In our relentless strive for economic freedom, we've given corporations way too much power, power that corporations don't have in other countries such as Japan.
You actually think that big corporations in Japan have less power than their American counterparts? You've been ingesting too much Michael Moore. Japan is often referred to as "Japan Inc." They may be take better care of their workers (or, put it another way, they're more paternalistic) but that requires more power not less.
And Japan doesn't lack big labor movement because the workers never saw a need for it. They used to have one. But like other labor movements, its heyday was the Great Depression. And at the time, Japan was moving towards being a right-wing, expansionistic military dictatorship. (Remember Pearl Harbor? Guess not.) Not the best environment for powerful unions to form.
As long as we're playing usage nazi: it should be "MULTICS", because the word's an acronym (according to the official programmer's manual). But "Multics" is used officially, and that trumps ordinary usage nazism.
"UNIX" is the inverse example. It should be "Unix" because it's not an acronym, but rather a play on "Multics". But AT&T decided early on that it was "UNIX".
Not true. Two of the three partners in the project were Bell Labs and GE. Bell Labs wanted an OS their researchers could actually use, and pulled out when they decided that the project wasn't going to come together in a useful time frame. GE's mainframe division wanted a new OS to differentiate their products from other mainframes, and went on to sell a small number of MULTICS-based systems. Or to be precise, Honeywell, Groupe Bull, and NEC, who owned the former GE mainframe division in turn, sold them. The last MULTICS-based commercial system was discontinued in 1987. Doesn't sound like a "research OS" to me.
This isn't marketing, this is trying to find a new market for old content.
If I had the comic-book fan mentality, I'd be really excited by this. After the first Spider-Man movie came out, I was sufficiently impressed to go out and buy some reprints of the early comic books.
Two big disappointments: the reprints are available only as line drawings, which destroys a lot of the impact of this kind of comic. And the stories were just plain dumb. (I mean jeez, they show a Mercury space capsule flying around like an airplane.) But a serious comics fan (and there are a lot of them) would overlook the second issue, and gladly pay $5/month to avoid the first issue.
UNIX can in fact be considered to be a 'simplified' successor to MULTICS.
Which is precisely why Unix matters and MULTICS doesn't. The simplifications in Unix are its most important contribution to the art of OS design. For example, we now take it for granted that the OS should implement a disk file as a simple byte stream, with bigger structures, such as records or indexes, being implemented on the application level. But when Unix appeared, that idea was novel and controversial.
The fact is, Unix was a fresh start, and a damned important one. Unix's creators' biggest accomplishment was clearing out all the feature crud and creating a simple model that has influenced computer science on many levels.
MULTICS, by contrast, was doomed by its own complexity. The fact that Unix was created from the ashes of Bell Labs' participation in the MULTICS project is just a historical accident.
There's probably more here than rebranding. Oracle has the resources to create their own Xen-based solution, and is certainly not going to rely on Red Hat's work.
That said, you're right to wonder at all the reaction to this announcement. Everybody and his dog are doing virtualization solutions, and the Oracle version is hardly groundbreaking. Indeed, since Xen only supports guest OSs that are hypervisor aware, it's not quite as robust as the "pure" virtualization that VMware does. And yet Oracle has managed to spin this as a solid challenge to VMware. Some marketeer really earned their pay on this.
I wouldn't know for sure, but his claims aren't totally implausible. Like all Hollywood hacks, HE belongs to the Writers Guild of America, and their standard contracts are not the "work for hire" contracts you and your dog signed.
My one claim to not being a total trekkie-lamer is that I don't go around insisting that people say "treker" not "trekkie". That and the fact that I've never owned a Star Fleet uniform.
I wonder of Harlan bothered to talk to his lawyer before making these claims? Probably not — he's a shoot from the lip kind of guy. Really, all he's been doing for the last few decades is making big pronouncements and whining about how people are ripping him off. The dude is the original drama queen.
In any case, there's no monkey wrench here. "The City on the Edge of Forever" (Harlan may be a bombastic hack writer, but he does dream up great titles) is just another Star Trek time travel gimmick — of which there are almost a dozen. I doubt that it's crucial to Abram's concept of the movie.
Find out when we first meet Kirk in Abram's Trek plus alternate timelines and time travel explained! If you want to stay as spoiler free as possible this article is NOT FOR YOU! On the other hand, if you know you're likely to be disappointed by yet another lame attempt to keep the Trek franchise alive, but have been a Trekkie since TOS first touched down on the planet of the salt monster, you pretty much have to read all the spoilers you can find so you won't be tempted to waste your time and money actually going to the movie.
Case in point: they're doing the Time Travel plot again. The only thing different about this one is that they're going through the time portal at the City on the Edge of Forever, instead of colliding with a "black star", doing a tight orbit around the sun, or imploding the warp engines.
Whoops! I just gave away the "spoiler"! Except that I didn't mention that Spock is traveling through time to save Cadet Kirk from assassination. Which isn't a "spoiler". It's just a plot summary like you'd see in any movie review.
Are you serious? The only way to make money in the stock market is to buy low and sell at a profit.
RMFP. I didn't say it wasn't true. I said it's meaningless. Everybody knows that goal of stock speculation is to buy stocks that are going to appreciate. The trick is know which stocks are going to appreciate.
The fact that you can say "buy low and sell high" without irony disqualifies you as an expert at making money. It's just a cliche, and this is the first time I've every heard it used non-humorously. I mean, jeez, even a stall at the flea market operates on that principle.
Anyway, people with stock options are not investors. They're employees who are beneficiaries of a profit-based bonus scheme. It would make more sense for these bonuses to be granted in the forms of cash, except that selling employees stock at discounted prices allows the company to give the benefit "off the books". (Dishonest? Of course.) It's never a good idea for them to hold onto their stock, because if the stock goes down (unlikely in Google's case, but nothing is certain on Wall Street), they're still liable for the taxes on the original benefit.
There's nothing magic about a stock just because you got to buy it at a discount. If you fancy yourself a capitalist, go and open a brokerage account and speculate the old fashioned way. Then there's no tax weirdness when you take a loss — as you certainly will from time to time.
Actually... "fruit flies like a banana" is grammatically ambiguous anyway, and you aren't interpreting it in the usual way.
Oh give me a break. When was the last time you used "Fruit flies like a banana" in conversation? Are you an expert on the aerodynamic qualities of food?
I have taste to backwards translate an oration forwards and between the languages.
Tranlationbooth.com does rather better: "I want to translate an oration of here for there between languages." I've also fed it "Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana" (English->traditional Chinese->English) and even though it garbled the text somewhat, it did figure out that "flies" was a verb in the first sentence and a noun in the second!
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And Japan doesn't lack big labor movement because the workers never saw a need for it. They used to have one. But like other labor movements, its heyday was the Great Depression. And at the time, Japan was moving towards being a right-wing, expansionistic military dictatorship. (Remember Pearl Harbor? Guess not.) Not the best environment for powerful unions to form.
As long as we're playing usage nazi: it should be "MULTICS", because the word's an acronym (according to the official programmer's manual). But "Multics" is used officially, and that trumps ordinary usage nazism.
"UNIX" is the inverse example. It should be "Unix" because it's not an acronym, but rather a play on "Multics". But AT&T decided early on that it was "UNIX".
Right you are. "Mr. Sulu, full reverse!"
So basically you're saying that Multics's biggest accomplishments were all instructive mistakes? Not a ringing endorsement.
Have a look at http://www.multicians.org/myths.html
This isn't marketing, this is trying to find a new market for old content.
If I had the comic-book fan mentality, I'd be really excited by this. After the first Spider-Man movie came out, I was sufficiently impressed to go out and buy some reprints of the early comic books.
Two big disappointments: the reprints are available only as line drawings, which destroys a lot of the impact of this kind of comic. And the stories were just plain dumb. (I mean jeez, they show a Mercury space capsule flying around like an airplane.) But a serious comics fan (and there are a lot of them) would overlook the second issue, and gladly pay $5/month to avoid the first issue.
The fact is, Unix was a fresh start, and a damned important one. Unix's creators' biggest accomplishment was clearing out all the feature crud and creating a simple model that has influenced computer science on many levels.
MULTICS, by contrast, was doomed by its own complexity. The fact that Unix was created from the ashes of Bell Labs' participation in the MULTICS project is just a historical accident.
There's probably more here than rebranding. Oracle has the resources to create their own Xen-based solution, and is certainly not going to rely on Red Hat's work.
That said, you're right to wonder at all the reaction to this announcement. Everybody and his dog are doing virtualization solutions, and the Oracle version is hardly groundbreaking. Indeed, since Xen only supports guest OSs that are hypervisor aware, it's not quite as robust as the "pure" virtualization that VMware does. And yet Oracle has managed to spin this as a solid challenge to VMware. Some marketeer really earned their pay on this.
I wouldn't know for sure, but his claims aren't totally implausible. Like all Hollywood hacks, HE belongs to the Writers Guild of America, and their standard contracts are not the "work for hire" contracts you and your dog signed.
A matter of opinion.
SMG on the rumor that she'd had a boob job: "Lemme tell ya, if I paid for these, I'd like 'em to look a lot better than this."
If time travel stories count as prequels and prequels count backwards, then "First Contact" was 0 and this one is -1.
Actually, the rule is "odd or even". At least in my experience.
My one claim to not being a total trekkie-lamer is that I don't go around insisting that people say "treker" not "trekkie". That and the fact that I've never owned a Star Fleet uniform.
I wonder of Harlan bothered to talk to his lawyer before making these claims? Probably not — he's a shoot from the lip kind of guy. Really, all he's been doing for the last few decades is making big pronouncements and whining about how people are ripping him off. The dude is the original drama queen.
In any case, there's no monkey wrench here. "The City on the Edge of Forever" (Harlan may be a bombastic hack writer, but he does dream up great titles) is just another Star Trek time travel gimmick — of which there are almost a dozen. I doubt that it's crucial to Abram's concept of the movie.
Case in point: they're doing the Time Travel plot again. The only thing different about this one is that they're going through the time portal at the City on the Edge of Forever, instead of colliding with a "black star", doing a tight orbit around the sun, or imploding the warp engines.
Whoops! I just gave away the "spoiler"! Except that I didn't mention that Spock is traveling through time to save Cadet Kirk from assassination. Which isn't a "spoiler". It's just a plot summary like you'd see in any movie review.
Trekkies are so lame. Myself included!
This makes his second death, right? At this rate, he'll soon catch up with Buffy!
The fact that you can say "buy low and sell high" without irony disqualifies you as an expert at making money. It's just a cliche, and this is the first time I've every heard it used non-humorously. I mean, jeez, even a stall at the flea market operates on that principle.
Anyway, people with stock options are not investors. They're employees who are beneficiaries of a profit-based bonus scheme. It would make more sense for these bonuses to be granted in the forms of cash, except that selling employees stock at discounted prices allows the company to give the benefit "off the books". (Dishonest? Of course.) It's never a good idea for them to hold onto their stock, because if the stock goes down (unlikely in Google's case, but nothing is certain on Wall Street), they're still liable for the taxes on the original benefit.
There's nothing magic about a stock just because you got to buy it at a discount. If you fancy yourself a capitalist, go and open a brokerage account and speculate the old fashioned way. Then there's no tax weirdness when you take a loss — as you certainly will from time to time.
Unless his real name Bluto Blutarsky, I'm skeptical that he knows jack about vilatial victology.
You said that I wasn't using "flys" in the usual way. If neither usage is "normal", how can it be "usual"?
No diplomatic rows here. Watergate was just a scandal. The Muhammed cartoons just caused riots. And all William Randolph Hearst did was start a war!
Well, I guess going to war with Spain did put a damper on our diplomatic relations....