That's Vi/Vim after 25 years of feature creep. The original Vi could run on PDP-11 that didn't have 15MB of disk total. Contrast that with EMACS, which has always had a ton of of scripts and stuff. My copy is about 50MB.
When I was at Sun, anybody who had a root password to their own machine (IS was getting unfriendly about that) would install a local copy of EMACS. Which went against IS policy: you were supposed to run all apps from a file server. Which worked for most applications. But when the network or server got flaky, EMACS would freeze every time it had to fetch another macro. During one such outage, I had to do all the editing for a release, because I was the only writer who knew Vi.
Still, I don't agree that Vi represents the "Unix way". Any program that you can't connect a pipe to violates that concept. I know old Unix hands who still use Ed. (Some of them can edit as fast as I can!) Vi has more to do with terminals. At Berkeley, they standardized on cheap LSI ADM3 terminals, the product for which the term "dumb terminal" was invented. (These didn't even have cursor keys -- there were little arrows on H, J, K, and L, indicating that they were the cursor keys when CTRL was held down. Which is why Vi/Vim uses these keys for cursor motion.) Through simple brute-force techniques, Vi supported fancy screen editing. If you had a fast-enough connection (meaning you were about 10 feet from the computer) you could even use the really cheap terminals that didn't have cursor addressing!
By contrast, MIT and Stanford had full-featured terminals they designed themselves, with powerful machines to drive them and fancy keyboards to invent complicated command sets around. So of course they used editors that had serious feature bloat from day one.
The constitution doesn't use the word. But there's something in there about "unreasonable search and seizure". What is that if not a right to privacy?
Of course, the constitution only protects your privacy from government intrusion. But a right can be considered to exist without being legally codified. Suppose I steal your private correspondence and read your most personal thoughts. Or plant surveillance gear in your bedroom for my own malicious gratification? Wouldn't you feel that your rights had been violated?
Side note: screw the moderator who labeled this "Flamebait". I don't agree with this opinion, but it is an honestly-held one. Read the FAQ before you moderate again!
Which is yet another example of Google making major innovations and throwing them out as if they're no big thing. Jeez, just because they have superior technology and are making a profit, they think they're too good to bother with Mindless Hype. It's UnAmerican!
I find it curious that Joy and McNeely are usually listed as "co-founders" of Sun. It's my understanding that neither of them was there from the very beginning. The idea for the company came from a couple of Stanford people (I foget their names, I'm sure someone will fill in the blanks), one a systems hardware person, the other an export on the previously mentioned Stanford University Network. As was usual in those days, the OS was an afterthought -- when they realized they needed one, they brought in Bill Joy.
Scott McNeely was hired away from Onyx, a company that made an early (and not terribly successful) microprocessor-based Unix box. He was not hired as CEO -- he got that job only after a serious of corner-office disasters.
I have a book somewhere the describes one of these disasters. There was an HP exec named Paul Ely who seemed determined to be the prototype for the modern Overpaid CEO. Couldn't do it at HP, so he shopped around. Sun negotiated with him, but balked when he told them he "couldn't keep the lights on" for less than $400,000. Not a lot of money now, but a shocking demand in 1984, and more than twice what anybody else at Sun made. A directors' revolt finally put Ely in charge of Convergent Technologies, where I was working at the time. (I remember seeing the outgoing President looking at him with undisguised loathing.) I forget his salary, but he got a hiring bonus of $1 million. Didn't work out, of course. When Ely looks at Scott McNeely's current compensation package, I'll bet he wishes he hadn't demanded so much up front....
I think it's significant that Joy is leaving Sun just now. He hasn't been at the center of any development effort for a long time. Instead, Sun has been happy to let him sit in Colorado and come up with Big Ideas. When I worked at Sun, there were a lot of people like that -- people whose job description seemed to center around being Creative and Innovative, rather than producing actual product. A lot of people (including me) thought that was a pretty cool thing. But now I suspect that Sun is finding that it no longer afford quite so much coolness.
Which justifies reasonable security measures. Arbitrary and extreme actions against your employees isn't going to help security one bit. Quite the opposite.
Whatever. My intent was not to propound yet another conspiracy theory, but rather to offer the "tough times require tough measures" nonsense the sarcasm it deserves.
Old Ossama is so useful. Need to fire a troublesome employee? Worried about embaressing facts slipping out? Just cite the Terrorist Threat and you can do what you want! If Bin Laden didn't exist, somebody would have to invent him. In my foil hat moments, I tend to suspect that somebody did.
IBM used to be the worst of the worst. Everybody had to wear white shirts with plain ties. (Everybody was a man, of course.) You had to go through a lot of weird bureaucracy to buy anything from them, even a typewriter part. Their management was famous for refusing to learn to use email. I don't know if they spied on their employees, but they certainly treated them paternalistically.
Then their business model fell apart. No more near monopoly on computers. They couldn't even control the "IBM-compatible" market. They were in deep trouble, and somebody realized that their arrogant corporate culture was a big part of the problem. So they hired a new boss from outside the industry, and retooled everything, from the way people worked together to their overreliance on proprietary technology. Worked out well. That which does not kill you, yada yada.
Re:They should fix their marketing
on
Java vs .NET
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· Score: 1
No,.net is not a programming language. But neither, strictly speaking, is Java. People tend to reduce Java to the language, but the platform is just as important. Not a minor point, since.NET is less tied to a single language then the Java VM.
But wasn't the Internet supposed to be 'open' at one point?
The Internet was designed to be open. But that's exactly the problem. In order to minimize central administration, the Internet minimized authentication and access control features. You could open a connection with any machine on the net, and use any SMTP server to send mail. Simple common sense and peer pressure kept things more or less orderly. That went out the window the moment the Internet became a true mass medium.
I'd prefer to see a lot of the basic technologies redesigned from scratch. Like an email system where you have to have some kind of verifiable identity to send mail, even if it's only a $5 dollar electronic certificate. But that's not going to happen any time soon. In the mean time, you can hardly blame ISPs for wanting to minimize wasted bandwidth, and respond to customer complaints -- even though the only way to do this is restrictive and kludgy filtering.
It's precisely the tech orientation of Google that makes for good marketing. The marketeers at go.com and nbci.com said, "We need ad revenue! Make the ads as obnoxious as possible!" The techies at Google said, "Hey, some ad revenue would be cool. But screw those obnoxious banner adds. We'll sell sponsored links and clearly label them as such." So everybody ignores the obnoxious ads, but actually considers Google sponsored links to be a cool convenience. There's a lesson there.
Another reason Google triumphed is not just that tech gets a priority, it's that there's any tech at all. Before Disney took it over, Infoseek was a really innovative and sophisticated search engine. This seemed to stop suddenly when Disney changed the name to Go and decided it had to be a "portal" -- meaning helping people find the right site was less important than helping people find your site. So the search engine languished, and even the spidering got half-assed. Which lost them all the users that they needed in the first place.
But the biggest reason Google is so damned kewl is that they've resisted the temptation to go public for so long. All the founders would be rich by now if they'd gone that route. Though that would have meant ceding control of the company to a bunch of Wall Street idiots. So would you rather be rich, or have a cool place to work? People don't usually make the right choice when asked that question.
Let me think. Either a lot of physics is a crock, or there's "something there"...
Yeah, I know, scientific theories get invalidated all the time. But a lot of badly controlled experiments done by people out to prove a really silly point aren't going to do it.
Re:So why didn't Intel do this? Politics
on
AMD64 Preview
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· Score: 1
Now that makes sense. And it would be especially convincing to Intel people who were tired of iterating the Pentium.
Fine, whatever, nice hat. I'm tired of this argument, just as I'm tired of all the redundant "no reg link" posts. If you want to make a career out of defeating online newspaper registration, go start a web site where those who actually give a shit can go and read up on this All Important Issue. Then you can just link the site, and your righteousness is served, without there being 20 stupid redundant posts.
Re:Ian Fleming's Bond
on
Bay of Souls
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I don't share your adoration of Ian Fleming's fiction, but you're sort of right about the literary James Bond. He was darker and more complicated than any of the movie Bonds. Still, the guy in the book share's the movie character's adolescent obsessions: guns, dangerous pastimes, have sex with as many women as possible. The difference between the books and the movies is more a matter of degree than kind.
And the connections between the books and the movies are stronger than you seem to think. With the obvious exception of Casino Royale (he sold the screen rights to that one early on), Ian Fleming was deeply involved in making all the Bond films that came out while he was alive. And some of the later Bond novels were based on the movies, not vice versa! (Thunderball was one -- not sure about the others.) Yeah, even these books were a little more sophisticated than they movies they were based on -- but not that sophisticated.
The fact is that Fleming didn't take Bond all that seriously. He was just a thriller character who turned out to be outrageously profitable for him.
There's one amusing story I heard about Fleming, pretty sure it's true. It seems that the plot of Casino Royale, where Bond takes an enemy agent's slush fund by beating him at Baccarat, was based on something Fleming and some other British agents actually did during WW II. Except in this episode, the bad guy stripped the Brits of all their cash. That's Hollywood!
If you were actually stealling it, all this registration avoidance wouldn't be so stupid. But they allow ordinary online access for free, so there's no theft involved.
People are not going to stop posting links to nytimes.com. They have a lot of good tech coverage. What they don't have is a web team that has its act together. You're not going to make them change their screwed up way of doing things, so register and forget about it.
Every time we get a nytimes.com link, somebody posts a way to bypass their registration system. Or several ways. Sometimes its half the discussion!
Since nytimes.com really insists on having a registration system (stupid, I agree, but they seem stuck on the idea), they eventually find ways to close the bypass. I sure hope they don't tell Google to stop spidering their site!
Registration is free, and you can tell them not to spam you. Go and register, and spare us all the noise.
Re:So why didn't Intel do this? Politics
on
AMD64 Preview
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· Score: 1
Good point. Too bad you posted as an AC, so nobody'll see it.
Somewhere on his web site, Schneier comments on how silly it is to ban sharp objects from airliners. Sadly, no other Big Name pundit seems to have noticed this.
I'll go a step further. This occurred to me soon afte 9-11, but it seemed impolitic and insensitive to say it. But now that people are beginning to realize how out-of-control the whole anti-terrorist thing is, I might as well speak my mind:
All these anti-hijacking measures are pointless. They might have done some good before 9-11, but they do nothing to prevent the next big terrorist act. Because it won't involve airplane hijacking. Because airplane hijacking is no longer a viable terrorist tactic. It's essentially a form of hostage-taking, and you can't take hostages if you can't control them. To control them, you have to give them the "cooperate and nobody gets hurt" line. Which lost all credibility when they murdered four plane loads of people.
Re:So why didn't Intel do this? Politics
on
AMD64 Preview
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Intel has sunk a lot of money and time into the Itanium architecture, almost a decade's worth.
Well, that explains why they're pushing the Itanium now. But the real question is what they were thinking 10 years ago, when they committed so much to a non-compatible processor. They knew going in that developing the Itanium was going to gobble up a lot of resources. So much so, they had to bring in HP to help. Imagine a project that's so big that Intel can't handle it solo!
Perhaps somebody was bored with the whole Pentium architecture.
Which suggests an interesting scenario
on
AMD64 Preview
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· Score: 1
Well, Intel tried to impose tight pricing controls on a lot of its CPUs. Fortunately, they'd signed second-sourcing contracts with various other companies. They tried to get out of them, but AMD's lawyers were able to persuade the courts that A Deal's a Deal. A damned good thing, 'cause a lot of important changes have been fuelled by commodity-priced CPUs.
Now the relationship between AMD and Intel may be reversed. Of course, Intel doesn't have a second-source contract for the Athlon64. But what they do have is a non-backward-compatible 64-bit chip that cost a bundle to develop -- and that nobody seems to want.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was at Sun, anybody who had a root password to their own machine (IS was getting unfriendly about that) would install a local copy of EMACS. Which went against IS policy: you were supposed to run all apps from a file server. Which worked for most applications. But when the network or server got flaky, EMACS would freeze every time it had to fetch another macro. During one such outage, I had to do all the editing for a release, because I was the only writer who knew Vi.
Still, I don't agree that Vi represents the "Unix way". Any program that you can't connect a pipe to violates that concept. I know old Unix hands who still use Ed. (Some of them can edit as fast as I can!) Vi has more to do with terminals. At Berkeley, they standardized on cheap LSI ADM3 terminals, the product for which the term "dumb terminal" was invented. (These didn't even have cursor keys -- there were little arrows on H, J, K, and L, indicating that they were the cursor keys when CTRL was held down. Which is why Vi/Vim uses these keys for cursor motion.) Through simple brute-force techniques, Vi supported fancy screen editing. If you had a fast-enough connection (meaning you were about 10 feet from the computer) you could even use the really cheap terminals that didn't have cursor addressing!
By contrast, MIT and Stanford had full-featured terminals they designed themselves, with powerful machines to drive them and fancy keyboards to invent complicated command sets around. So of course they used editors that had serious feature bloat from day one.
Of course, the constitution only protects your privacy from government intrusion. But a right can be considered to exist without being legally codified. Suppose I steal your private correspondence and read your most personal thoughts. Or plant surveillance gear in your bedroom for my own malicious gratification? Wouldn't you feel that your rights had been violated?
Side note: screw the moderator who labeled this "Flamebait". I don't agree with this opinion, but it is an honestly-held one. Read the FAQ before you moderate again!
Just block the air intakes. Much more fun!
Which is yet another example of Google making major innovations and throwing them out as if they're no big thing. Jeez, just because they have superior technology and are making a profit, they think they're too good to bother with Mindless Hype. It's UnAmerican!
Scott McNeely was hired away from Onyx, a company that made an early (and not terribly successful) microprocessor-based Unix box. He was not hired as CEO -- he got that job only after a serious of corner-office disasters.
I have a book somewhere the describes one of these disasters. There was an HP exec named Paul Ely who seemed determined to be the prototype for the modern Overpaid CEO. Couldn't do it at HP, so he shopped around. Sun negotiated with him, but balked when he told them he "couldn't keep the lights on" for less than $400,000. Not a lot of money now, but a shocking demand in 1984, and more than twice what anybody else at Sun made. A directors' revolt finally put Ely in charge of Convergent Technologies, where I was working at the time. (I remember seeing the outgoing President looking at him with undisguised loathing.) I forget his salary, but he got a hiring bonus of $1 million. Didn't work out, of course. When Ely looks at Scott McNeely's current compensation package, I'll bet he wishes he hadn't demanded so much up front....
I think it's significant that Joy is leaving Sun just now. He hasn't been at the center of any development effort for a long time. Instead, Sun has been happy to let him sit in Colorado and come up with Big Ideas. When I worked at Sun, there were a lot of people like that -- people whose job description seemed to center around being Creative and Innovative, rather than producing actual product. A lot of people (including me) thought that was a pretty cool thing. But now I suspect that Sun is finding that it no longer afford quite so much coolness.
Which justifies reasonable security measures. Arbitrary and extreme actions against your employees isn't going to help security one bit. Quite the opposite.
Oops. Thanks for mention him. i love big brother! i love big brother!
Whatever. My intent was not to propound yet another conspiracy theory, but rather to offer the "tough times require tough measures" nonsense the sarcasm it deserves.
Old Ossama is so useful. Need to fire a troublesome employee? Worried about embaressing facts slipping out? Just cite the Terrorist Threat and you can do what you want! If Bin Laden didn't exist, somebody would have to invent him. In my foil hat moments, I tend to suspect that somebody did.
Then their business model fell apart. No more near monopoly on computers. They couldn't even control the "IBM-compatible" market. They were in deep trouble, and somebody realized that their arrogant corporate culture was a big part of the problem. So they hired a new boss from outside the industry, and retooled everything, from the way people worked together to their overreliance on proprietary technology. Worked out well. That which does not kill you, yada yada.
No, .net is not a programming language. But neither, strictly speaking, is Java. People tend to reduce Java to the language, but the platform is just as important. Not a minor point, since .NET is less tied to a single language then the Java VM.
I'd prefer to see a lot of the basic technologies redesigned from scratch. Like an email system where you have to have some kind of verifiable identity to send mail, even if it's only a $5 dollar electronic certificate. But that's not going to happen any time soon. In the mean time, you can hardly blame ISPs for wanting to minimize wasted bandwidth, and respond to customer complaints -- even though the only way to do this is restrictive and kludgy filtering.
Yeah, Slashdot really sucks, don't it. Maybe you shouldn't waste your time on it (please!).
Another reason Google triumphed is not just that tech gets a priority, it's that there's any tech at all. Before Disney took it over, Infoseek was a really innovative and sophisticated search engine. This seemed to stop suddenly when Disney changed the name to Go and decided it had to be a "portal" -- meaning helping people find the right site was less important than helping people find your site. So the search engine languished, and even the spidering got half-assed. Which lost them all the users that they needed in the first place.
But the biggest reason Google is so damned kewl is that they've resisted the temptation to go public for so long. All the founders would be rich by now if they'd gone that route. Though that would have meant ceding control of the company to a bunch of Wall Street idiots. So would you rather be rich, or have a cool place to work? People don't usually make the right choice when asked that question.
Yeah, I know, scientific theories get invalidated all the time. But a lot of badly controlled experiments done by people out to prove a really silly point aren't going to do it.
Now that makes sense. And it would be especially convincing to Intel people who were tired of iterating the Pentium.
Fine, whatever, nice hat. I'm tired of this argument, just as I'm tired of all the redundant "no reg link" posts. If you want to make a career out of defeating online newspaper registration, go start a web site where those who actually give a shit can go and read up on this All Important Issue. Then you can just link the site, and your righteousness is served, without there being 20 stupid redundant posts.
And the connections between the books and the movies are stronger than you seem to think. With the obvious exception of Casino Royale (he sold the screen rights to that one early on), Ian Fleming was deeply involved in making all the Bond films that came out while he was alive. And some of the later Bond novels were based on the movies, not vice versa! (Thunderball was one -- not sure about the others.) Yeah, even these books were a little more sophisticated than they movies they were based on -- but not that sophisticated.
The fact is that Fleming didn't take Bond all that seriously. He was just a thriller character who turned out to be outrageously profitable for him.
There's one amusing story I heard about Fleming, pretty sure it's true. It seems that the plot of Casino Royale, where Bond takes an enemy agent's slush fund by beating him at Baccarat, was based on something Fleming and some other British agents actually did during WW II. Except in this episode, the bad guy stripped the Brits of all their cash. That's Hollywood!
People are not going to stop posting links to nytimes.com. They have a lot of good tech coverage. What they don't have is a web team that has its act together. You're not going to make them change their screwed up way of doing things, so register and forget about it.
Since nytimes.com really insists on having a registration system (stupid, I agree, but they seem stuck on the idea), they eventually find ways to close the bypass. I sure hope they don't tell Google to stop spidering their site!
Registration is free, and you can tell them not to spam you. Go and register, and spare us all the noise.
Good point. Too bad you posted as an AC, so nobody'll see it.
I'll go a step further. This occurred to me soon afte 9-11, but it seemed impolitic and insensitive to say it. But now that people are beginning to realize how out-of-control the whole anti-terrorist thing is, I might as well speak my mind:
All these anti-hijacking measures are pointless. They might have done some good before 9-11, but they do nothing to prevent the next big terrorist act. Because it won't involve airplane hijacking. Because airplane hijacking is no longer a viable terrorist tactic. It's essentially a form of hostage-taking, and you can't take hostages if you can't control them. To control them, you have to give them the "cooperate and nobody gets hurt" line. Which lost all credibility when they murdered four plane loads of people.
Perhaps somebody was bored with the whole Pentium architecture.
Now the relationship between AMD and Intel may be reversed. Of course, Intel doesn't have a second-source contract for the Athlon64. But what they do have is a non-backward-compatible 64-bit chip that cost a bundle to develop -- and that nobody seems to want.