"You get what you pay for?" Nonsense. Not paying for something is pretty much a guarantee that you won't get it. But paying for it is hardly a guarantee that you will!
Well, it doesn't happen more often than I think, not after my own brief tenure on the help desk of a colo provider. We would rent rack space to a "company" (often one or two people) who would turn around and rent it out to other folks. For all I know, they in turn also rented it out. (This is why spam blacklists are so useless: just knowing an IP address doesn't tell you which colo or hosting provider is actually giving network access to a spammer.) The guy in the middle goes out of business, and the guy at the end is hosed. And if the guy at the end is a shared hosting provider, his customers are hosed.
Once I got a pleading phone call from a guy who had rented rack space from somebody who rented it from us. The guy in the middle had stopped paying his bills and got cut off. Policy was to seize the hardware in the defaulter's racks, even if it wasn't his, and hold it hostage against payment. The caller just wanted his hardware back, and if it'd been up to me he would have gotten it. We couldn't sell it, so it was just going to collect dust until the bill got paid — that is, forever. But nope, wasn't going to happen.
Nor was the company I worked for totally trustworthy. Despite having thousands of racks in multiple locations, and its own network backbone, the company was basically the private property of one guy who had started the whole operation in his garage 10 years before. Now, AFAIK, this guy was 100% honest; he was certainly more than fair (well, most of the time) to his employees. But there was really nothing to prevent him from collecting all the bills up front, not paying his own bills, and skipping the country.
And honest or not, this dude was not a great business executive. Because of poor planning and faulty procedures, we had endless network problems and even one highly avoidable power outage. (Caused by maintenance on the UPS!) Really, I think many of our customers would have ditched us in a moment, if they could have found a provider with any certainty of doing a better job than we were doing.
What consumers need is some kind of a neutral audit service. Does the company have cash flow to stay in business? (Perhaps posting a bond to make sure their bills are paid?) Do they have "best practices" procedures in place to prevent stupid accidents like the one we had with the UPS? Hell, do they even have the facilities they claim to have? Then consumers could look at the audit and know what they're getting into.
First bug report for Kylix (Linux version of Delphi): testers claimed the "compile" command wasn't doing anything. What they didn't understand was that their test programs were finishing compilation before they had a chance to release the mouse button!
Thing is with Pascal: it's designed to be very easy to compile. (So CS students could use it for their first stab at writing a compiler; this was before grammar generators made hand-built compilers obsolete.) So compiling only takes one pass, and even that pass executes quickly. Very handy when you're working with an IDE....
The "support route" requires more than. a compiler. It requires developers who know both the technology and culture, which are drastically different from those of any other language. Not bad, just different. Which is why Turbo/Delphi/Object/Free Pascal has always been fiercely opposed by management (which doesn't care for nonstandard technology) and fiercely defended by developers (who love its tiny compile cycle and elegant features).
The suits will win in the end, because they're breeding faster. There's not a lot of incentive to become a Pascal expert, because it's perceived as a fringe language. (To some extent, that's a self-fulfilling prophecy, but that doesn't make it any less true.) So there will be fewer and fewer developers who insist on working in Pascal, and always the same number of managers who insist on switching to a "standard" language.
So Pascal is doomed. Yes, they've been saying that for a long time, because it's been true for a long time. Religions don't die quickly.
Personal note: I used to work for Borland and was responsible for documenting a big chunk of the Delphi API. Fell in love with the language during those years. Driven out by the sheer insanity of Borland management. Now I can't bear to work in the language — too depressing.
Right you are. This is not an operating system, and its backers don't pretend that it is. Not even TFA article refers to it as an OS. It's just the usual Slashdot summarizing.
It's really an Ajax-based GUI API. Referring to it as an "operating system" is dumb, but consistent with the way most people deal with OSs. When you hear people moan about the demise of Amiga or NextStep or Be, they almost always talk about some cool GUI feature or application, not about the software or hardware platforms the GUI is built on. And yet it's the software and hardware platforms that ultimately distinguishes one system from another. A GUI can be implemented anywhere.
But people talk about what they know, and what most people know is the GUI. So to most people, the GUI is the OS.
Your complaint about Wikipedia is a special case of my #1 complaint about Wikipedia. Which is that its content mostly lacks focus. I write technical documents for a living, and in my job it's important to structure content carefully and only put in the facts that your readers are likely to need. (The most difficult and most enjoyable aspect of my work.) Because nobody "owns" a given article, it's impossible to impose this kind of discipline on Wikipedia. To my mind, that's the biggest drawback to editing reference material on a Wiki, and a fatal flaw in the Wikipedia concept.
Don't get me wrong. I like Wikis (I manage my department TWiki) and I like the idea of "open-source" documentation. But the two just don't go together. Open Source allows its developers a maximum of freedom, but every good OSS project has a code nazi who makes sure that only code that actually enhances the product get integrated. I'm reminded of that Heinlein character who said his household was a combination of fascism and anarchy, with no trace of democracy. Wikipedia has the anarchy part down. And, despite what Colbert says, it's not at all democratic. But a Wiki is incompatible with fascism.
I often refer to Wikipedia (always with an eye to guessing what's serious content and what's some idiot's ramblings) but I never enjoy reading it. I'm enough of a dweeb to enjoy reading real encylopedia, which is what Wikipedia will never be.
In computing, zero has always been been a valid index, and often makes more sense as the lower bound than 1. For example, if you have a multidimensional array stored contiguously, it's easier to calculate the memory location holding a given element if the array's lower bounds are 0.
So "zeroth" is perfectly good word, and Asimov (who really didn't understand computers all that well) probably didn't coin it.
I once had a CS professor who insisted that his students number the sections in their papers from 0 instead of 1!
Doesn't the software have to be optimised for multiprocessors?
Well, it has to be multithreaded. Thing is, a lot of software is multithreaded already; even on a single-core system, it makes sense to distribute functionality among multiple threads so that resources are used efficiently. On server systems (which is where Opterons are mostly used) software pretty much has to be multithreaded — you don't want all your other clients hanging when one client is waiting on a resource. A web server is a classic example.
When you move a multithreaded program to a system with more cores, than any given thread is more likely to get a core to run on when it needs it. Assuming, of course, that you have enough threads so that's an issue.
Shameless plug: I'm the docs lead for this Opeteron-based server, which can have up to 8 CPUs, for a total of 16 cores. When the Barcelona-based CPU modules are ready, customers will be able to upgrade their systems to a maximum of 32 cores. (Don't ask me when this will happen; Marketing would have me killed.) Obviously any software running on such a system has already dealt with the multicore optimization issue.
... if you cause harm to others, you are accountable...
That's a generalized and oversimplified description of a complicated principle. If people were "held accountable" every time they did something that causes harm, we'd all be in jail.
Ever throw a battery in the trash? That adds toxic material to the landfill which leaches into the water table where it does all kind of harm to people and the environment. So your action caused harm to others much as the poorly maintained PC does.
Now maybe that means that it should be illegal to have certain OSs hooked up to the internet, just as it's now illegal in many places to put batteries in the trash. But it does not give individuals the right to go around sabotaging computers, anymore than they have the right to break into your house and steal all your battery-operated gizmos.
That one is different enough from a laptop (can't put a laptop in your pocket!) that the "for a few bucks more" rule doesn't apply. So maybe it will succeed, especially since it actually has a decent battery life, unlike its predecessor, the 770.
I didn't mean to imply that it was impossible to sell new kinds of internet gizmos. All you need to do is find a need that isn't covered by an existing gizmo. It's when you try to compete directly with the PC and laptop that you get into trouble.
You touch a sore point. The ISP in question didn't offer secure connections. The only way they could have done that is to junk the SMTP/POP software they had developed in-house and gone to something off-the-shelf. Then I wouldn't have been able to hack the mail connection by hand. But I wouldn't have had to, because we wouldn't have had that stupid mailbox corruption issue.
It is if you're ignorant of something a layman can't be expected to know. You mention housing inspectors. A housing inspector doesn't go around issuing fines for having an unsafe house. When he sees a problem, he informs the homeowner, and imposes a deadline for fixing it. That's not "ignorance is no excuse." That's "ok, you didn't know any better, but now you do."
And in fact the existence of the housing inspector actually reduces the owner's legal responsibility. Suppose somebody burns to death, and it's shown that a sprinkler system would have saved them. Is the owner liable? Not unless the missing sprinklers are a local requirement.
As for having "computer inspectors": are you willing to pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege of owning a computer? That's what building owners pay in offers and taxes to cover the cost of housing inspectors.
I find OneNote pretty usable, though not nearly as usable as it should be. Two sad points: the built-in handwriting recognition is worthless, because it's too hard to deal with recognition errors; and too many features don't work without a keyboard. Both problems are absurd in a program designed for tablets!
Still, it works well enough to be the note taking tool that's replaced my spiral-bound notebook. (Technical writer. Lots of meetings. Lots of interviews.) The interesting thing is that, bad as OneNote is, its competition is even worse. I guess the user base is too small to provide the feedback a product needs to mature.
I think Sharepoint is more a case of the "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" principle.
I have to admit that I'd want to give Sharepoint a close look if it were an option for anything I do. Reason: I'm a big fan of OneNote. Or to be more precise, I'm a big fan of the idea of OneNote, since many of this program's features are not intelligently implemented.
You have to respect the wisdom of the protocol designers in making them usable even by a manually telnetting human.
Well, these were protocol designers who were eating their own dogfood. (Yucky metaphor, but I guess we're stuck with it.) And they had to deal with systems that had lots of nasty data incompatibility: bit order, byte order, even lack of byte addressability support. Restricting themselves to byte values they could bang out on a keyboard must have made debugging a lot easier.
You are. There are millions of non-geeks out there with malware problems, and you're insisting that they're all criminally negligent, just because they don't understand what's wrong with their computer.
Sometimes it is indeed intelligent IT engineers resisting brainless buzzwords. But just as often it's stupid IT engineers resisting new technologies the company actually needs. God knows I've seen both.
A case in point is Wiki technology, which manages to be both overhyped and extremely useful. On the one hand, you have snake-oil types who push elaborate (and usually pretty buggy) wiki engines that are supposed to replace every enterprise application on the intranet. On the other hand, you have nice simple wiki implementations that improve collaboration and cooperation with a very low training overhead.
We have an extraordinarily difficult time getting IT to update broken links on our website
Your company is really out of date. Maintaining a web isn't an IT function, it belongs to specialized web developers. If you guys were with it, you wouldn't have inept IT people who can't keep the web site up to date; you'd be like other companies, with an inept web team that can't the web site up to date!
Ignorance is certainly an excuse when you have no way of knowing the consequences of your action. You're held responsible when your car crashes due to your negligence, not the negligence of your mechanic or the person who sold you the car.
I'm going to say it one last time, then I'm going to get on with my life: not everybody is a computer geek. Not knowing about malware doesn't make a person stupid or ignorant, it just makes them one of those ordinary people who expects technology to just work. Which is the usual definition of well-designed technology. Which most home computers are not.
Slashdot Mirror
"You get what you pay for?" Nonsense. Not paying for something is pretty much a guarantee that you won't get it. But paying for it is hardly a guarantee that you will!
Well, it doesn't happen more often than I think, not after my own brief tenure on the help desk of a colo provider. We would rent rack space to a "company" (often one or two people) who would turn around and rent it out to other folks. For all I know, they in turn also rented it out. (This is why spam blacklists are so useless: just knowing an IP address doesn't tell you which colo or hosting provider is actually giving network access to a spammer.) The guy in the middle goes out of business, and the guy at the end is hosed. And if the guy at the end is a shared hosting provider, his customers are hosed.
Once I got a pleading phone call from a guy who had rented rack space from somebody who rented it from us. The guy in the middle had stopped paying his bills and got cut off. Policy was to seize the hardware in the defaulter's racks, even if it wasn't his, and hold it hostage against payment. The caller just wanted his hardware back, and if it'd been up to me he would have gotten it. We couldn't sell it, so it was just going to collect dust until the bill got paid — that is, forever. But nope, wasn't going to happen.
Nor was the company I worked for totally trustworthy. Despite having thousands of racks in multiple locations, and its own network backbone, the company was basically the private property of one guy who had started the whole operation in his garage 10 years before. Now, AFAIK, this guy was 100% honest; he was certainly more than fair (well, most of the time) to his employees. But there was really nothing to prevent him from collecting all the bills up front, not paying his own bills, and skipping the country.
And honest or not, this dude was not a great business executive. Because of poor planning and faulty procedures, we had endless network problems and even one highly avoidable power outage. (Caused by maintenance on the UPS!) Really, I think many of our customers would have ditched us in a moment, if they could have found a provider with any certainty of doing a better job than we were doing.
What consumers need is some kind of a neutral audit service. Does the company have cash flow to stay in business? (Perhaps posting a bond to make sure their bills are paid?) Do they have "best practices" procedures in place to prevent stupid accidents like the one we had with the UPS? Hell, do they even have the facilities they claim to have? Then consumers could look at the audit and know what they're getting into.
Thing is with Pascal: it's designed to be very easy to compile. (So CS students could use it for their first stab at writing a compiler; this was before grammar generators made hand-built compilers obsolete.) So compiling only takes one pass, and even that pass executes quickly. Very handy when you're working with an IDE....
Ach. Getting depressed again.
The "support route" requires more than. a compiler. It requires developers who know both the technology and culture, which are drastically different from those of any other language. Not bad, just different. Which is why Turbo/Delphi/Object/Free Pascal has always been fiercely opposed by management (which doesn't care for nonstandard technology) and fiercely defended by developers (who love its tiny compile cycle and elegant features).
The suits will win in the end, because they're breeding faster. There's not a lot of incentive to become a Pascal expert, because it's perceived as a fringe language. (To some extent, that's a self-fulfilling prophecy, but that doesn't make it any less true.) So there will be fewer and fewer developers who insist on working in Pascal, and always the same number of managers who insist on switching to a "standard" language.
So Pascal is doomed. Yes, they've been saying that for a long time, because it's been true for a long time. Religions don't die quickly.
Personal note: I used to work for Borland and was responsible for documenting a big chunk of the Delphi API. Fell in love with the language during those years. Driven out by the sheer insanity of Borland management. Now I can't bear to work in the language — too depressing.
My mistake. They are nitwits after all.
Right you are. This is not an operating system, and its backers don't pretend that it is. Not even TFA article refers to it as an OS. It's just the usual Slashdot summarizing.
It's really an Ajax-based GUI API. Referring to it as an "operating system" is dumb, but consistent with the way most people deal with OSs. When you hear people moan about the demise of Amiga or NextStep or Be, they almost always talk about some cool GUI feature or application, not about the software or hardware platforms the GUI is built on. And yet it's the software and hardware platforms that ultimately distinguishes one system from another. A GUI can be implemented anywhere.
But people talk about what they know, and what most people know is the GUI. So to most people, the GUI is the OS.
Your complaint about Wikipedia is a special case of my #1 complaint about Wikipedia. Which is that its content mostly lacks focus. I write technical documents for a living, and in my job it's important to structure content carefully and only put in the facts that your readers are likely to need. (The most difficult and most enjoyable aspect of my work.) Because nobody "owns" a given article, it's impossible to impose this kind of discipline on Wikipedia. To my mind, that's the biggest drawback to editing reference material on a Wiki, and a fatal flaw in the Wikipedia concept.
Don't get me wrong. I like Wikis (I manage my department TWiki) and I like the idea of "open-source" documentation. But the two just don't go together. Open Source allows its developers a maximum of freedom, but every good OSS project has a code nazi who makes sure that only code that actually enhances the product get integrated. I'm reminded of that Heinlein character who said his household was a combination of fascism and anarchy, with no trace of democracy. Wikipedia has the anarchy part down. And, despite what Colbert says, it's not at all democratic. But a Wiki is incompatible with fascism.
I often refer to Wikipedia (always with an eye to guessing what's serious content and what's some idiot's ramblings) but I never enjoy reading it. I'm enough of a dweeb to enjoy reading real encylopedia, which is what Wikipedia will never be.
In computing, zero has always been been a valid index, and often makes more sense as the lower bound than 1. For example, if you have a multidimensional array stored contiguously, it's easier to calculate the memory location holding a given element if the array's lower bounds are 0.
So "zeroth" is perfectly good word, and Asimov (who really didn't understand computers all that well) probably didn't coin it.
I once had a CS professor who insisted that his students number the sections in their papers from 0 instead of 1!
When you move a multithreaded program to a system with more cores, than any given thread is more likely to get a core to run on when it needs it. Assuming, of course, that you have enough threads so that's an issue.
Shameless plug: I'm the docs lead for this Opeteron-based server, which can have up to 8 CPUs, for a total of 16 cores. When the Barcelona-based CPU modules are ready, customers will be able to upgrade their systems to a maximum of 32 cores. (Don't ask me when this will happen; Marketing would have me killed.) Obviously any software running on such a system has already dealt with the multicore optimization issue.
Ever throw a battery in the trash? That adds toxic material to the landfill which leaches into the water table where it does all kind of harm to people and the environment. So your action caused harm to others much as the poorly maintained PC does.
Now maybe that means that it should be illegal to have certain OSs hooked up to the internet, just as it's now illegal in many places to put batteries in the trash. But it does not give individuals the right to go around sabotaging computers, anymore than they have the right to break into your house and steal all your battery-operated gizmos.
That one is different enough from a laptop (can't put a laptop in your pocket!) that the "for a few bucks more" rule doesn't apply. So maybe it will succeed, especially since it actually has a decent battery life, unlike its predecessor, the 770.
I didn't mean to imply that it was impossible to sell new kinds of internet gizmos. All you need to do is find a need that isn't covered by an existing gizmo. It's when you try to compete directly with the PC and laptop that you get into trouble.
You touch a sore point. The ISP in question didn't offer secure connections. The only way they could have done that is to junk the SMTP/POP software they had developed in-house and gone to something off-the-shelf. Then I wouldn't have been able to hack the mail connection by hand. But I wouldn't have had to, because we wouldn't have had that stupid mailbox corruption issue.
And in fact the existence of the housing inspector actually reduces the owner's legal responsibility. Suppose somebody burns to death, and it's shown that a sprinkler system would have saved them. Is the owner liable? Not unless the missing sprinklers are a local requirement.
As for having "computer inspectors": are you willing to pay hundreds of dollars for the privilege of owning a computer? That's what building owners pay in offers and taxes to cover the cost of housing inspectors.
Can I call you Virgil, or is it still "Mr. Tibbs"?
I find OneNote pretty usable, though not nearly as usable as it should be. Two sad points: the built-in handwriting recognition is worthless, because it's too hard to deal with recognition errors; and too many features don't work without a keyboard. Both problems are absurd in a program designed for tablets!
Still, it works well enough to be the note taking tool that's replaced my spiral-bound notebook. (Technical writer. Lots of meetings. Lots of interviews.) The interesting thing is that, bad as OneNote is, its competition is even worse. I guess the user base is too small to provide the feedback a product needs to mature.
I think Sharepoint is more a case of the "Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft" principle.
I have to admit that I'd want to give Sharepoint a close look if it were an option for anything I do. Reason: I'm a big fan of OneNote. Or to be more precise, I'm a big fan of the idea of OneNote, since many of this program's features are not intelligently implemented.
Sometimes it is indeed intelligent IT engineers resisting brainless buzzwords. But just as often it's stupid IT engineers resisting new technologies the company actually needs. God knows I've seen both.
A case in point is Wiki technology, which manages to be both overhyped and extremely useful. On the one hand, you have snake-oil types who push elaborate (and usually pretty buggy) wiki engines that are supposed to replace every enterprise application on the intranet. On the other hand, you have nice simple wiki implementations that improve collaboration and cooperation with a very low training overhead.
I'm going to say it one last time, then I'm going to get on with my life: not everybody is a computer geek. Not knowing about malware doesn't make a person stupid or ignorant, it just makes them one of those ordinary people who expects technology to just work. Which is the usual definition of well-designed technology. Which most home computers are not.
If you're going to talk about responsibility, address yourself to the folks who created computer systems with so many security holes.
AND DON'T FUCKING SHOUT AT PEOPLE. IT'S RUDE
Funny that never came up before. If we'd all known this, he probably would have gotten a lot less attention.