I wonder if the answer isn't "Unix". Pascal seemed to reach its apogee on non-Unix minis and DOS-based PCs in the late 80s and very early 90s, which is about the same time that Unix-based workstations became very popular.
I seem to remember Pascal being THE language to master in the early and mid 80s. The mainframe based timesharing systems all had Pascal compilers and they were even available (if you had the luxury of two floppies) for Apple ][ computers. I knew people who did software development in Pascal on IBM PCs in the 1980s. I seem to remember all my "Inside Macintosh" books had Pascal code in them.
The Unix/C transition may be more of a coincidence than anything else, but it doesn't seem that it hurt.
We let the Chinese army, which had already invaded Korea, retreat back over the border without attacking that same army for political reasons. The Chinese army should have been chased into Mongolia. All along Beijing should have been told that the new H-bomb makes the old A-bomb look like one of their New Year's Firecrackers, keep it up in Korea and you'll get a first-hand experience.
In Vietnam we handcuffed ourselves by not allowing Westmoreland to go after NVA regulars, irregulars and supply lines that ran through Cambodia and Laos, in addition to the war being run by politicans and not soldiers. The NVA won the war with the bargaining table and in Congress, not with the barrel of a gun.
I wish that notebooks came with a way to use the video and PS/2 ports as inputs so that even if the computing hardware was obsolete, the display panel and keyboard could still be used. Obviously using the display is the most valuable part.
At my last job I really could have used one of those flip-up LCD display/keyboard trays in our racks, but the boss saw the cost and said "dream on". Of course I've chucked a dozen laptops that would have been perfect for that very application if they could accept video in.
We didn't have to flatten Iraq to have gotten better results than what we've done so far. But we would have had to have gone in with the willingness to kill Iraqis as necessary to demonstrate our willingness to use as much force as we wanted and felt we needed.
2-3x the original number of troops would have helped A LOT simply as a show of force. Sealing the borders effectively would have helped, too (I cannnot believe we're just getting around to sealing the Syrian border now).
Most imporant would have been establishing dusk-dawn curfews and standing, public orders that some acts (looting, carrying firearms, curfew violations) would carry shoot-on-sight orders. Losing civil control was a HUGE mistake, perhaps the biggest.
Larger areas that mounted more organized resistance should have been flattened in a scorched earth manner. B-52 carpet bombing would have been appropriate. This would have only been done once or twice as a show of force; organized & sustained B-52 raids are significant psychological tools.
Anyway, the point is that nuking Iraq into glass wouldn't have been what we wanted. But making it known that we are willing and able to crush resistance with overwhelming force without consideration of world opinion or civilian casualties would have ruined the opposition.
Surrenders are never a function of any single event, although it's hard to argue that the Japanese surrender was strongly motivated by the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
The strategic bombing campaign in Germany was a failure, though. We never stopped the ball bearing production. German industrial output was nothing short of miraculous, though, considering they were developing and delivering new weapons concepts until the bitter end.
The firebombing of Dresden and Hamburg were regrettable, but they also weren't Lemay's idea, they were at the insistance of British commanders who wanted payback for the Blitz and German rocket attacks. Payback likely also accounting for U.S. firebombing raids as well.
But it's not like total war was some U.S. invention, either. Burning cities, taking slaves and booty, and sowing salt into the enemies fields has been going on since at least Roman times.
I think the whole notion of spam being exclusively an offshore thing isn't true.
It's possible that some aspects of it may depend on offshore services (mail servers or web servers), but I think by and large key parts of it are controlled within the U.S.
I don't think it's practical to spam from a foreign country as well as do everythinng else, including shipping products, from overseas. Too expensive, too many cultural and language barriers to overcome, and so on. Maybe there are some instances where you only deliver an electronic or other virtual product where this might work, but there are still probably U.S.-dependent angles you could work with (eg, denying credit card transactions or bank transfers).
I'm assuming that some spamvertised stuff actually is "real" as in someone will provide a product in exchange for credit card numbers or something; I figure that most spam has to provide something that actually gets sold most of the time or no one would ever bother with it.
The U.S. could destroy the middle east from orbit, but they have troops in there fighting with simple hand held weapons. Sometimes you don't want to kill every one. It's bad PR.
We've forgotten how you win a war.
You've got to kill people, and when you've killed enough they stop fighting. General Curtis Lemay
Since this basically is an "organized" crime, what's needed is a RICO investigation. RICO (Racketeer-influenced and Corrupt Organizations act) is a special law crafted to fight organized crime. Essentially anyone knowingly involved in a criminal organization or providing it with support can face a shit load of jail time.
One thing spammers DO need are hosting companies, internet service, a certain amount of banking services, and so on. The people providing them with these services need to be investigated as part of a RICO investigation. That alone will have a chilling effect, and there has to be a few prosecutions possible.
Seeing THOSE guys guy down will do a lot to increase the risk of even doing otherwise "legitimate" business with a spammer, and thus the costs will rise even higher to the point where spam will not be profitable.
Stopping people from spamming is impossible; cutting off their air supply isn't. The money goes someplace, and anyone getting a cut needs to start reviewing the glossy brochures for Federal Penetenieries.
I'll support whatever DRM/jail time software licensing laws they want, BUT they have to certify the merchantability, fitness and suitability of the products they are selling.
In other words, if they say it does X, it has to do X, or they have to make it do X. If not, I get my money back or can sue them when it fails to do X and breaks other stuff, too.
Bayesian filtering isn't a massive leap of intellect. Before it came out, I started dinking around with the idea of measuring word frequency in spam messages vs. non-spam messages. I didn't have the math background to do the statistical comparison in a meaningful way (or the programming chops to make it viable), but the idea of looking at spam and non-spam and doing some lexical analysis based on word usage isn't exactly novel.
I'm sure you've been modded -1 for your post, but I share your sentiment to some degree or other. What I wish is that Slashdot spent more time promoting what non-geeks had to say about technology and less promoting what some select group of "ubergeeks" had to say about non-technology subjects.
It's not that Paul Graham or Linus or ESR or whoever don't necessarily have something interesting to say, and in an interesting way, about subject matter outside their area of expertise (in this case the squishy areas of management and economics), but it's the sycophancy and lack of criticism with which it's presented.
The Wikipedia page on PCBs is pretty vague on dates, but they indicate that Monsanto didn't start marketing PCBs until 1930. It might be that the oil the parent poster's control electronics was immersed in some _other_ nasty industrial checmical, but it seems kind of doubtful that it would contain PCBs.
..that aren't like $10 a pop or whatever. I'll admit to not looking for any in a few months, but it seems they never went down in price even when the price of DL-capable burners hit rock bottom.
Maybe they're cheaper, but not close enough to single layer.
...the one you see running across your living room is the stupid one that isn't doing any damage and will probably win (or lose!) the Darwin award by stepping into a trap.
It's the SMART mice eating the food in your cupboard and breeding in the walls that you don't see you have to be concerned with.
The same comments apply to serial killers. The dumb ones get caught, the smart ones are scary.
The issue of killing and torturing animals made so common in the popular media during the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer has been grossly oversimplified.
Almost every child goes through a phase where they "torture" insects at the very least; just last night I watched two small neighbor boys "maim" a dozen carpenter ants. At very young ages they're intellect and emotional intelligence isn't developed enough to project thier own emotions and understand those of other people and to the extent they have them, of animals.
Watch very young toddlers in a nursery -- you *have* to watch them -- as they have no barrier preventing them from hitting, poking, pulling or harming other children, especially smaller ones. My own son will pull my hair, ears, rip my glasses off my face and make a run at mom's earrings. After a couple of hair/ear pullings, the dog won't even get close.
It's only when children are older, in their adolescent years, that they have a developed sense of self and an understanding of others feelings that animal torture becomes an issue. And it's not even the killing aspect -- it's the prolonged torture and post-death experience that really demonstrates sociopathy and lack of empathy, not the actual killing itself.
My dad lived in the Ozarks in the 1940s, when it was quite rural. As a teenager, he used to shoot water moccasins and turtles all the time. The turtles would eat his trout lines, and the snakes were a dangerous pest. He never went on to be a sociopath.
*WHY* the hell would you even want to interview someone with a director-level title at a company like Microsoft? You're going to get a 100% content-free interview, as people at that position get there by being as utterly devoid of opinions, content or anything else interesting, except for their Jedi mind-trick: a list of "completed deliverables" that more senior managers can't help but throw money at.
Why not interview someone more rank and file who actually does the work of pounding out OSS install and maintenance at Mickeysloth? They probably are more like real people with real opinions and might have something interesting to say, instead of the diet-caffeine-and-coloring-free management.
I'm not expecting a corporation to have any stand on public policy. In fact, I think it'd be a great idea if corporations were *barred* from having *any* stand on any public policy, since as you rightly note, a corporation only has an interest in making a profit and any stand on public policy they make will be cynical at best, and at worst completely dishonest.
Corporate money has done more to pollute and corrupt the democratic system that just about anything.
The problem for Microsoft was that they took a stand and are now taking the opposite stand, vs. not taking *any* stand. What's worse is that they're openly ackknowledging that they have no problem looking at civil liberties or other human rights as not firm values, but something they're willing to be flexible on to make a buck.
So, if you have a country where "the different value system" endorses stuff like cutting off a girl's clitoris and sewing her vagina shut to ensure her virginity at marriage, Microsoft won't have a problem with that, because, well, it's a "different value system" and Microsoft doesn't want to get involved, and it might cost them some money.
China has a "different value system" that endorses the use of slave labor and politcal gulags. For that matter, Buchenwald was the result of a "different value system". Where does it end?
I think they picked the worst of two possible choices -- endorsing a squishy moral relativism in the name of cultural diversity that only serves to justify barbaric behavior, and it's all been done in the name of profits.
Maybe Bill should have stayed at Harvard and gotten a little better education.
How about we not waste law enforcement efforts on pointless enforcement efforts that will get nowhere and instead focus those efforts on internet-based crimes, such as the fraud/theft rings behind spam, phishing and other activities?
Right, which qualifies you as an up-to-your-elbows OS hacker.
I was addressing a poster higher in this hierarchy who said he "hadn't noticed" any vulnerabilities, and I was trying nicely to call BS on his Apple sycophancy, since most people don't notice vulnerabilities (at least not at the end-user level) unless they're manifested as more particular kinds of bugs.
How do you run across a vulnerability? Unless you're an elbow-deep-in-the-OS hacker, I can't think of how I'd run across a vulnerability unless it manifested itself as an ordinary bug that caused a visible fault.
If NRO had 10 meter stereo in the 1960s, just what do you think they have now? My guess is something with an order of magnitude more resolution and color bandwidth than anything India can put up.
All those color glossy ads of attractive people wearing designer fashions sitting in coffee houses or ultramodern buildings with their laptops just smell like a lifestyle sales pitch to me.
It's not like they could be doing very much serious computing on those connections, with those computers. It's jerk-off consumer computing -- web, email, IM, P2P.
I know I'm gonna get flamed by the 3 Slashbots running Xterm sessions to Blue Gene or something "important" via wifi, but I still think it's largely a solution supporting a "cool" urban lifestyle, and not something that solves real problems in computing.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if the answer isn't "Unix". Pascal seemed to reach its apogee on non-Unix minis and DOS-based PCs in the late 80s and very early 90s, which is about the same time that Unix-based workstations became very popular.
I seem to remember Pascal being THE language to master in the early and mid 80s. The mainframe based timesharing systems all had Pascal compilers and they were even available (if you had the luxury of two floppies) for Apple ][ computers. I knew people who did software development in Pascal on IBM PCs in the 1980s. I seem to remember all my "Inside Macintosh" books had Pascal code in them.
The Unix/C transition may be more of a coincidence than anything else, but it doesn't seem that it hurt.
We let the Chinese army, which had already invaded Korea, retreat back over the border without attacking that same army for political reasons. The Chinese army should have been chased into Mongolia. All along Beijing should have been told that the new H-bomb makes the old A-bomb look like one of their New Year's Firecrackers, keep it up in Korea and you'll get a first-hand experience.
In Vietnam we handcuffed ourselves by not allowing Westmoreland to go after NVA regulars, irregulars and supply lines that ran through Cambodia and Laos, in addition to the war being run by politicans and not soldiers. The NVA won the war with the bargaining table and in Congress, not with the barrel of a gun.
I wish that notebooks came with a way to use the video and PS/2 ports as inputs so that even if the computing hardware was obsolete, the display panel and keyboard could still be used. Obviously using the display is the most valuable part.
At my last job I really could have used one of those flip-up LCD display/keyboard trays in our racks, but the boss saw the cost and said "dream on". Of course I've chucked a dozen laptops that would have been perfect for that very application if they could accept video in.
We didn't have to flatten Iraq to have gotten better results than what we've done so far. But we would have had to have gone in with the willingness to kill Iraqis as necessary to demonstrate our willingness to use as much force as we wanted and felt we needed.
2-3x the original number of troops would have helped A LOT simply as a show of force. Sealing the borders effectively would have helped, too (I cannnot believe we're just getting around to sealing the Syrian border now).
Most imporant would have been establishing dusk-dawn curfews and standing, public orders that some acts (looting, carrying firearms, curfew violations) would carry shoot-on-sight orders. Losing civil control was a HUGE mistake, perhaps the biggest.
Larger areas that mounted more organized resistance should have been flattened in a scorched earth manner. B-52 carpet bombing would have been appropriate. This would have only been done once or twice as a show of force; organized & sustained B-52 raids are significant psychological tools.
Anyway, the point is that nuking Iraq into glass wouldn't have been what we wanted. But making it known that we are willing and able to crush resistance with overwhelming force without consideration of world opinion or civilian casualties would have ruined the opposition.
Surrenders are never a function of any single event, although it's hard to argue that the Japanese surrender was strongly motivated by the atomic bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.
The strategic bombing campaign in Germany was a failure, though. We never stopped the ball bearing production. German industrial output was nothing short of miraculous, though, considering they were developing and delivering new weapons concepts until the bitter end.
The firebombing of Dresden and Hamburg were regrettable, but they also weren't Lemay's idea, they were at the insistance of British commanders who wanted payback for the Blitz and German rocket attacks. Payback likely also accounting for U.S. firebombing raids as well.
But it's not like total war was some U.S. invention, either. Burning cities, taking slaves and booty, and sowing salt into the enemies fields has been going on since at least Roman times.
I think the whole notion of spam being exclusively an offshore thing isn't true.
It's possible that some aspects of it may depend on offshore services (mail servers or web servers), but I think by and large key parts of it are controlled within the U.S.
I don't think it's practical to spam from a foreign country as well as do everythinng else, including shipping products, from overseas. Too expensive, too many cultural and language barriers to overcome, and so on. Maybe there are some instances where you only deliver an electronic or other virtual product where this might work, but there are still probably U.S.-dependent angles you could work with (eg, denying credit card transactions or bank transfers).
I'm assuming that some spamvertised stuff actually is "real" as in someone will provide a product in exchange for credit card numbers or something; I figure that most spam has to provide something that actually gets sold most of the time or no one would ever bother with it.
We've forgotten how you win a war.
Since this basically is an "organized" crime, what's needed is a RICO investigation. RICO (Racketeer-influenced and Corrupt Organizations act) is a special law crafted to fight organized crime. Essentially anyone knowingly involved in a criminal organization or providing it with support can face a shit load of jail time.
One thing spammers DO need are hosting companies, internet service, a certain amount of banking services, and so on. The people providing them with these services need to be investigated as part of a RICO investigation. That alone will have a chilling effect, and there has to be a few prosecutions possible.
Seeing THOSE guys guy down will do a lot to increase the risk of even doing otherwise "legitimate" business with a spammer, and thus the costs will rise even higher to the point where spam will not be profitable.
Stopping people from spamming is impossible; cutting off their air supply isn't. The money goes someplace, and anyone getting a cut needs to start reviewing the glossy brochures for Federal Penetenieries.
I'll make a trade with the software industry:
I'll support whatever DRM/jail time software licensing laws they want, BUT they have to certify the merchantability, fitness and suitability of the products they are selling.
In other words, if they say it does X, it has to do X, or they have to make it do X. If not, I get my money back or can sue them when it fails to do X and breaks other stuff, too.
Bayesian filtering isn't a massive leap of intellect. Before it came out, I started dinking around with the idea of measuring word frequency in spam messages vs. non-spam messages. I didn't have the math background to do the statistical comparison in a meaningful way (or the programming chops to make it viable), but the idea of looking at spam and non-spam and doing some lexical analysis based on word usage isn't exactly novel.
I'm sure you've been modded -1 for your post, but I share your sentiment to some degree or other. What I wish is that Slashdot spent more time promoting what non-geeks had to say about technology and less promoting what some select group of "ubergeeks" had to say about non-technology subjects.
It's not that Paul Graham or Linus or ESR or whoever don't necessarily have something interesting to say, and in an interesting way, about subject matter outside their area of expertise (in this case the squishy areas of management and economics), but it's the sycophancy and lack of criticism with which it's presented.
The Wikipedia page on PCBs is pretty vague on dates, but they indicate that Monsanto didn't start marketing PCBs until 1930. It might be that the oil the parent poster's control electronics was immersed in some _other_ nasty industrial checmical, but it seems kind of doubtful that it would contain PCBs.
..that aren't like $10 a pop or whatever. I'll admit to not looking for any in a few months, but it seems they never went down in price even when the price of DL-capable burners hit rock bottom.
Maybe they're cheaper, but not close enough to single layer.
...the one you see running across your living room is the stupid one that isn't doing any damage and will probably win (or lose!) the Darwin award by stepping into a trap.
It's the SMART mice eating the food in your cupboard and breeding in the walls that you don't see you have to be concerned with.
The same comments apply to serial killers. The dumb ones get caught, the smart ones are scary.
The issue of killing and torturing animals made so common in the popular media during the trial of Jeffrey Dahmer has been grossly oversimplified.
Almost every child goes through a phase where they "torture" insects at the very least; just last night I watched two small neighbor boys "maim" a dozen carpenter ants. At very young ages they're intellect and emotional intelligence isn't developed enough to project thier own emotions and understand those of other people and to the extent they have them, of animals.
Watch very young toddlers in a nursery -- you *have* to watch them -- as they have no barrier preventing them from hitting, poking, pulling or harming other children, especially smaller ones. My own son will pull my hair, ears, rip my glasses off my face and make a run at mom's earrings. After a couple of hair/ear pullings, the dog won't even get close.
It's only when children are older, in their adolescent years, that they have a developed sense of self and an understanding of others feelings that animal torture becomes an issue. And it's not even the killing aspect -- it's the prolonged torture and post-death experience that really demonstrates sociopathy and lack of empathy, not the actual killing itself.
My dad lived in the Ozarks in the 1940s, when it was quite rural. As a teenager, he used to shoot water moccasins and turtles all the time. The turtles would eat his trout lines, and the snakes were a dangerous pest. He never went on to be a sociopath.
*WHY* the hell would you even want to interview someone with a director-level title at a company like Microsoft? You're going to get a 100% content-free interview, as people at that position get there by being as utterly devoid of opinions, content or anything else interesting, except for their Jedi mind-trick: a list of "completed deliverables" that more senior managers can't help but throw money at.
Why not interview someone more rank and file who actually does the work of pounding out OSS install and maintenance at Mickeysloth? They probably are more like real people with real opinions and might have something interesting to say, instead of the diet-caffeine-and-coloring-free management.
...for when she gets owned by an older guy in about 5 years.
I'm not expecting a corporation to have any stand on public policy. In fact, I think it'd be a great idea if corporations were *barred* from having *any* stand on any public policy, since as you rightly note, a corporation only has an interest in making a profit and any stand on public policy they make will be cynical at best, and at worst completely dishonest.
Corporate money has done more to pollute and corrupt the democratic system that just about anything.
The problem for Microsoft was that they took a stand and are now taking the opposite stand, vs. not taking *any* stand. What's worse is that they're openly ackknowledging that they have no problem looking at civil liberties or other human rights as not firm values, but something they're willing to be flexible on to make a buck.
So, if you have a country where "the different value system" endorses stuff like cutting off a girl's clitoris and sewing her vagina shut to ensure her virginity at marriage, Microsoft won't have a problem with that, because, well, it's a "different value system" and Microsoft doesn't want to get involved, and it might cost them some money.
China has a "different value system" that endorses the use of slave labor and politcal gulags. For that matter, Buchenwald was the result of a "different value system". Where does it end?
I think they picked the worst of two possible choices -- endorsing a squishy moral relativism in the name of cultural diversity that only serves to justify barbaric behavior, and it's all been done in the name of profits.
Maybe Bill should have stayed at Harvard and gotten a little better education.
How about we not waste law enforcement efforts on pointless enforcement efforts that will get nowhere and instead focus those efforts on internet-based crimes, such as the fraud/theft rings behind spam, phishing and other activities?
Right, which qualifies you as an up-to-your-elbows OS hacker.
I was addressing a poster higher in this hierarchy who said he "hadn't noticed" any vulnerabilities, and I was trying nicely to call BS on his Apple sycophancy, since most people don't notice vulnerabilities (at least not at the end-user level) unless they're manifested as more particular kinds of bugs.
How do you run across a vulnerability? Unless you're an elbow-deep-in-the-OS hacker, I can't think of how I'd run across a vulnerability unless it manifested itself as an ordinary bug that caused a visible fault.
If NRO had 10 meter stereo in the 1960s, just what do you think they have now? My guess is something with an order of magnitude more resolution and color bandwidth than anything India can put up.
...probably had this ability in the late 60s or early 70s.
All those color glossy ads of attractive people wearing designer fashions sitting in coffee houses or ultramodern buildings with their laptops just smell like a lifestyle sales pitch to me.
It's not like they could be doing very much serious computing on those connections, with those computers. It's jerk-off consumer computing -- web, email, IM, P2P.
I know I'm gonna get flamed by the 3 Slashbots running Xterm sessions to Blue Gene or something "important" via wifi, but I still think it's largely a solution supporting a "cool" urban lifestyle, and not something that solves real problems in computing.