I guess this is technically not a dup, since there are some differences in the details. But it's still much too similar to yesterday's story. Zonk really needs to find a new line of work.
Regardless of how often Microsoft has said otherwise in court, they do not make one product
And that is relevent to this discusion because...
Other software firms of similiar size do release security patches as needed.
No software firm has ever needed to release as many security patches as Microsoft has.
I actually work for Sun. If you told our software people that they had to release dozens of patches per year, and do it without a scheduled software cycle, they'd laugh in your face.
It's interesting that they count AOL as part of Google, but not Yahoo. In point of fact, Yahoo also uses the Google search engine. So Google actually has 78% of the U.S. market, minus the (unknown, but probably very small) percentage of Yahoo users that actually rely on Yahoo's poorly maintained "web directory".
The fact is that Yahoo has never had a viable search product. They started out as a shared bookmark file, then became a directory web site. It was never the best way to search the web — the web always grew too fast for a directory to be up to date. But because Yahoo managed to get a lot of visibility early on, they created a mindshare they've never lost. It's the ultimate triumph of branding over substance.
They work on a schedule because that's the only way you can do a software project of any size. It's not like a flaw pops up once in a while, and they pull a programmer off his regular chores to write a patch. This is a large number of patches getting released over a long period of time. To create, test, and deploy software on that scale, you need a large team of programmers, together with project managers, QA folk, integrators, web deployment people, and technical writers. That kind of org cannot work on an ad-hoc basis.
Microsoft's fuckup is not in choosing to release their patches on a scheduled basis. They really had no choice in the matter. Their fuckup is in letting their security situation get so bad, they had to produce a large number of patches every month.
If my high-end digital screen was in the shop, I'd read a book or go for a walk. Then again, I'll probably never own a high-end digital screen.
But you remind me of a strange thing I did once. My 19" TV set was in the shop, it would be a week before they got around to it, and though replacing it wasn't a big deal, I wasn't going to spend the money until I was sure the old TV was well and truly dead. And yet there was a cliffhanging episode of St. Elsewhere on my VCR that I really wanted to see. So I plugged the composite output of my VCR into my Apple monitor, and watched the episode in green monochrome. A unique experience.
$1K is nothing. Early HDTV setups set their early adopters back ten times as much.
Also, remember that you don't buy expensive toys just to use them. You also buy them to shame all your friends and neighbors whose toys aren't as expensive as yours.
I wonder if anybody will actually use that. I can't imagine anybody spending that much money on the hardware, plus the extra cost of the disks, just to watch something at the same resolution as my $35 player offers.
If one area is bad, and one is good, people will move to the good area.
Sure, we'll find a place that's tolerable to live in, and we'll all move there. You could roof over the Grand Canyon, divide it into condos, and easily have enough living space for 5 billion people to live.
But what do they live off? We can't all just order takeout. Somebody has to go out and work the farms, mine the minerals, run the factories, and do all the other stuff we need to do to make a living. To do all the things you do to support all the people we have, you need a whole planet, not just some tiny corner of it.
I actually used to take screen shots that way, when I was documenting apps that ran on non-graphics terminals. But I suspect that this would not get past Flickr.
The "think different" campaign may be long defunct, but it was pretty consistent with the image Apple has been pushing for a long time. Of course, it absurd to link Cesar Chavez (who organized the most low-tech of workers) or Ghandi (who profoundly distrusted advanced technology) to any kind of computer. But that's all beside the point. Apple has always pushed a mellow, countercultural image. Sweatshops are hardly consistent with that.
There will come day where we expect our compilers to encode parallel information into the code so it will run faster on our 1024 core machines. Interprative languages are going to be struggling to do that "just-in-time" like they struggle to do any optimizations now "just-in-time".
Which you will see is possible, once you get away from your preconceptions.
I knew this conversation would be full of misconceptions as soon as I saw that it classified non-native languages as "interpreted/JIT". Runtimes like Java and.NET have not been based on either interpreters or Just-In-Time compilers for almost a decade. They use dynamic compilers which optimize on the basis of what the program is actually doing. This is something that no C++ compiler can do. This kind of optimization can result in "interpreted" applications that are actually faster than native apps. Not always, of course — it depends on what kind of application you're running. But it does happen.
Also the notion that optimization is about producing the most efficient machine language possible has been obsolete since about the time they stopped using Z80s in PCs. Software applications nowadays are more than symbol crunchers: they consist of complicated I/O and network components, which have to work together for the app to run efficiently. And adding multicore processors to the mix does not reassert the importance of micro-optimization. Quite the opposite: a multicore application is a concurrent (what people used to call "multithreaded") application. Actually, concurrency has been important ever since processors got so painfully fast — but now that the Mhz wars have been replaced by the multicore wars, concurrency is 10 times as important. And the best native code compiler on the planet does nothing to help a concurrent program run better. Only a good concurrent runtime can do that.
When early releases of the Java runtime ran so slowly, everybody blamed the fact that it was based on a simple bytecode intpreter. That was certainly part of the problem, but there were many other parts. One of these was the fact that Java's concurrency API was absurdly primitive and inefficient. That's no longer the case. And with a modern, powerful concurrency API, the Java runtime can handle your umpteen-core systems as well as any native code runtime.
There's something called sticking up for yourself.
And there's something called using your head. If he'd been hit by a car while chasing the thief through traffic, his medical bills would make that stupid cell phone look a lot less expensive. He even could have been killed.
If you hear of somebody getting killed this way (and it does happen a lot), you can go to his funeral and say, "Hey, at least he stuck up for himself." But I don't recommend it.
"Ground ground nuts" I got from 84, Charing Cross Road, which is basically a collection of letters written between 1949 and 1969. I guess you've been globalized a bit since then. It's always impressed me as an example of a term that's perfectly logical to one ear ("ground nuts" are peanuts, because they grow on the ground, and peanut butter is just ground peanuts), but bizarre to somebody who hasn't heard it before.
As for "pantechnicon", perhaps there just isn't an American equivalent. As I understand it, it was originally the name of a building that housed a furniture warehouse (the reasons the building had that name are too complicated to go into), then the carriages used to haul furniture from that warehouse, then trucks of a type you might use to haul furniture. These trucks have many uses, but you most often see them used as moving vans — excuse me, removal vans. And indeed, Wikipedia, in its usual sloppy fashion, claims that panopticon is a "disused British word for removal van". Judging from Google, the word is anything but disused.
This is one of those many instances where British English (boffin, lorry, ground ground nuts, pantechnicon) is different from American English (geek, truck, peanut butter, moving van). In this case, "beer" is British English for a beverage, and American English for a cheap way to get drunk.
Slashdot Mirror
I guess this is technically not a dup, since there are some differences in the details. But it's still much too similar to yesterday's story. Zonk really needs to find a new line of work.
I actually work for Sun. If you told our software people that they had to release dozens of patches per year, and do it without a scheduled software cycle, they'd laugh in your face.
The fact is that Yahoo has never had a viable search product. They started out as a shared bookmark file, then became a directory web site. It was never the best way to search the web — the web always grew too fast for a directory to be up to date. But because Yahoo managed to get a lot of visibility early on, they created a mindshare they've never lost. It's the ultimate triumph of branding over substance.
Microsoft's fuckup is not in choosing to release their patches on a scheduled basis. They really had no choice in the matter. Their fuckup is in letting their security situation get so bad, they had to produce a large number of patches every month.
But you remind me of a strange thing I did once. My 19" TV set was in the shop, it would be a week before they got around to it, and though replacing it wasn't a big deal, I wasn't going to spend the money until I was sure the old TV was well and truly dead. And yet there was a cliffhanging episode of St. Elsewhere on my VCR that I really wanted to see. So I plugged the composite output of my VCR into my Apple monitor, and watched the episode in green monochrome. A unique experience.
Also, remember that you don't buy expensive toys just to use them. You also buy them to shame all your friends and neighbors whose toys aren't as expensive as yours.
I wonder if anybody will actually use that. I can't imagine anybody spending that much money on the hardware, plus the extra cost of the disks, just to watch something at the same resolution as my $35 player offers.
Anyway, The City was just a Hollywood gimmick. The screenplay set the story in a future Los Angeles, but the studio decided that would cost too much.
BTW, they're working on a remake....
The whole global warming thing is bunk! Time to take the Hummer out of mothballs!
Define "thriving".
I seem to recall that everybody in Logan's Run was terminated on their 30th birthday.
Proof that there's no problem in life that can't be solved by writing a Firefox plugin!
Sure, we'll find a place that's tolerable to live in, and we'll all move there. You could roof over the Grand Canyon, divide it into condos, and easily have enough living space for 5 billion people to live.
But what do they live off? We can't all just order takeout. Somebody has to go out and work the farms, mine the minerals, run the factories, and do all the other stuff we need to do to make a living. To do all the things you do to support all the people we have, you need a whole planet, not just some tiny corner of it.
I actually used to take screen shots that way, when I was documenting apps that ran on non-graphics terminals. But I suspect that this would not get past Flickr.
Do you understand the concept of irony? Guess not.
We'll meet again.
Don't know where.
Don't know when.
But we'll surely meet again
Some sunny day!
The "think different" campaign may be long defunct, but it was pretty consistent with the image Apple has been pushing for a long time. Of course, it absurd to link Cesar Chavez (who organized the most low-tech of workers) or Ghandi (who profoundly distrusted advanced technology) to any kind of computer. But that's all beside the point. Apple has always pushed a mellow, countercultural image. Sweatshops are hardly consistent with that.
Encasing your body in concrete has been shown to reduce your risk of injury due to personal assault.
Which you will see is possible, once you get away from your preconceptions.
I knew this conversation would be full of misconceptions as soon as I saw that it classified non-native languages as "interpreted/JIT". Runtimes like Java and .NET have not been based on either interpreters or Just-In-Time compilers for almost a decade. They use dynamic compilers which optimize on the basis of what the program is actually doing. This is something that no C++ compiler can do. This kind of optimization can result in "interpreted" applications that are actually faster than native apps. Not always, of course — it depends on what kind of application you're running. But it does happen.
Also the notion that optimization is about producing the most efficient machine language possible has been obsolete since about the time they stopped using Z80s in PCs. Software applications nowadays are more than symbol crunchers: they consist of complicated I/O and network components, which have to work together for the app to run efficiently. And adding multicore processors to the mix does not reassert the importance of micro-optimization. Quite the opposite: a multicore application is a concurrent (what people used to call "multithreaded") application. Actually, concurrency has been important ever since processors got so painfully fast — but now that the Mhz wars have been replaced by the multicore wars, concurrency is 10 times as important. And the best native code compiler on the planet does nothing to help a concurrent program run better. Only a good concurrent runtime can do that.
When early releases of the Java runtime ran so slowly, everybody blamed the fact that it was based on a simple bytecode intpreter. That was certainly part of the problem, but there were many other parts. One of these was the fact that Java's concurrency API was absurdly primitive and inefficient. That's no longer the case. And with a modern, powerful concurrency API, the Java runtime can handle your umpteen-core systems as well as any native code runtime.
I'm still waiting for my pony!
I never understood that adage. By the time she's cute, you're no longer able to do anything about it.
If you hear of somebody getting killed this way (and it does happen a lot), you can go to his funeral and say, "Hey, at least he stuck up for himself." But I don't recommend it.
As for "pantechnicon", perhaps there just isn't an American equivalent. As I understand it, it was originally the name of a building that housed a furniture warehouse (the reasons the building had that name are too complicated to go into), then the carriages used to haul furniture from that warehouse, then trucks of a type you might use to haul furniture. These trucks have many uses, but you most often see them used as moving vans — excuse me, removal vans. And indeed, Wikipedia, in its usual sloppy fashion, claims that panopticon is a "disused British word for removal van". Judging from Google, the word is anything but disused.
This is one of those many instances where British English (boffin, lorry, ground ground nuts, pantechnicon) is different from American English (geek, truck, peanut butter, moving van). In this case, "beer" is British English for a beverage, and American English for a cheap way to get drunk.