCP connection that finally got me to 9600 bps, which cost quite a bit in those days. When broadband came along in the 90's, I was all over that. No more modems!
Aw heck - I've got some core laying around here... Great as a conversation piece. Mine comes from my Circa 1972 PDP-11/40, and is laid out in 8KW cards.
Depending on the time frame, I'd say it was probably pre-MIDI. MIDI was first available on the Yamaha DX7, which was released in 1983. I would guess it was voltage control, as used on many analog synths of the time. Digital audio, as we use it today, would have been a non-starter in a portable system. Even commercial samplers were up in the I-Need-A-Mortgage realm of cost.
Yes, sort of... The BIOS was proprietary, but IBM did publish the source for it. The reason Phoenix had to clean room it was because it was published they needed to deliberately avoid tainting their efforts. IIRC, what they did was have two teams - one team read the IBM code and wrote descriptions of the routines, and the other team took those descriptions and wrote the code from them. This was how they managed to have such a high level of compatibility without actually copying the IBM code.
There was - it was called the PET. While the 4032 and 8032 (and the later SuperPET) used an external (but still proprietary) cassette recorder, the 2001 had it built in, next to the keyboard. Actually, I don't remember exactly if the PET could play audio through the cassette drive, but I do remember that it was a little more reliable than, say, the TRS-80, for loading, as long as the tape alignment was good.
Someone else mentioned the Spectrum...
I never actually used in anger a cassette tape for data storage, but I remember a friend loading EDTASM for his TRS-80 Model I from tape. Of course, even though the later IBM PC had a cassette interface, once memory sized exceeded a certain threshold, say 64K for sake of conversation, loading and saving from tape became completely impractical. What were data transfer speeds? 500 B/sec or so? Even SA400 drives circa 1980 could move 15K a second on average.
I find it interesting that the perception is that there aren't a lot of women in IT/CS. As both a contractor and a full time employee, I've noticed that the number of women in an organization has more to do with the attitudes of the organization and less to do with the job.
Some data points: My current team is 50/50 male/female, all engineers. The extended team maintains that ratio when you bring in QA and PM. Only when you bring in the professional services people does the ratio slip. If you take the whole company, only professional services, internal IT, and sales are under the 50/50 ratio.
I also found this to be true at a PPOE, a major university affiliated hospital. Where I did not find it to be true were several "dot bombs" I worked for. There was a strong good-ole-boy feeling at those places that I imagine would be unattractive to female applicants.
Both type of environments share similar traits in their own groups:
Female friendly places tended to have a more "academic" feel - not necessarily in academia but an environment of knowledge and growth; the environment tended to have a strong professional level of conduct and a strong work ethic. Female un-friendly places tended to have a more confrontational environment, with more competition among teams and team members. Ego was emphasized, and the environment was more "locker room" than office sometimes. Professionalism was equated with how quickly you could close a deal or come up with an angle. Many of these organization were more sales oriented than engineering oriented.
Just my opinion of course, but one that seems to hold true in my experiences.
A LASER based TV isn't new, but rather a technology finaly moving into the masses. I worked with a LASER projection display (nominally a "TV") in the mid 90's in Boston, that while expensive, worked nicely and could be scaled quite impresively. That used a gas white-light laser and a traditional color path (PCAOM, for those who know), but there's no reason it could not be recreated much more cheaply today using solid-state and diode-based lasers. Until recently the major bottleneck has been the availability of cheap and long-lasting blue-light lasers. Once that barrier started to break, things like Blue Ray discs become doable on the consumer scale. A laser based TV is actually not a bad application. Some side-effects: LASER prices will drop again as manufacturing picks up, the costs of the color modulation equipment will also drop. This means I could maybe put together a cheaper projector for the lasers, and that, along with a proper power output scaling, move this technology into bigger and lighter screens. Movie-house screens for the house? Doable, since lasers don't spread as much as a traditional light beam. Project that image on anything! Oh, and take off the screen and replace the scanners with something more "X,Y", and you have a nifty vector display, IN COLOR! Pink-floyd fans rejoice!
And then after a year it got as many bad sectors as my hair. Then I died.
I'm sorry to hear about your death, but perhaps there's good cause for a wrongful death lawsuit? Or perhaps you needed to calm down a bit more and not take it so seriously... BTW, Does the afterlife have good deals on aftermarket equipment? I bet there's a lot of VAXen still running...
RM
Several things will still be a challenge in "consumer" level images devices (i.e. cameras) 1. More pixels mean higher demands on the lenses. And good lenses are NOT cheap. 2. More pixels mean higher demands on storage. Storage is getting cheaper. 3. More pixels mean higher demands on bandwidth. Bandwith is not universal.
For your typical user of a point-and-shoot camera, 8+ megapixels won't mean much. Most people print images at 4x6" at best, or view them on the screen. For your pro or semi-pro user, they're not that affected by the point-and-shoot market, and will be looking for sharpness, clarity, color fidelity, and lack of noise. None of which are areas that CMOS sensors have excelled in.
In my personal theory that any advanced technology will eventually be applied to entertainment (in general), and Television (in specific), I predict that Quantum Computing will eventually be applied to the family entertainment center. Only it will fail completely when people discover the uncertainty principle that says you can't watch your show and at the same time know what time it's scheduled...... or something like that...
OSS Software's advantages are often cited as being 1: free, and 2: Open. Both of these are strong advantages in some situations, but not necessarily in all. Most companies aren't firstly concerned with direct purchase price. In fact, many OSS projects have commercial components that provide custimization and support for a fee. Open software is a strong pull for those of use in the software field, but usually doesn't translate for the end user of software directly. For me, the biggest advantage of OSS is that of availability and access. If I need a widget right now to solve a problem, I don't have to go through a formal purchase process with PO's and the like, I can just find what I need NOW. Then the other advantages kick in, because I can now modify it to exactly meet my needs. Yes, this translates to price via time saved, but not actual dollars. And yes, we do support OSS project with cash.
Not true. You are unique just like everyone else. According to the logic of being unique or not, that would mean nobody is unique and therefore we are all the same.
Leaving the "logic" of this alone for a moment (can you really associate the set of all unique things to equate with a member of that set??) what the original said was "pretty unique", which under most strict english parsing would be "A good looking, aestetically pleasing, unique...", which is not what the poster intended. Try "Novel" or "Innovative".
This of course makes no sense on a lot of levels. The choice of a tool is completely dependent on the environment in which it is being used. If I have a mostly Java based system, with business objects and a database layer, it makes a lot of sense to use JSP's over PHP. A lot of that choice comes from the magnatude of the system in development, developer skills, etc. I'd even consider mixing the two technologies under certain circumstances. Large multi-tier systems are complex beasts that can quickly get out of control, and JSP's fit nicely into that scheme. PHP is a powerful scripting language with many great features in its bag of tricks, but it's still a scripting language and should be used correctly.
COBOL is to Java what Neal Stephenson is to Issac Asimov. Both write good science fiction, but in the end they are really two different things entirely, syntax-wise.
(With applogies to the High School set who didn't have to endure analogies on the SAT this year...)
If I have to write lots of "rows and numbers" type programming, COBOL isn't bad. (but still not my first choice these days.) However, I don't think I want to write a GUI or the server side to a web site in it. Ditto for VB.
Of course, the whole comparison thing is meaningless unless you take into consideration what each language was designed for and when it was designed. COBOL has been around a LONG time (computer time wise), and certainly has been surplanted by new technology. There would be very few compelling reasons for me to start a new system in COBOL today. Java is (basically) a refinement of C++, with much better library support. As such, it's syntax is C based, which also has been around a long time. The C-like languages survive for two reasons: flexibility and terseness. (word?) C-like languages work on data structures, whereas COBOL-like languages work on 'business' or 'work' structures. That is the inherenet flexibility of the C-like languages vs. the COBOL-like languages. I can get C/C++/Java to work with basically any structure I want, but I'd have to bend over backwards to get COBOL to do a linked list. And I can do it in fewer characters to boot. (Programmers are lazy, ya know.)
You want your new whiz-bang language to survive? Make it flexible, make it terse, and make it fast. Perl met this criteria for many people. Java does too. VB was an aberation, surviving mostly on the sheer force of Microsoft's will. BASIC-like languages were certainly useful for what they were, but I'd argue today that a good scripting language like PHP is more appropiate for now.
I'm a TiVo Series 1 owner for quite a while now (bought the 'lifetime' subscription at the original price.) Don't get me wrong, I still love the Tivo; the interface is the best, the packaging and stability excellent. But, my S1 is starting to show it's age, and it was time to think about replacing it with something with more capability and perhaps allowing some hacking. The Series 2 machine isn't that machine. Propiatary formats, a closed system, low CPU power on the platform, and not-so-great expandibility are all adding up to move me away from Tivo. Plus, I don't want to deal with monthly subscriptions either, so the only way to go is with the lifetime subscription, which is priced too high. Two weeks ago I put together my first MythTV box, and I must say that it's been very good. Sure, it's not ready for Joe Sixpack yet, but for the crowd that wants to move video around and play around with the machine some more, it's just the ticket. I'm slowing moving recordings from the Tivo to the MythTV... Additionally, the quality of video under Myth is much better than the TiVo, and I can tweak the storage options to my hearts' content.
For Tivo, it might be too little, too late to attract the hacker community, and most of the non-tech crowd only wants to watch sienfield reruns and doesn't care about moving things to their PC. Perhaps they might have captured back some of the tech market by providing open standards and decent access methods, but Tivo still hasn't figured out who their customer is. DRM is toadying to the cable industry, not serving their customers.
Not only are there cameras, but: . Random searches on public transportation . Restrictions on what you can carry . Restrictions on where you can go . Restrictions on when you can go . Major road closings . Just about every ATF and FDA dog in the country will be in town
Not only will we be the most watched, but also the most controlled. Except for some protests in the past few weeks, Bostonians seem to be the most cowed and beaten people I've met. I'm amazed, simply amazed. We've truely traded our feedom for a false sense of security. When the next terrorist attack comes (which most likely won't be in Boston), hopefully we'll open our eyes to this. If not, we will only give the terrorists more power over us.
Slashdot Mirror
Proving yet again that you can write COBOL in any language.
Seriously tho, the resulting code can't be all that great for a true Java programmer to maintain after the conversion - at its heart it would still be organized in a non-OOP (procedural) manner, which would certainly require some cross-thinking.
Without going into details, I got my start as a software engineer by hacking into a well known corporate system and being offered a job. I didn't get caught, but rather let them know about it (in a very nice way!) This was more than 20 years ago now, so I dare say the climate towards benign systems hacking is probably a tad more hostile today. Intent and methods probably saved my bacon, even then.
Sold!
Oh, wait...
I find it interesting that operating systems are more and more being treated like applications. Traditionally the OS was responsible for managing resources (Disk, Memory, etc.), controlling security, and coordinating activities (queues, jobs, etc.) Today the Windows OS is responsible for browsing the web, playing music, recording TV, and plotting world domination (OK, I added that last one...) Why should these things be included in the "operating system" mix? I would argue that even a windowing system is borderline (see X).
Hey, I had a portal.com account -- cup.portal.com to be precise.
I used an Amiga to access that machine over PPP, and before that UUCP. Prior to that it was UUCP to a DEC associates' VAX, and two hops to DECVAX. Pretty good turnaround on usenet too. It was that UUCP connection that finally got me to 9600 bps, which cost quite a bit in those days. When broadband came along in the 90's, I was all over that. No more modems!
RM
Aw heck - I've got some core laying around here... Great as a conversation piece. Mine comes from my Circa 1972 PDP-11/40, and is laid out in 8KW cards.
Depending on the time frame, I'd say it was probably pre-MIDI. MIDI was first available on the Yamaha DX7, which was released in 1983. I would guess it was voltage control, as used on many analog synths of the time. Digital audio, as we use it today, would have been a non-starter in a portable system. Even commercial samplers were up in the I-Need-A-Mortgage realm of cost.
Yes, sort of... The BIOS was proprietary, but IBM did publish the source for it. The reason Phoenix had to clean room it was because it was published they needed to deliberately avoid tainting their efforts. IIRC, what they did was have two teams - one team read the IBM code and wrote descriptions of the routines, and the other team took those descriptions and wrote the code from them. This was how they managed to have such a high level of compatibility without actually copying the IBM code.
There was - it was called the PET. While the 4032 and 8032 (and the later SuperPET) used an external (but still proprietary) cassette recorder, the 2001 had it built in, next to the keyboard. Actually, I don't remember exactly if the PET could play audio through the cassette drive, but I do remember that it was a little more reliable than, say, the TRS-80, for loading, as long as the tape alignment was good.
Someone else mentioned the Spectrum...
I never actually used in anger a cassette tape for data storage, but I remember a friend loading EDTASM for his TRS-80 Model I from tape. Of course, even though the later IBM PC had a cassette interface, once memory sized exceeded a certain threshold, say 64K for sake of conversation, loading and saving from tape became completely impractical. What were data transfer speeds? 500 B/sec or so? Even SA400 drives circa 1980 could move 15K a second on average.
I find it interesting that the perception is that there aren't a lot of women in IT/CS. As both a contractor and a full time employee, I've noticed that the number of women in an organization has more to do with the attitudes of the organization and less to do with the job.
Some data points: My current team is 50/50 male/female, all engineers. The extended team maintains that ratio when you bring in QA and PM. Only when you bring in the professional services people does the ratio slip. If you take the whole company, only professional services, internal IT, and sales are under the 50/50 ratio.
I also found this to be true at a PPOE, a major university affiliated hospital. Where I did not find it to be true were several "dot bombs" I worked for. There was a strong good-ole-boy feeling at those places that I imagine would be unattractive to female applicants.
Both type of environments share similar traits in their own groups:
Female friendly places tended to have a more "academic" feel - not necessarily in academia but an environment of knowledge and growth; the environment tended to have a strong professional level of conduct and a strong work ethic.
Female un-friendly places tended to have a more confrontational environment, with more competition among teams and team members. Ego was emphasized, and the environment was more "locker room" than office sometimes. Professionalism was equated with how quickly you could close a deal or come up with an angle. Many of these organization were more sales oriented than engineering oriented.
Just my opinion of course, but one that seems to hold true in my experiences.
RM
Brings new meaning to the term "Tower configuration"!
RM
A LASER based TV isn't new, but rather a technology finaly moving into the masses. I worked with a LASER projection display (nominally a "TV") in the mid 90's in Boston, that while expensive, worked nicely and could be scaled quite impresively. That used a gas white-light laser and a traditional color path (PCAOM, for those who know), but there's no reason it could not be recreated much more cheaply today using solid-state and diode-based lasers.
Until recently the major bottleneck has been the availability of cheap and long-lasting blue-light lasers. Once that barrier started to break, things like Blue Ray discs become doable on the consumer scale. A laser based TV is actually not a bad application.
Some side-effects: LASER prices will drop again as manufacturing picks up, the costs of the color modulation equipment will also drop. This means I could maybe put together a cheaper projector for the lasers, and that, along with a proper power output scaling, move this technology into bigger and lighter screens. Movie-house screens for the house? Doable, since lasers don't spread as much as a traditional light beam. Project that image on anything!
Oh, and take off the screen and replace the scanners with something more "X,Y", and you have a nifty vector display, IN COLOR! Pink-floyd fans rejoice!
Yeah, I realized right after I wrote it that I had it backasswards... but you got the point... (I own a Canon 10D myself...)
Several things will still be a challenge in "consumer" level images devices (i.e. cameras)
1. More pixels mean higher demands on the lenses. And good lenses are NOT cheap.
2. More pixels mean higher demands on storage. Storage is getting cheaper.
3. More pixels mean higher demands on bandwidth. Bandwith is not universal.
For your typical user of a point-and-shoot camera, 8+ megapixels won't mean much. Most people print images at 4x6" at best, or view them on the screen. For your pro or semi-pro user, they're not that affected by the point-and-shoot market, and will be looking for sharpness, clarity, color fidelity, and lack of noise. None of which are areas that CMOS sensors have excelled in.
In my personal theory that any advanced technology will eventually be applied to entertainment (in general), and Television (in specific), I predict that Quantum Computing will eventually be applied to the family entertainment center. Only it will fail completely when people discover the uncertainty principle that says you can't watch your show and at the same time know what time it's scheduled... ... or something like that...
I love the "How far will you go?" quote in the letter. Of course Eric's response is "Not THAT far!"
Ever dance with the devil...?
OSS Software's advantages are often cited as being 1: free, and 2: Open. Both of these are strong advantages in some situations, but not necessarily in all. Most companies aren't firstly concerned with direct purchase price. In fact, many OSS projects have commercial components that provide custimization and support for a fee. Open software is a strong pull for those of use in the software field, but usually doesn't translate for the end user of software directly.
For me, the biggest advantage of OSS is that of availability and access. If I need a widget right now to solve a problem, I don't have to go through a formal purchase process with PO's and the like, I can just find what I need NOW. Then the other advantages kick in, because I can now modify it to exactly meet my needs. Yes, this translates to price via time saved, but not actual dollars. And yes, we do support OSS project with cash.
Leaving the "logic" of this alone for a moment (can you really associate the set of all unique things to equate with a member of that set??) what the original said was "pretty unique", which under most strict english parsing would be "A good looking, aestetically pleasing, unique...", which is not what the poster intended. Try "Novel" or "Innovative".
Hi, I'm M-m-m-m-m-Max Head-hea-hea-Headroom!!
... a Beowulf Cluster of... oh wait...
(Hmm, can zombies be clustered? We all know from Night of the Living Dead that they DO cluster. Quite well, in fact...)
This of course makes no sense on a lot of levels. The choice of a tool is completely dependent on the environment in which it is being used. If I have a mostly Java based system, with business objects and a database layer, it makes a lot of sense to use JSP's over PHP. A lot of that choice comes from the magnatude of the system in development, developer skills, etc. I'd even consider mixing the two technologies under certain circumstances. Large multi-tier systems are complex beasts that can quickly get out of control, and JSP's fit nicely into that scheme. PHP is a powerful scripting language with many great features in its bag of tricks, but it's still a scripting language and should be used correctly.
COBOL is to Java what Neal Stephenson is to Issac Asimov. Both write good science fiction, but in the end they are really two different things entirely, syntax-wise.
(With applogies to the High School set who didn't have to endure analogies on the SAT this year...)
If I have to write lots of "rows and numbers" type programming, COBOL isn't bad. (but still not my first choice these days.) However, I don't think I want to write a GUI or the server side to a web site in it. Ditto for VB.
Of course, the whole comparison thing is meaningless unless you take into consideration what each language was designed for and when it was designed. COBOL has been around a LONG time (computer time wise), and certainly has been surplanted by new technology. There would be very few compelling reasons for me to start a new system in COBOL today. Java is (basically) a refinement of C++, with much better library support. As such, it's syntax is C based, which also has been around a long time. The C-like languages survive for two reasons: flexibility and terseness. (word?) C-like languages work on data structures, whereas COBOL-like languages work on 'business' or 'work' structures. That is the inherenet flexibility of the C-like languages vs. the COBOL-like languages. I can get C/C++/Java to work with basically any structure I want, but I'd have to bend over backwards to get COBOL to do a linked list. And I can do it in fewer characters to boot. (Programmers are lazy, ya know.)
You want your new whiz-bang language to survive? Make it flexible, make it terse, and make it fast. Perl met this criteria for many people. Java does too. VB was an aberation, surviving mostly on the sheer force of Microsoft's will. BASIC-like languages were certainly useful for what they were, but I'd argue today that a good scripting language like PHP is more appropiate for now.
I'm a TiVo Series 1 owner for quite a while now (bought the 'lifetime' subscription at the original price.) Don't get me wrong, I still love the Tivo; the interface is the best, the packaging and stability excellent. But, my S1 is starting to show it's age, and it was time to think about replacing it with something with more capability and perhaps allowing some hacking. The Series 2 machine isn't that machine. Propiatary formats, a closed system, low CPU power on the platform, and not-so-great expandibility are all adding up to move me away from Tivo. Plus, I don't want to deal with monthly subscriptions either, so the only way to go is with the lifetime subscription, which is priced too high.
Two weeks ago I put together my first MythTV box, and I must say that it's been very good. Sure, it's not ready for Joe Sixpack yet, but for the crowd that wants to move video around and play around with the machine some more, it's just the ticket. I'm slowing moving recordings from the Tivo to the MythTV... Additionally, the quality of video under Myth is much better than the TiVo, and I can tweak the storage options to my hearts' content.
For Tivo, it might be too little, too late to attract the hacker community, and most of the non-tech crowd only wants to watch sienfield reruns and doesn't care about moving things to their PC. Perhaps they might have captured back some of the tech market by providing open standards and decent access methods, but Tivo still hasn't figured out who their customer is. DRM is toadying to the cable industry, not serving their customers.
Not only are there cameras, but:
. Random searches on public transportation
. Restrictions on what you can carry
. Restrictions on where you can go
. Restrictions on when you can go
. Major road closings
. Just about every ATF and FDA dog in the country will be in town
Not only will we be the most watched, but also the most controlled. Except for some protests in the past few weeks, Bostonians seem to be the most cowed and beaten people I've met. I'm amazed, simply amazed. We've truely traded our feedom for a false sense of security. When the next terrorist attack comes (which most likely won't be in Boston), hopefully we'll open our eyes to this. If not, we will only give the terrorists more power over us.
RM