> Heh, imagine that now. With email and the internet that bank would have been out $1,000,000 no problem.
Kind of unlikely - the use of the internet might have turned one into lots, but the fact that no-one responded means that there would have been no-one to spread the work.
If I'd been one of the 115000, I would at least have read it - I always read the fine print of any contracts I am involved with. The only exception I make to this is that I don't read all those nearly identical software EULAs.
New Zealand instituted a phto-ID driver's license a while back, and since then a lot of places assume that that is the form of ID that people will use.
The article says:
> but you can only get arrested for _driving_ without one
That's why I simply leave mine at home (I don't ever actually drive, so I don't need it). So far, other forms of ID have always been accepted - but I'm prepared to make an awful lof of noise if my driver's license is ever required for something else.
At the time the photo driver's license was introduced, there was some idea of turning it into a national ID card, with a 'non-driver' card for those who don't drive. Thankfully, that was rejected - this time. I suspect it's coming though, and if it does I'll be in there fighting it.
I'm in a very rare position of:
* have a license and eligible to drive
* _never_ actually driving,
so I'm aware others don't have the luxury of taking my position on this one, although what you can do is _never_ use your driver's license except for driving related purposes.
Actually, there are good sales of the embedded PowerPC versions - used in things like high end CISCO routers. It's the desktop chips that aren't doing as well - PowerPC is quite a wide range.
The 'end of the line' comment wasn't taken so much from the pundits as from Intel trying to move over to IA64. The AMD 64-bit extensions might go somewhere, but that is yet to be determined. The writing is certainly on the wall for the 32-bit x86, on memory address space if nothing else.
Compare that with PowerPC, where as you say a lot less money has been spent on optimizing, and it is not far behind and sometimes ahead (certainly some of the Altivec code I was writing last year couldn't be matched on Intel hardware at the time, although P4 might have changed this). Remember PowerPC does more processing per MHz. It also has a very nice upgrade path to 64 bit.
As an aside, quite a bit of the speed difference between PowerPC and x86 seem to come from the latter having much more polished compilers, particularly gcc.
The advantage of integration is simply no (or at least very little) messing around with drivers, and you know the OS will work with the hardware. Examples of Apple making use of control over the hardware are the switch from 68K to PowerPC (would have been impossible to do that as well as they did without controllong both), and the move from ADB to USB with hardly a hitch. Apple knows exactly what hardware the OS has to work on, and makes sure that it does so.
My experience with buying Macintosh is that you plug them in, upgrade the OS if you have to, and then you start to do useful stuff with them. I don't thing any other OS/platform is nearly as smooth. Certainly Windows 95 (latest I have really used) and Linux (I've had no end of trouble with 'is this mouse/video-card supported?') aren't. Plug and play is a combination of the hardware and the software playing nice with each other.
(1) Keeping the proprietary hardware, but with an x86 instead of a PowerPC.
I don't see the advantage in changing from a chip with plenty of growth room left (PowerPC) to a chip nearing the end of its line (x86). In any case, with this option, it would be an orphan, because it wouldn't run old Mac software, and still wouldn't run Windows, as there are lots of things done differently other than the CPU.
(2) Move over the the whole Intel-PC architecture.
This would mean throwing out Apple's big advantage - that they can integrate the OS and the hardware nicely, they don't have to put all the kludges in to ensure that their OS runs on a vast array of 3rd party hardware. I think Apple wants to be more than just box makers.
In neither case would I regard this as a good thing for Apple or Apple users.
Anyway, this is an old rumour, and would only happen if IBM/Motorola both dropped the PowerPC and forced Apple to change.
I notice that the web site you referred to also talks about the 'iWalk', which I understand has been pretty much discredited.
Well I wasn't inconvenienced much - all it really meant was that at I time that I had a lot of energy that could have gone into that particular free software, that energy went somewhere else.
> What they really said was "We don't intend to put in any time supporting equipment sold by this vendor. Any."
I'm a bit curious - who said that? I haven't found a reference to it. This would be quite different than a boycott.
It's the idea of a 'boycott' over this that I find immature, not the desire to not spend time on Macintosh support.
The irony is that I'm now running Mac OSX, and guess what the compiler that comes with it is? GCC
The reason that the boycott was immature is that a boycott needs to be aimed at making things more difficult for the people who are doing the bad things, in order to discourage those bad actions.
Now who did this boycott actually inconvenience?
Not Apple... they were quite happy selling boxes with closed software, just like every other computer maker at the time. Maybe it had a minor effect on people who wanted to work on open source software choosing different hardware.
The people who were really affected were the Apple owners, not the company, in that we didn't have a good way out of the proprietary software (I used proprietary tools for many more years).
I had a Mac at the time, and wasn't too happy about the 'Look and Feel' lawsuit (wasn't happy about MicroSoft either) and one of my flatmates, knowing that I had a strong interest in compiler design, tried to get me interested in gcc and other free software. I was quite interested until I found out that 'oh, it won't run on your computer because there is a boycott', so I lost interest and put my energy elsewhere. I didn't have the resources to buy another machine just to do free software stuff, and doing a Mac port would have been a pretty big hurdle to start to use something.
The loss in this case was to me as an Apple owner, and to the Free Software movement, for whatever people like me didn't contribute.
For anyone planning a boycott, think through that you are actually aiming at the right target.
> He reminded his audience that the joint work on the copper linac design in the US and Japan was undertaken with the understanding that the machine would be sited somewhere on the Pacific Rim, presumably in Japan or California.
I understood that most of the Pacific rim (certainly Japan and California) are prone to earthquakes - isn't this undesirable for something large with fine tolerances?
If you had a look at the method, they took the centre of mass in three dimensions, which will give a point well beneath the earth's surface, and then "Project the point onto the surface".
If they were to meet at the actual centre of mass, I imagine it would be rather hot.
The only case where this is ill-defined is if the centre of mass happens to be at the earth's centre. If there centre of mass is very near the earth's centre, then small variations in the developer distribution will result in large variations of the projection.
Note that this method does not obviously guarantee the shortest "as the crow files" distance to the selected point, because curvature of travel paths is not taken into account.
It is however independant of the coordinate system used.
> If no lawyer would take a frivolous case (like against Barney insults - an obvious Freedom of Speech issue) then frivolous cases would not exist.
The idea that a case might not be taken because no lawyer would take it on scares me... it is far more likely that if someone can't find a lawyer, it is likely to be the little person who is either being attacked by megacorp or has had something unjustly taken away from him/her.
What is needed is checks and balances in the system so that such lawsuits and threats are strongly discouraged, and if they happen there is a fair way of dealing with them.
No mental strain? I think not.
on
Nostrildamus
·
· Score: 2
> I mean how on earth or space does one apply for a position which really takes no physical effort or mental strain?
It must take a bit of concentration to rank smells like that, even on a scale of 0-4, as we are not really designed for it . Unlike sight or hearing, smell is really a background sense - we are not used to paying analytical attention to it.
I wouldn't want to do the job for too long at once, both from the sense of smell getting jaded, and concentration wandering.
Not so much that someone could give this a malicious payload (although that is possible), more that all software contains bugs, so even a 'good' worm could have unplanned unpleasant side effects.
On the Macintosh (a platform I am more familiar with), the vast majority of viruses were benign (as in did no deliberate damage), but many of those had bugs or resource usage that caused infected machines to have problems.
If I got this worm, I'd still have to treat the machine as compromised - of course that may be no great loss given that it only infects already compromised systems.
My training is in Mathematics, and I've hardly ever looked at maths at this level (although I did do one logic and set theory course - four lectures to get to the empty set as I recall).
However, even though this stuff is to mathematics what assember is to high level programming, in that hardly anyone need look at it, it is important to know that all that theory is there. Well, important to me anyway.
I also like the idea of this a a proof verifier - it is so easy to make a mistake in a mathematical proof, because what 'looks right' might have some hidden assumption that is incorrect.
A few years ago, I considered doing something like this on a smaller scale. At the risk of starting a language flamewar, it surprises me that the software for this is written in ANSI C, when I would have thought this problem is much easier to deal with in one of the high level functional or logic languages.
At first glance, this looks like a valuable contribution.
>... an effort to keep the language moving, avoid fossilization and avoid being overtaken by proprietary extensions.
You mean keep the compiler writers so busy scrambling to keep up with the new standard that they don't have any _time_ to work on proprietary extensions?
>ABC-weapons are already pretty good at killing lots of people, and they are easy to get. Heck, even India & Pakistan got nukes. How about the Taleban? How about you? Get yours today!
This song by Tom Lehrer (from THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS) seems an appropriate respose to this comment...
"Who's Next"
One of the big news items of the past year concerned the fact that China, which we call 'Red China', exploded a nuclear bomb, which we called a 'device'. Then Indonesia announced that it was gonna have one soon, and proliferation became the word of the day. Here's a song about that.
First we got the bomb and that was good,
'Cause we love peace and motherhood.
Then Russia got the bomb, but that's o.k.,
'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way!
Who's next?
France got the bomb, but don't you grieve,
'Cause they're on our side, I believe.
China got the bomb, but have no fears;
They can't wipe us out for at least five years!
Who's next?
Then Indonesia claimed that they
Were gonna get one any day.
South Africa wants two, that's right:
One for the black and one for the white!
Who's next?
Egypt's gonna get one, too,
Just to use on you know who.
So Israel's getting tense,
Wants one in self defense.
"The Lord's our shepherd," says the psalm,
But just in case, we better get a bomb!
Who's next?
Luxembourg is next to go
And, who knows, maybe Monaco.
We'll try to stay serene and calm
When Alabama gets the bomb!
Who's next, who's next, who's next?
Who's next?
"The main site was down for a few hours, as we maxed out our bandwidth for the month. We've transfered over 12GB in the last two weeks! I've worked out a way to make sure that if we max out our bandwidth in the future, we just pay more, instead of the site going down..."
They are _really_ going to thank slashdot for this story being posted.
I hope everyone uses the mirrors where appropriate.
Yes the G4 is a 32 bit chip. There was intended to be a 64 bit G4 (the PowerPC architecture model supports both 32 and 64 bit), but that keeps getting pushed back to the next generation.
A task doesn't need to be 'embarrassingly parallel' to make use of Altivec - many tasks (particuarly computation bound ones) lend themselves to use of Altivec (sometimes with some clever coding required). The obvious exception is that Altivec is that Altivec doesn't support double precision floating point.
Sometimes it just good to be able to sling around 128 bits at once.
Languages I have found useful not on your list include Mathematica (obviously for internal use only), Mercury, assembler... and there are doubtless many many others.
The list of useful languages is as open-ended as the list of possible tasks.
Sweatshop victims are almost by definition too trapped/scared/overworked to say anything. And it's not like they have many ways of getting the word out even if they overcome this.
This is probably a comment that is too late to read, but...
The problem with the $28 dollars a month to a child is that it is a band-aid, a kludge that doesn't address the underlying problem.
I'm not saying that this is true in your case, but charity such as yours can do more harm than good - the doner feels that are doing the right thing, without addressing any real problems, and the person receiving the aid just ends up in this position of dependance.
The underlying problem is systemic - essentially the rich countries and multinational corporations are screwing the poor countries.
Off the top of my head, part of a solution to sweatshops would be for each western country to outlaw in that country any activity, services or goods from any organisation that can't audit that all their worker conditions mean certain international labour standards (such standards exist, but are generally ignored).
"You can't demonstrate that the workers in you shoe factory meet the mimimum condtions? OK, you can't do any business in our country, and it is illegal for any of your goods to be sold here". That would change things in a hurry.
Unfortunately, anyone who has thought about it would realise that our standard of living is kept artificially high by other people countries bearing the cost, so it is politically a dead issue.
So what to do about it? Don't buy sweatshop produced goods. Get involved in organisations that are working towards changing this parasitism.
> As it is, PReP/CHRP is moribund (so there are no commodity PPC chips or boards on the market) and in the end IA64 may finish it off.
I very much doubt it - PPC is used a lot in embedded stuff because if its low power use, and a G4 makes a useful DSP. It could one day disappear from desktops and higher though. Despite any technical merits, the G4 has been a marketing disaster - people just see 500 MHz and think "slow".
As for Apple's scorched earth policy - I agree that they handled it really badly, but I think overall they didn't have a lot of choice about the clones, although it still would have been nice to see CHRP, even if you needed more to run Apple software. PowerComputing was starting to undercut their hardware sales quite badly, and contrary to what I have seen suggested, Apple wouldn't effectively survive as just a software company.
Is there any generation of processor development in which this sort of thing hasn't happened?
There seem to be two constants in processor generations that I can see:
(1) The new generation always takes longer, runs slower, and has more things taken out than was originally suggested,
(2) the old generation gets ramped up to clock speeds way beyond what was originally anticipated while we wait.
I remember when the PowerPC G4 was going to have a lot of changes including multi-core and run at most of a GHz - what we eventually got was in some ways a smartened up (mostly fp & memory improvements) G3 + altivec. Meanwhile IBM keeps making the G3s faster and faster.
Then of course there is the story of how the whole x86 architecture wasn't supposed to get this far before being replaced by something with less cruft.
> Time for a new GNU boycott? That might hit Darwin hard, and thus indirectly Apple and their OS-X. Would be well deserved.
I don't think it would hit Apple very hard at all (it didn't last time). Who it would hit would be Apple users.
At the time of the last FSF boycott, I'd just spent several thousand dollars on a Macintosh system, and all that the boycott meant for me was that "oh, well, I can't participate in this GPL software thing - I don't have the right hardware, never mind". There was no way that I (and I suspect many others) had the resources or desire to switch architectures because of the boycott, even thoug I wasn't happy with Apple's lawsuit. Result: a loss to the open source software community as I went and did other things (including compiler stuff not related to gcc). And my next machine was a Macintosh too, as all my stuff had been developed on tools that only worked on Macintosh, rather than, say, gcc. No harm to Apple at all that I can see.
Regardless of any merits of the who is ripping off/bullying who, don't EVER do something like a boycott (or any other sort of protest) without first having at least some idea of who you are actually going to affect (first rule of effective protest).
Slashdot Mirror
> Heh, imagine that now. With email and the internet that bank would have been out $1,000,000 no problem.
Kind of unlikely - the use of the internet might have turned one into lots, but the fact that no-one responded means that there would have been no-one to spread the work.
If I'd been one of the 115000, I would at least have read it - I always read the fine print of any contracts I am involved with. The only exception I make to this is that I don't read all those nearly identical software EULAs.
New Zealand instituted a phto-ID driver's license a while back, and since then a lot of places assume that that is the form of ID that people will use.
The article says:
> but you can only get arrested for _driving_ without one
That's why I simply leave mine at home (I don't ever actually drive, so I don't need it). So far, other forms of ID have always been accepted - but I'm prepared to make an awful lof of noise if my driver's license is ever required for something else.
At the time the photo driver's license was introduced, there was some idea of turning it into a national ID card, with a 'non-driver' card for those who don't drive. Thankfully, that was rejected - this time. I suspect it's coming though, and if it does I'll be in there fighting it.
I'm in a very rare position of:
* have a license and eligible to drive
* _never_ actually driving,
so I'm aware others don't have the luxury of taking my position on this one, although what you can do is _never_ use your driver's license except for driving related purposes.
Actually, there are good sales of the embedded PowerPC versions - used in things like high end CISCO routers. It's the desktop chips that aren't doing as well - PowerPC is quite a wide range.
The 'end of the line' comment wasn't taken so much from the pundits as from Intel trying to move over to IA64. The AMD 64-bit extensions might go somewhere, but that is yet to be determined. The writing is certainly on the wall for the 32-bit x86, on memory address space if nothing else.
Compare that with PowerPC, where as you say a lot less money has been spent on optimizing, and it is not far behind and sometimes ahead (certainly some of the Altivec code I was writing last year couldn't be matched on Intel hardware at the time, although P4 might have changed this). Remember PowerPC does more processing per MHz. It also has a very nice upgrade path to 64 bit.
As an aside, quite a bit of the speed difference between PowerPC and x86 seem to come from the latter having much more polished compilers, particularly gcc.
The advantage of integration is simply no (or at least very little) messing around with drivers, and you know the OS will work with the hardware. Examples of Apple making use of control over the hardware are the switch from 68K to PowerPC (would have been impossible to do that as well as they did without controllong both), and the move from ADB to USB with hardly a hitch. Apple knows exactly what hardware the OS has to work on, and makes sure that it does so.
My experience with buying Macintosh is that you plug them in, upgrade the OS if you have to, and then you start to do useful stuff with them. I don't thing any other OS/platform is nearly as smooth. Certainly Windows 95 (latest I have really used) and Linux (I've had no end of trouble with 'is this mouse/video-card supported?') aren't. Plug and play is a combination of the hardware and the software playing nice with each other.
Two things can be meant by this:
(1) Keeping the proprietary hardware, but with an x86 instead of a PowerPC.
I don't see the advantage in changing from a chip with plenty of growth room left (PowerPC) to a chip nearing the end of its line (x86). In any case, with this option, it would be an orphan, because it wouldn't run old Mac software, and still wouldn't run Windows, as there are lots of things done differently other than the CPU.
(2) Move over the the whole Intel-PC architecture.
This would mean throwing out Apple's big advantage - that they can integrate the OS and the hardware nicely, they don't have to put all the kludges in to ensure that their OS runs on a vast array of 3rd party hardware. I think Apple wants to be more than just box makers.
In neither case would I regard this as a good thing for Apple or Apple users.
Anyway, this is an old rumour, and would only happen if IBM/Motorola both dropped the PowerPC and forced Apple to change.
I notice that the web site you referred to also talks about the 'iWalk', which I understand has been pretty much discredited.
> Sorry you were inconvenienced, but...
Well I wasn't inconvenienced much - all it really meant was that at I time that I had a lot of energy that could have gone into that particular free software, that energy went somewhere else.
> What they really said was "We don't intend to put in any time supporting equipment sold by this vendor. Any."
I'm a bit curious - who said that? I haven't found a reference to it. This would be quite different than a boycott.
It's the idea of a 'boycott' over this that I find immature, not the desire to not spend time on Macintosh support.
The irony is that I'm now running Mac OSX, and guess what the compiler that comes with it is? GCC
Please read this before you mod me down ...
... they were quite happy selling boxes with closed software, just like every other computer maker at the time. Maybe it had a minor effect on people who wanted to work on open source software choosing different hardware.
The reason that the boycott was immature is that a boycott needs to be aimed at making things more difficult for the people who are doing the bad things, in order to discourage those bad actions.
Now who did this boycott actually inconvenience?
Not Apple
The people who were really affected were the Apple owners, not the company, in that we didn't have a good way out of the proprietary software (I used proprietary tools for many more years).
I had a Mac at the time, and wasn't too happy about the 'Look and Feel' lawsuit (wasn't happy about MicroSoft either) and one of my flatmates, knowing that I had a strong interest in compiler design, tried to get me interested in gcc and other free software. I was quite interested until I found out that 'oh, it won't run on your computer because there is a boycott', so I lost interest and put my energy elsewhere. I didn't have the resources to buy another machine just to do free software stuff, and doing a Mac port would have been a pretty big hurdle to start to use something.
The loss in this case was to me as an Apple owner, and to the Free Software movement, for whatever people like me didn't contribute.
For anyone planning a boycott, think through that you are actually aiming at the right target.
Wow! What kind if internet connection do you have? :-)
From the article:
> He reminded his audience that the joint work on the copper linac design in the US and Japan was undertaken with the understanding that the machine would be sited somewhere on the Pacific Rim, presumably in Japan or California.
I understood that most of the Pacific rim (certainly Japan and California) are prone to earthquakes - isn't this undesirable for something large with fine tolerances?
If you had a look at the method, they took the centre of mass in three dimensions, which will give a point well beneath the earth's surface, and then "Project the point onto the surface".
If they were to meet at the actual centre of mass, I imagine it would be rather hot.
The only case where this is ill-defined is if the centre of mass happens to be at the earth's centre. If there centre of mass is very near the earth's centre, then small variations in the developer distribution will result in large variations of the projection.
Note that this method does not obviously guarantee the shortest "as the crow files" distance to the selected point, because curvature of travel paths is not taken into account.
It is however independant of the coordinate system used.
> If no lawyer would take a frivolous case (like against Barney insults - an obvious Freedom of Speech issue) then frivolous cases would not exist.
... it is far more likely that if someone can't find a lawyer, it is likely to be the little person who is either being attacked by megacorp or has had something unjustly taken away from him/her.
The idea that a case might not be taken because no lawyer would take it on scares me
What is needed is checks and balances in the system so that such lawsuits and threats are strongly discouraged, and if they happen there is a fair way of dealing with them.
Lookout, the wind is dropping!
Huh? _*SPLAT*_
> I mean how on earth or space does one apply for a position which really takes no physical effort or mental strain?
It must take a bit of concentration to rank smells like that, even on a scale of 0-4, as we are not really designed for it . Unlike sight or hearing, smell is really a background sense - we are not used to paying analytical attention to it.
I wouldn't want to do the job for too long at once, both from the sense of smell getting jaded, and concentration wandering.
Roy Ward.
is can you trust it?
Not so much that someone could give this a malicious payload (although that is possible), more that all software contains bugs, so even a 'good' worm could have unplanned unpleasant side effects.
On the Macintosh (a platform I am more familiar with), the vast majority of viruses were benign (as in did no deliberate damage), but many of those had bugs or resource usage that caused infected machines to have problems.
If I got this worm, I'd still have to treat the machine as compromised - of course that may be no great loss given that it only infects already compromised systems.
Roy Ward.
My training is in Mathematics, and I've hardly ever looked at maths at this level (although I did do one logic and set theory course - four lectures to get to the empty set as I recall).
However, even though this stuff is to mathematics what assember is to high level programming, in that hardly anyone need look at it, it is important to know that all that theory is there. Well, important to me anyway.
I also like the idea of this a a proof verifier - it is so easy to make a mistake in a mathematical proof, because what 'looks right' might have some hidden assumption that is incorrect.
A few years ago, I considered doing something like this on a smaller scale. At the risk of starting a language flamewar, it surprises me that the software for this is written in ANSI C, when I would have thought this problem is much easier to deal with in one of the high level functional or logic languages.
At first glance, this looks like a valuable contribution.
> ... an effort to keep the language moving, avoid fossilization and avoid being overtaken by proprietary extensions.
You mean keep the compiler writers so busy scrambling to keep up with the new standard that they don't have any _time_ to work on proprietary extensions?
>ABC-weapons are already pretty good at killing lots of people, and they are easy to get. Heck, even India & Pakistan got nukes. How about the Taleban? How about you? Get yours today!
...
This song by Tom Lehrer (from THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS) seems an appropriate respose to this comment
"Who's Next"
One of the big news items of the past year concerned the fact that China, which we call 'Red China', exploded a nuclear bomb, which we called a 'device'. Then Indonesia announced that it was gonna have one soon, and proliferation became the word of the day. Here's a song about that.
First we got the bomb and that was good,
'Cause we love peace and motherhood.
Then Russia got the bomb, but that's o.k.,
'Cause the balance of power's maintained that way!
Who's next?
France got the bomb, but don't you grieve,
'Cause they're on our side, I believe.
China got the bomb, but have no fears;
They can't wipe us out for at least five years!
Who's next?
Then Indonesia claimed that they
Were gonna get one any day.
South Africa wants two, that's right:
One for the black and one for the white!
Who's next?
Egypt's gonna get one, too,
Just to use on you know who.
So Israel's getting tense,
Wants one in self defense.
"The Lord's our shepherd," says the psalm,
But just in case, we better get a bomb!
Who's next?
Luxembourg is next to go
And, who knows, maybe Monaco.
We'll try to stay serene and calm
When Alabama gets the bomb!
Who's next, who's next, who's next?
Who's next?
From the site:
"The main site was down for a few hours, as we maxed out our bandwidth for the month. We've transfered over 12GB in the last two weeks! I've worked out a way to make sure that if we max out our bandwidth in the future, we just pay more, instead of the site going down..."
They are _really_ going to thank slashdot for this story being posted.
I hope everyone uses the mirrors where appropriate.
Roy Ward.
RGB is indeed the primary colours for mixing light, but the colours for pigment are:
Cyan
Yellow
Magenta
The reason RYB is often quoted is that Cyan and Magenta are not colours commonly used, and they look a lot like blue and red.
Yes the G4 is a 32 bit chip. There was intended to be a 64 bit G4 (the PowerPC architecture model supports both 32 and 64 bit), but that keeps getting pushed back to the next generation.
A task doesn't need to be 'embarrassingly parallel' to make use of Altivec - many tasks (particuarly computation bound ones) lend themselves to use of Altivec (sometimes with some clever coding required). The obvious exception is that Altivec is that Altivec doesn't support double precision floating point.
Sometimes it just good to be able to sling around 128 bits at once.
Roy Ward.
Languages I have found useful not on your list include Mathematica (obviously for internal use only), Mercury, assembler ... and there are doubtless many many others.
The list of useful languages is as open-ended as the list of possible tasks.
Roy Ward.
Sweatshop victims are almost by definition too trapped/scared/overworked to say anything. And it's not like they have many ways of getting the word out even if they overcome this.
...
I don't think I can put it better than this
http://adbusters.org/spoofads/fashion/nike/
This is probably a comment that is too late to read, but ...
The problem with the $28 dollars a month to a child is that it is a band-aid, a kludge that doesn't address the underlying problem.
I'm not saying that this is true in your case, but charity such as yours can do more harm than good - the doner feels that are doing the right thing, without addressing any real problems, and the person receiving the aid just ends up in this position of dependance.
The underlying problem is systemic - essentially the rich countries and multinational corporations are screwing the poor countries.
Off the top of my head, part of a solution to sweatshops would be for each western country to outlaw in that country any activity, services or goods from any organisation that can't audit that all their worker conditions mean certain international labour standards (such standards exist, but are generally ignored).
"You can't demonstrate that the workers in you shoe factory meet the mimimum condtions? OK, you can't do any business in our country, and it is illegal for any of your goods to be sold here". That would change things in a hurry.
Unfortunately, anyone who has thought about it would realise that our standard of living is kept artificially high by other people countries bearing the cost, so it is politically a dead issue.
So what to do about it? Don't buy sweatshop produced goods. Get involved in organisations that are working towards changing this parasitism.
> As it is, PReP/CHRP is moribund (so there are no commodity PPC chips or boards on the market) and in the end IA64 may finish it off.
I very much doubt it - PPC is used a lot in embedded stuff because if its low power use, and a G4 makes a useful DSP. It could one day disappear from desktops and higher though. Despite any technical merits, the G4 has been a marketing disaster - people just see 500 MHz and think "slow".
As for Apple's scorched earth policy - I agree that they handled it really badly, but I think overall they didn't have a lot of choice about the clones, although it still would have been nice to see CHRP, even if you needed more to run Apple software. PowerComputing was starting to undercut their hardware sales quite badly, and contrary to what I have seen suggested, Apple wouldn't effectively survive as just a software company.
Is there any generation of processor development in which this sort of thing hasn't happened?
There seem to be two constants in processor generations that I can see:
(1) The new generation always takes longer, runs slower, and has more things taken out than was originally suggested,
(2) the old generation gets ramped up to clock speeds way beyond what was originally anticipated while we wait.
I remember when the PowerPC G4 was going to have a lot of changes including multi-core and run at most of a GHz - what we eventually got was in some ways a smartened up (mostly fp & memory improvements) G3 + altivec. Meanwhile IBM keeps making the G3s faster and faster.
Then of course there is the story of how the whole x86 architecture wasn't supposed to get this far before being replaced by something with less cruft.
> Time for a new GNU boycott? That might hit Darwin hard, and thus indirectly Apple and their OS-X. Would be well deserved.
I don't think it would hit Apple very hard at all (it didn't last time). Who it would hit would be Apple users.
At the time of the last FSF boycott, I'd just spent several thousand dollars on a Macintosh system, and all that the boycott meant for me was that "oh, well, I can't participate in this GPL software thing - I don't have the right hardware, never mind". There was no way that I (and I suspect many others) had the resources or desire to switch architectures because of the boycott, even thoug I wasn't happy with Apple's lawsuit. Result: a loss to the open source software community as I went and did other things (including compiler stuff not related to gcc). And my next machine was a Macintosh too, as all my stuff had been developed on tools that only worked on Macintosh, rather than, say, gcc. No harm to Apple at all that I can see.
Regardless of any merits of the who is ripping off/bullying who, don't EVER do something like a boycott (or any other sort of protest) without first having at least some idea of who you are actually going to affect (first rule of effective protest).