Gee... That certainly looks to be a snide comment to me.
Gee... I'm sure that escaped Rob's attention.
Re:Bad things really do happen.
on
Breaking Windows
·
· Score: 2
somewhere, someone wrote that bug, and they wrote it for the platform that would allow it to do the most damage, and that platform is windows.
Exactly! But the reason Windows allows it to do most damage is because Windows is full of security holes because of Microsoft's insistence on reinventing everything, badly.
The "path traversal" bug in IIS was one of the most egregious flaws ever: a URL like/scripts/../../winnt/system32/cmd.exe allowed crackers to execute arbitrary commands on a web server. This is basic, web server design 101 - don't allow access outside the published directory tree.
And most other Microsoft "security holes" aren't much better. It's plain incompetence, the result of throwing a million programming monkeys at the task of reinventing the software that drives the Internet, and shipping it regardless of quality.
Less bitching, more solutions.
Want solutions? Switch your servers to Linux, or Solaris, or anything but Windows. An entire class of Internet-wide worms and viruses will disappear.
Implementing functionality at the hardware level makes less and less sense as general-purpose processing hardware becomes cheaper and more powerful. For example, it has become cost-effective to put an intelligent chip (e.g. the PIC microcontroller and its ilk) in places where previously, only specialized circuitry was used. The result is typically more flexible - because it can easily be reprogrammed - and more powerful, because it can do "intelligent" things that more dedicated hardware often can't, like connect to the Internet or display data on an LCD.
The same kind of logic applies to many embedded Linux applications. Rather than spend resources designing custom hardware and custom software, it makes sense to use an off-the-shelf and well-understood hardware platform, along with an OS which comes with source, which allows it to be customized and stripped down as small as you need it, to the point where it can fit on a floppy or even a watch.
Instead of wasting time reinventing the wheel, smart designers will choose and customize components that already do most of what they want, which frees up resources to focus on the specific functionality they need, rather than on features that don't have much to do with the application, like memory management and task scheduling.
On some technical level, it might be appealing to have a machine that's been designed from the ground up to do one function, and only one function, with nothing extraneous. But in practice, this tends to be expensive, and the end result is often less flexible.
...you're truly evil, far exceeding the depravity of any spammer. It's not much of a stretch from there to people like Hitler and Milosevic - they only difference is they didn't just jail people they didn't like, they had them killed.
Try to separate your annoyance at a trivial problem - spam - from something which threatens all our freedom - the freedom to read, listen, and watch without paying a toll on every occasion, for example. The freedom to not have every detail of our lives controlled by global corporate monopolies. In the face of these threats, so clearly demonstrated by Sklayrov's current predicament, spam doesn't even belong in the dicussion.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
--Benjamin Franklin
You want to give up our freedoms in exchange for safety from spammers? You're incredibly lucky to be living in an environment where you can afford to believe that spam is the worst thing you have to worry about. If history is any guide, it won't always be that way. Laws like the DMCA are one of the ways in which societies can change for the worse. A little law called "apartheid" in South Africa ultimately led to the ravaging of that country, in political, economic and human terms. It doesn't take the imagination of a Neal Stephenson or a William Gibson to project what the DMCA can result in - in fact, RMS has already written one such near-future sci-fi piece, "The Right to Read", and Sklyarov is busy living the prelude to that story.
Re:People only learn what they're ready to learn
on
Joy of Linux
·
· Score: 2
Call me lame, look down on me, you have every right to, but an awful lot of people like me exist.
Hey, I'm not calling you lame, even if my comments might have seemed dismissive of newbies. That isn't really what I meant. What's lame is the sort of close-minded post I was responding to. What I should have said is that/. provides a wonderful sort of cross-fertilization between worlds, if you're open to it. Even a troll like the one I was responding to can generate interesting exchanges which might point people in useful directions, which is the only reason I bother to respond.
As for running Linux: you definitely need to play with it to learn. Hard disks are so cheap these days, if you can't buy one, maybe you could get an old one from someone who's upgrading and add it to your machine. If you really want to avoid messing with your Windows config, install Linux on a 2nd drive and use your machine's BIOS to enable the drive you want to use and disable the other (or if you're really paranoid, unplug the unused drive's power). This isn't the "right" way to do it, but if you're worried that you might, say, trash Windows with a LILO install when you're getting started - not a completely baseless concern - then what I'm talking about eliminates that worry.
Although you didn't raise it directly, I think the question of "why use Linux", implicit to the whole issue of what's cool and what people's motivation is, is a very valid one. Linux isn't the answer for everyone, right now. I use it because I'm a developer, and because I hate the bugginess and lack of control I have under Windows. Having the source to everything, even if you only have a minimal clue about what to do with it, can be incredibly empowering. You may not always know what to do with the source, but someone else might.
For non-developers who want to learn, though, Windows presents the same basic problem - it's a prepackaged, minimally customizable solution.
Microsoft goes out of its way to hide the innards from you and make it difficult to modify. If you're a granny or a flute player and all you want is to be able to email your buddies and surf a little, Windows isn't so bad. But if you want more than just a predigested, spoonfed solution, if you're curious about what's going on under the hood and want to learn about it, then Windows is an exercise in frustration.
Linux can be frustrating too, in a different way, but the payoff is a lot greater - real knowledge, rather than just learning non-transferrable superficialities about Microsoft's latest marketing-approved flavor-of-the-month.
BTW, if you manage to get Linux running, and get a little comfy with it, you might look into running it as your main install and running Windows in a virtual machine using something like Win4Lin. I do something similar myself - my main desktop environment used to be Windows NT, which I still need for work, but now my base environment is Linux. I actually use VMWare to run NT on Linux, not Win4Lin (which runs Win9x), but it's the same basic idea and should work just as well. I reboot my machine a lot less often since I switched.
People only learn what they're ready to learn
on
Joy of Linux
·
· Score: 2
Nice troll. The best are when you suspect trolling but reply anyway, in case the message is serious.
You know those articles where your eyes glaze over and you don't understand or care about what's being talked about? Those are the articles for the real geeks here. Sure,/. is read by plenty of wannabes, script kiddies, and interested bystanders. And sure, when you see books about Linux here, many of them are gonna be "Linux for average/. users or their friends". There aren't a lot of books with titles like "Linux for geek gods", other than con-jobs by exploitative publishers. The reason is that the really interesting stuff can't all be put into one book. You have to integrate what you learn from multiple sources, and apply your own filters. If you're reading/. waiting for discussions that'll make it all click for you, you've missed the point. If you're ever going to understand it, you have a few years of assimilation to go, at least, and you have to do homework outside of/. You'll get out as much as you bring to the table, and it doesn't sound as though you're bringing much right now.
/. is not a discussion site in the way that some mailing lists are. People comment on articles. The point about it, for me, is that (a) it brings interesting things to my attention (a human-mediated "intelligent agent"); and (b) often, people who know a lot about the subjects raised comment on them, and add information that would be difficult to get otherwise, from more mediated sources. Despite the trolls, the flames, and the fr1st ps0ts, a lot of good stuff appears on this site and it's not hard to find, if you know what you're looking for.
Finally, the/. humor can be peerless, although again, you have to understand it to get it (tautological, I know).
All your sociological pretensions are belong to you.
What someone learns on his/her own time counts for bupkus with recruiters and hiring managers.
There's more to it than that. Sure, this guy wouldn't land a new Oracle job on the strength of nothing but a bit of self-teaching. But part of the point is to continue to develop your skills on an ongoing basis, while you have a job. This might allow the guy to move onto other things with his current employer.
If he does find himself in the position of facing recruiters and hiring managers, the ability to say that he has "familiarity with Oracle" and back that up by being able to pass some of the silly sorts of tests that have been described in other messages here, could make the difference between being hired or not. Maybe he would still have to rely on his COBOL skills to get a job, but someone who knows both COBOL and Oracle is going to be more valuable than someone who knows COBOL alone.
Finally, just because recruiters and hiring managers are often short-sighted morons, doesn't mean you should just sit back and let them shuffle you where they think you belong. Make them understand and believe what you can do, explain to them how you'll add value to their business, demonstrate that you're not stuck in a single outdated skill set, and you'll make an impression on the better managers, which are the ones you want to be working for anyway.
Sitting around whinging about how your company won't train you, on the other hand, will get you nowhere real fast.
If your dad desperately wants to learn Oracle, he should get hold of the trial version and some books, install it on a PC (Linux or Windows NT), and start teaching himself. Sitting around waiting for a corp to train him is a recipe for termination.
If he's not enough of a self-starter to teach himself at least the basics (not a good sign), then he should consider investing in a training course. He should approach his boss for sponsorship, but if he's turned down, he should go ahead and pay for it himself.
If he doesn't take some proactive action like this, the writing is on the wall for him, and it'll be his own fault.
Really good, smart programmers usually become more useful as they get older and more experienced. I've seen multiple cases, though, where mediocre programmers become useless or worse than useless, even actively causing harm, as they get older.
The problem in these cases has been that back when these mediocre programmers were younger, they had fewer of those family and other life obligations, and were more motivated to work hard at doing an acceptable job. What seems to happen over time, though, is that they:
Don't keep their skills up to date, and find adapting to new technologies and tools very difficult, because this takes time, skill, and devotion.
Don't have as much time to devote to compensating for the fact that they were never that good in the first place.
Begin to indulge in various increasingly irrational behaviors to cover up their shortcomings, possibly causing damage to team function and overall morale. Fellow employees don't necessarily want to throw such people to the wolves, so it can take a while until the obvious becomes apparent to higher-ups.
Expect to be paid more, even though their value to a company decreases over time.
Faced with this, it's little wonder that many managers shy away from older programmers. Since there are more average programmers than otherwise, some version of the above may apply to the bulk of the programmer market.
And of course, a big part of the problem is that management is often so incapable of judging programmer performance on an individual basis, that it has little choice but to fall back on simplistic indicators, like age.
Not that I know anything, but his management reasoning sounds reasonable to me.
No, that's not reasonable. Why damage your business (or take the risk of doing so) to solve a problem that doesn't yet exist, and may never exist? Instead, take steps to actually address the underlying risk.
Hire an understudy to act as a backup for the irreplaceable person. If that person has a negative reaction to this, use your management skills (hopefully a bit more sophisticated than those being displayed so far) to explain why this is a good thing for all concerned, and obtain his/her participation.
As part of bringing the new person up to speed, ask that the two of them collaborate on an effort to document the various critical systems.
When this process is complete, then you can fire one or both of them! Bwahahahaha!
[PS: the subject line is a reference to a fun book of that name by Stanley Bing, worth reading if you want some perspective on this kind of stuff.]
I'm sure its a concession to ubiquitous convention in other languages. C/C++, Javascript, Java, Python, Ruby, Visual BASIC and quite a few other languages support "." as a structure/object member selection operator.
I'm not saying it's a great move, but I can understand the motivation. I find -> to be cluttering myself.
BTW, using - or > would play havoc with arithmetic and comparisons, surely...
I think a change like -> to . makes sense. The incompatibilities it creates are very unfortunate, but it's such a common operator that it may be worth it in terms of readability (oh wait, can't use that word in a sentence about Perl).
Stuff like using the keyword "given" for switch statements just seems like nothing more than capricious perversity. Which may be a pretty good description of Larry Wall's character, so I guess Perl programmers will just have to live with it!
Any company of significant size, or with a halfway decent IT department, has considered the business risk involved in being dependent on a single vendor for all aspects of their computing strategy.
Up until not that long ago, Microsoft produced the desktop OS and the office apps, and that was basically it. Then with NT, Microsoft entered the server space with a vengeance, and now you have large corporations that find that they have effectively bet their company from end to end on Microsoft software. This worries many of them, especially with Microsoft's increasingly self-serving, anti-customer antics.
.NET's legitimacy will be seriously compromised if there are no alternative implementations, or if the "standards" on which it is based are hollow. Contrast this to what's happening in the Java space, where there are solid standards, and multiple implementations, including Open Source ones, from companies both big (IBM, Sun, Oracle) and small.
It's not difficult to make a case to a CIO that betting the company's IT strategy on products and tools that are based on standards implemented by multiple vendors, is safer than a system implemented by a single vendor with an iffy record on standards. With Microsoft being the single vendor, the risk is not so much that it'll go out of business, but rather that customers will be pushed in directions they don't want to go, without any alternative choices.
Even at the level of non-technical managers, questions are being raised lately by the mainstream press coverage of Microsoft's various take-over-the-world strategies. Microsoft has generated its own self-damaging FUD, which has started to trickle down into places which, before long, could start having a real effect.
Viable alternatives to Microsoft solutions are becoming more and more attractive in the business environment..NET may not be adopted quite as blindly as many expect.
Rather than replying to a couple of the other joyless and uncurious morons who replied to your message, I thought I'd say that yes, I think the idea of a PIC-based emulator for something like this is fun - especially when compared with the size and power requirements of the original (here's a picture).
IIRC, the MIT Computing Museum (or whatever it's called) in Boston has some exhibits along these lines. The Dr. Dobb's article mentions that The Computer Museum History Center has a 604 on display, so perhaps they'd put a PIC emulator next to it, which could make for a fun resume item!
Google turned up this page which contains some info on the 604's basic instruction set.
But Katz is an AI too, so it makes sense...
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 3
We all know Katz is an AI, or at the very least a rather messy and verbose Perl script. Sure, with Katz there's something of an emphasis on the A, not so much on the I, but still. Having the Katz AI review a movie about AI is too perfect an opportunity to pass up, so they sneaked it onto the main page. I can live with that, can't you?
Quit the lame wriggling, Michael!
on
Review: A.I.
·
· Score: 2
C'mon, Michael, don't try to pretend you knew that the "aliens" were descended from mecha, but nevertheless chose to use some weird semantic distinction. I missed it too, but at least I can admit it.
Thank you! A thought-provoking quote - for me anyway, having a tendency to focus on those great, general views. I'll have to get my act together if I ever want to be Emperor of Rome...;)
We'll also stop that confusing practice of confronting people with password prompts from now on. If we just assume they are who they claim, we're less likely to have stress and confusion.
I know you think you're joking, but that's only because you presumably don't work in an environment where management might think your suggestion was a really good idea, and want you to implement it immediately!
Doesn't bloody matter, mate. I could go download the Linux kernel right now, do a bulk replace of 'linux' with 'SuiteSisterMarix' and sell it to you for 1 MILLION doll-ars.
Yes, but if you added some "proprietary" stuff on top of the kernel, I can't legally do anything with the entire package without conforming to your overall license. If I want to strip out the free bits (via the source) and give them away, or try to install them on the rest of my LAN, that'd be OK, but who in their right mind is going to do that? It'd be like a less-friendly version of Slackware. So although I think Caldera are loony and will probably go out of business soon, they are presumably "free" to do this.
Re "proves nothing", the kite exercise does prove something: that it's possible to lift large, heavy objects with kites (7000 lbs!!) It doesn't prove that the Egyptians did it, of course.
Aside from the lack of direct documentary evidence, this actually doesn't seem that unlikely to me. After all, sail technology was presumably well established at the time. Whether or not it actually happened, it *could* have!:)
Shouldn't an update be appended to the complete original text of the story and clearly marked as such, rather than appear to be an attempt to cover up something you came to regret having said?
Not when it really is an attempt to cover up something you came to regret having said...
You do not appear to realize that [Slashdot] is composed of nearly 97% trolls.
Oh, we realize that. Happily, the moderation system picks out the interesting and funny stuff, and ignores all but the most entertaining or subtle trolls.
I notice your post is sitting at 0 points - I rest my case...
Slashdot Mirror
Gee ... I'm sure that escaped Rob's attention.
Exactly! But the reason Windows allows it to do most damage is because Windows is full of security holes because of Microsoft's insistence on reinventing everything, badly.
The "path traversal" bug in IIS was one of the most egregious flaws ever: a URL like /scripts/../../winnt/system32/cmd.exe allowed crackers to execute arbitrary commands on a web server. This is basic, web server design 101 - don't allow access outside the published directory tree.
And most other Microsoft "security holes" aren't much better. It's plain incompetence, the result of throwing a million programming monkeys at the task of reinventing the software that drives the Internet, and shipping it regardless of quality.
Less bitching, more solutions.
Want solutions? Switch your servers to Linux, or Solaris, or anything but Windows. An entire class of Internet-wide worms and viruses will disappear.
What you find annoying, others find funny. I suspect we're looking at a culture gap here.
The same kind of logic applies to many embedded Linux applications. Rather than spend resources designing custom hardware and custom software, it makes sense to use an off-the-shelf and well-understood hardware platform, along with an OS which comes with source, which allows it to be customized and stripped down as small as you need it, to the point where it can fit on a floppy or even a watch.
Instead of wasting time reinventing the wheel, smart designers will choose and customize components that already do most of what they want, which frees up resources to focus on the specific functionality they need, rather than on features that don't have much to do with the application, like memory management and task scheduling.
On some technical level, it might be appealing to have a machine that's been designed from the ground up to do one function, and only one function, with nothing extraneous. But in practice, this tends to be expensive, and the end result is often less flexible.
Try to separate your annoyance at a trivial problem - spam - from something which threatens all our freedom - the freedom to read, listen, and watch without paying a toll on every occasion, for example. The freedom to not have every detail of our lives controlled by global corporate monopolies. In the face of these threats, so clearly demonstrated by Sklayrov's current predicament, spam doesn't even belong in the dicussion.
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."
--Benjamin Franklin
You want to give up our freedoms in exchange for safety from spammers? You're incredibly lucky to be living in an environment where you can afford to believe that spam is the worst thing you have to worry about. If history is any guide, it won't always be that way. Laws like the DMCA are one of the ways in which societies can change for the worse. A little law called "apartheid" in South Africa ultimately led to the ravaging of that country, in political, economic and human terms. It doesn't take the imagination of a Neal Stephenson or a William Gibson to project what the DMCA can result in - in fact, RMS has already written one such near-future sci-fi piece, "The Right to Read", and Sklyarov is busy living the prelude to that story.
Hey, I'm not calling you lame, even if my comments might have seemed dismissive of newbies. That isn't really what I meant. What's lame is the sort of close-minded post I was responding to. What I should have said is that /. provides a wonderful sort of cross-fertilization between worlds, if you're open to it. Even a troll like the one I was responding to can generate interesting exchanges which might point people in useful directions, which is the only reason I bother to respond.
As for running Linux: you definitely need to play with it to learn. Hard disks are so cheap these days, if you can't buy one, maybe you could get an old one from someone who's upgrading and add it to your machine. If you really want to avoid messing with your Windows config, install Linux on a 2nd drive and use your machine's BIOS to enable the drive you want to use and disable the other (or if you're really paranoid, unplug the unused drive's power). This isn't the "right" way to do it, but if you're worried that you might, say, trash Windows with a LILO install when you're getting started - not a completely baseless concern - then what I'm talking about eliminates that worry.
Although you didn't raise it directly, I think the question of "why use Linux", implicit to the whole issue of what's cool and what people's motivation is, is a very valid one. Linux isn't the answer for everyone, right now. I use it because I'm a developer, and because I hate the bugginess and lack of control I have under Windows. Having the source to everything, even if you only have a minimal clue about what to do with it, can be incredibly empowering. You may not always know what to do with the source, but someone else might.
For non-developers who want to learn, though, Windows presents the same basic problem - it's a prepackaged, minimally customizable solution. Microsoft goes out of its way to hide the innards from you and make it difficult to modify. If you're a granny or a flute player and all you want is to be able to email your buddies and surf a little, Windows isn't so bad. But if you want more than just a predigested, spoonfed solution, if you're curious about what's going on under the hood and want to learn about it, then Windows is an exercise in frustration.
Linux can be frustrating too, in a different way, but the payoff is a lot greater - real knowledge, rather than just learning non-transferrable superficialities about Microsoft's latest marketing-approved flavor-of-the-month.
BTW, if you manage to get Linux running, and get a little comfy with it, you might look into running it as your main install and running Windows in a virtual machine using something like Win4Lin. I do something similar myself - my main desktop environment used to be Windows NT, which I still need for work, but now my base environment is Linux. I actually use VMWare to run NT on Linux, not Win4Lin (which runs Win9x), but it's the same basic idea and should work just as well. I reboot my machine a lot less often since I switched.
You know those articles where your eyes glaze over and you don't understand or care about what's being talked about? Those are the articles for the real geeks here. Sure, /. is read by plenty of wannabes, script kiddies, and interested bystanders. And sure, when you see books about Linux here, many of them are gonna be "Linux for average /. users or their friends". There aren't a lot of books with titles like "Linux for geek gods", other than con-jobs by exploitative publishers. The reason is that the really interesting stuff can't all be put into one book. You have to integrate what you learn from multiple sources, and apply your own filters. If you're reading /. waiting for discussions that'll make it all click for you, you've missed the point. If you're ever going to understand it, you have a few years of assimilation to go, at least, and you have to do homework outside of /. You'll get out as much as you bring to the table, and it doesn't sound as though you're bringing much right now.
Finally, the /. humor can be peerless, although again, you have to understand it to get it (tautological, I know).
All your sociological pretensions are belong to you.
There's more to it than that. Sure, this guy wouldn't land a new Oracle job on the strength of nothing but a bit of self-teaching. But part of the point is to continue to develop your skills on an ongoing basis, while you have a job. This might allow the guy to move onto other things with his current employer.
If he does find himself in the position of facing recruiters and hiring managers, the ability to say that he has "familiarity with Oracle" and back that up by being able to pass some of the silly sorts of tests that have been described in other messages here, could make the difference between being hired or not. Maybe he would still have to rely on his COBOL skills to get a job, but someone who knows both COBOL and Oracle is going to be more valuable than someone who knows COBOL alone.
Finally, just because recruiters and hiring managers are often short-sighted morons, doesn't mean you should just sit back and let them shuffle you where they think you belong. Make them understand and believe what you can do, explain to them how you'll add value to their business, demonstrate that you're not stuck in a single outdated skill set, and you'll make an impression on the better managers, which are the ones you want to be working for anyway.
Sitting around whinging about how your company won't train you, on the other hand, will get you nowhere real fast.
If he's not enough of a self-starter to teach himself at least the basics (not a good sign), then he should consider investing in a training course. He should approach his boss for sponsorship, but if he's turned down, he should go ahead and pay for it himself.
If he doesn't take some proactive action like this, the writing is on the wall for him, and it'll be his own fault.
The problem in these cases has been that back when these mediocre programmers were younger, they had fewer of those family and other life obligations, and were more motivated to work hard at doing an acceptable job. What seems to happen over time, though, is that they:
-
Don't keep their skills up to date, and find adapting to new technologies and tools very difficult, because this takes time, skill, and devotion.
- Don't have as much time to devote to compensating for the fact that they were never that good in the first place.
- Begin to indulge in various increasingly irrational behaviors to cover up their shortcomings, possibly causing damage to team function and overall morale. Fellow employees don't necessarily want to throw such people to the wolves, so it can take a while until the obvious becomes apparent to higher-ups.
- Expect to be paid more, even though their value to a company decreases over time.
Faced with this, it's little wonder that many managers shy away from older programmers. Since there are more average programmers than otherwise, some version of the above may apply to the bulk of the programmer market.And of course, a big part of the problem is that management is often so incapable of judging programmer performance on an individual basis, that it has little choice but to fall back on simplistic indicators, like age.
No, that's not reasonable. Why damage your business (or take the risk of doing so) to solve a problem that doesn't yet exist, and may never exist? Instead, take steps to actually address the underlying risk.
Hire an understudy to act as a backup for the irreplaceable person. If that person has a negative reaction to this, use your management skills (hopefully a bit more sophisticated than those being displayed so far) to explain why this is a good thing for all concerned, and obtain his/her participation.
As part of bringing the new person up to speed, ask that the two of them collaborate on an effort to document the various critical systems.
When this process is complete, then you can fire one or both of them! Bwahahahaha!
[PS: the subject line is a reference to a fun book of that name by Stanley Bing, worth reading if you want some perspective on this kind of stuff.]
'Course, I'm not sure Perl would be the best tool for the job...
I'm not saying it's a great move, but I can understand the motivation. I find -> to be cluttering myself.
BTW, using - or > would play havoc with arithmetic and comparisons, surely...
Stuff like using the keyword "given" for switch statements just seems like nothing more than capricious perversity. Which may be a pretty good description of Larry Wall's character, so I guess Perl programmers will just have to live with it!
What was the piece of equipment? C'mon, we're all dying to know...
Up until not that long ago, Microsoft produced the desktop OS and the office apps, and that was basically it. Then with NT, Microsoft entered the server space with a vengeance, and now you have large corporations that find that they have effectively bet their company from end to end on Microsoft software. This worries many of them, especially with Microsoft's increasingly self-serving, anti-customer antics.
It's not difficult to make a case to a CIO that betting the company's IT strategy on products and tools that are based on standards implemented by multiple vendors, is safer than a system implemented by a single vendor with an iffy record on standards. With Microsoft being the single vendor, the risk is not so much that it'll go out of business, but rather that customers will be pushed in directions they don't want to go, without any alternative choices.
Even at the level of non-technical managers, questions are being raised lately by the mainstream press coverage of Microsoft's various take-over-the-world strategies. Microsoft has generated its own self-damaging FUD, which has started to trickle down into places which, before long, could start having a real effect.
Viable alternatives to Microsoft solutions are becoming more and more attractive in the business environment. .NET may not be adopted quite as blindly as many expect.
IIRC, the MIT Computing Museum (or whatever it's called) in Boston has some exhibits along these lines. The Dr. Dobb's article mentions that The Computer Museum History Center has a 604 on display, so perhaps they'd put a PIC emulator next to it, which could make for a fun resume item!
Google turned up this page which contains some info on the 604's basic instruction set.
We all know Katz is an AI, or at the very least a rather messy and verbose Perl script. Sure, with Katz there's something of an emphasis on the A, not so much on the I, but still. Having the Katz AI review a movie about AI is too perfect an opportunity to pass up, so they sneaked it onto the main page. I can live with that, can't you?
C'mon, Michael, don't try to pretend you knew that the "aliens" were descended from mecha, but nevertheless chose to use some weird semantic distinction. I missed it too, but at least I can admit it.
Thank you! A thought-provoking quote - for me anyway, having a tendency to focus on those great, general views. I'll have to get my act together if I ever want to be Emperor of Rome... ;)
I know you think you're joking, but that's only because you presumably don't work in an environment where management might think your suggestion was a really good idea, and want you to implement it immediately!
Yes, but if you added some "proprietary" stuff on top of the kernel, I can't legally do anything with the entire package without conforming to your overall license. If I want to strip out the free bits (via the source) and give them away, or try to install them on the rest of my LAN, that'd be OK, but who in their right mind is going to do that? It'd be like a less-friendly version of Slackware. So although I think Caldera are loony and will probably go out of business soon, they are presumably "free" to do this.
Aside from the lack of direct documentary evidence, this actually doesn't seem that unlikely to me. After all, sail technology was presumably well established at the time. Whether or not it actually happened, it *could* have! :)
I like your .sig, where's it from?
Not when it really is an attempt to cover up something you came to regret having said...
Oh, we realize that. Happily, the moderation system picks out the interesting and funny stuff, and ignores all but the most entertaining or subtle trolls.
I notice your post is sitting at 0 points - I rest my case...