Haven't seen Doubt, but I do recall that the Streep character was an extremely conservative nun, the sort of person who thinks of all change as evil. I don't think her attitudes were being held up as something to emulate
The problem with your argument is that you don't say how you think ballpoint pens cause bad penmanship. Without some hypothetical mechanism all you've got is just another post hoc argument. You could just as easily claim that the decline in penmanship was caused by the invention of TV, the construction of the Interstate Highway System, or fluoridation. That last one is probably very popular in some circles.
Here's a much simpler mechanism: when skills stop being valuable, people stop learning them. What's the value of handwriting? Well, if your business correspondence is handwritten, then you better make sure that whoever writes out the "fair copy" has really good handwriting. And indeed, there used to be professional scriveners whose sole job skill was extremely good penmanship.
But businesses stopped hiring scriveners after typewriters became common about 125 years ago. There are other uses for handwriting, but they've been gradually eaten away by technology. Nowadays, ability to hack out text on a QWERTY keyboard is a lot more valuable than good penmanship. And that's the skill people have.
Incidentally, a certain politician is considered to have pretty good penmanship, despite having grown up after the decline of the fountain pen. Judging from his autobiography, I suspect his achievement-oriented mother stood over him as he practiced it. Which is the only way you can get a kid to acquire such a skill.
And notice from the document that I link: the dude writes with a felt tip!!!
Not pedantic, an important distinction. In fact, I suspect that a majority of the individual stockholders are against the merger. Many of small stockholders will have paid $20 or more for each share, and would be in denial about the fact that it's never getting up there again. So of course they balk at being forced to sell to Oracle for $9.50. How else to account for 38% of the shares voting against a purchase at a nice premium over market?
Another important distinction:
As a result of this Sun's stock will be taken from the stock market as of Friday.
Not true. The stock doesn't get delisted until the sale is final. What the submitter is probably thinking of is the removal of Sun from the NASDAQ 100 index. That removes some prestige from the stock, but doesn't remove it from the market.
My theory is that the highly reliable hardware Sun Microsystems sells is no longer popular because it is far cheaper to use consumer-grade hardware with software that is fault-tolerant.
That's not a theory, that's the accepted industry paradigm. Even Sun has accepted it, at least on paper. Which is why Sun now sells hardware with commodity processors.
Which nobody seems to know about. That's because Sun still has a lot of people (too many of them in sales and marketing) that are in total denial about the end of the Sparc era.
That's a common outcome when a big company acquires a product. Sun itself is a past master of this kind of self-inflicted foot shooting — remember Cobalt Networks?
But Oracle actually seems to do a lot better with its acquisitions than do other companies. Have a look at this list of recent acquisitions. Notice that each item points to a current product page. The one that fascinates me is Rdb — a relational database! — that probably would have died if Oracle hadn't acquired it and thrown resources at it.
Uhm, you want the same programmers who couldn't keep track of their pointers to add validity checks? Yeah, that'll work.
This kind of error is actually nothing new. The business with all those 0x20s (do they really store dollar values in 64-bit integers?) Is reminiscent of a snafu I read about back when punched cards where the main data input medium.
To understand what happened you need to know how 80-column IBM punched cards worked. (Here's a picture of such a card. It's printed to show how the columns are allocated for FORTRAN source code, but that doesn't affect how the card actually works.) Each column represents an alphanumeric value. A single punch in the numbered rows meant a numeric digit. Other characters were encoded by combinations I won't go into (more details here); suffice to say that the letters A through R were represented by a punch in the zone rows (the top two rows above the numeric rows) combined with a numeric punch. In particular, the later A is represented by a punch in the top row combined with a punch in the 1 row.
Now then, one fine day a keypunch operator is inputting data for a town that taxes personal property. (I don't remember the specific figures, so I'll make some up to illustrate what happened.) A guy owns a car valued at $200. In the card used for inputting the tax data for the car, ten columns are set aside for the assessed value. The operator should have punched "_____20000" (using _ to represent blank columns with no punch). But his finger slipped, and he input "A____20000".
Any properly designed language runtime would have choked on this input (alphabetic data in a numeric field). The language runtime (FORTRAN I think, or maybe COBOL) was not properly designed. In a numeric field, any blank column in a numeric field was assumed to represent 0 — and the zone punches were simply ignored! End result: the value of the car was recorded as $10,000,200.00. With a 0.5% tax on personal property, the guy was sent a bill taxing his $200 car at $50,001. (Like I said, these figures are imaginary, but they're in the ballpark.) He didn't have to pay, of course, but by the time he protested his bill, the city budget had already been drawn up, and had to be hastily revised based on $50K (about $300K in today's money) suddenly evaporating.
Not a marketing gimmick. If you did any component-based programming, you'd see a lot of utility in ActiveX objects. They allow people to write libraries that you easily plug into your application and interact with at design time using a GUI like pre-.NET Visual Basic or Delphi.
What really made this kind of object valuable is that it allowed you to use an object-oriented framework like MFC or VCL without knowing jack about object-oriented programming. Unfortunately, this capability was simply ignored when they moved from COM to.NET.
Now, it's perfectly true that the implementation of the ActiveX concept is a horror. Bad API design, bad documentation, buggy code. But those are not marketing fuckups.
First, you're not being pedantic at all. The confusion about what "ASCII" means has caused no end of grief. Look at all the web pages that are full of "?" glyphs because people are confused about what characters they can safely use. And that's actually an improvement over they way things used to be. For a long time most web pages didn't even specify character set, and browsers were supposed to guess. One resulting glitch: Internet Explorer tended to assume that any page containing a right-curly-quote was in Japanese!
One reason I parted ways with Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders was their stubborn insistence that anything you can type on a U.S. PC keyboard is "ASCII" and therefore universally readable. They've since discovered their mistake, but are still sort of in denial about the consequences.
Other nitpick: strictly speaking, there's no such thing as an ANSI character set. It's not even sloppy usage, because when somebody says "ANSI character" it's less than obvious what they're talking about. Probably CP 1252, or maybe CP 437. The Wikipedia article on CP 1242 claims that it's called "ANSI" because of confusion with Latin 1, which supposedly started out as an ANSI spec. (CP 1242 and Latin 1 are the same except that the former uses some codes that the latter doesn't; and yes, that does cause problems.) That rates a big {Citation Needed} from me.
Ooh! One more nitpick! CP 437 is often referred to as "extended ASCII". Now, this game looks like it's running on a PC using CP 437 displayed on MS-DOS's "ANSI" terminal emulator. (So called because it implements ANSI X3.64.) So EVERYBODY'S RIGHT!!!!
"Domestication" doesn't imply "obedience", as any mule skinner will tell you. It just means that you have a population of animals (or plants!) that have lived with humans long enough to be physically distinct from their wild ancestors.
I think it counts as neotenous cultural behavior. "Neoteny" refers to a juvenile characteristic that's retained into adulthood, like those salamanders that never lose their gills because they live in the desert. Now, domestic cats retains lots of kitten behaviors that disappear if they're not socialized with humans early on: purring, that habit of "making bread" in your lap (kittens need to massage momma's mammaries in order to get them to work), and of course that pitiful meow they resort to whenever they want you to do something for them.
I was amused by this thought from the submitter:
Cat owners may have suspected as much, but it seems our feline friends have found a way to manipulate us humans.
Suspected? Suspected??? Every cat lover knows they are the most manipulative, self-centered creatures on the planet! God knows what it says about us that we love them all the more for it!
It's nice to own your own OS stack. It's nicer to offer what you customers want. Sun owned the same stack and they still had to offer Linux support, because it would have hurt their x64 sales big time if they hadn't. Management will have changed, but not the needs of customers. If anything, there will be a stronger emphasis on Linux, because management will lose a lot of its Solaris-uber-alles bigotry.
All these prognostications about Sun under Oracle are ridiculous. They're all made by people who don't know the first thing about the computer systems business. We start out with people assuming that Oracle will shut down Sun's hardware business "because Oracle is a software company." Now it's a lot of bugs either-or logic about OS choices.
Come to think of it, all of the prognostications people make when Oracle makes an acquisition end up being pretty lame. They're usually based on lame assumptions, like "oh, this acquisition also does databases, they must be buying it in order to shut it down." Which never turns out to be the case.
... they've been able to do experiments and science up there in it for over a decade already.
No they haven't. They've done a fair amount of science, but there have been very long periods when there wasn't enough crew to do more than maintenance. These include the 30 months that the entire shuttle fleet was grounded after the loss of Columbia. Other periods have been forced by budget cutbacks.
If it didn't suck so much it also wouldn't matter so much to have alternatives be popular.
I disagree. If the alternatives hadn't started getting a following, web developers would have gone on coding for IE, and not worrying about being standards compliant. IE-compatibility would have ended up being the de-facto standard for web applications.
Look at what Microsoft did when they created the de-facto standard for desktop platforms. Monopoly issues aside, do you really want the web to be designed around the kind of complicated, inconsistent, and poorly documented conventions that Microsoft invents?
So it will probably be healthy to remain skeptical until trend this is confirmed by other organizations.
Especially after all the breathless "Firefox is taking over" stories on Slashdot, submitted by fanboys every time there's a spike in downloads (like after a release!) or the browser's market share gains a tiny fraction of a percent.
Mind you, I'm really glad to see that we're finally getting some serious competition in the browser marketplace. But before you congratulate yourselves too much, send a psychic "Thanks for Shooting Yourselves in the Foot!" to Steve and Bill. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera all have real advantages, but none of these would have overcome IE's big advantage: being the default browser on the desktop OS that owns 90% of its market. The only thing that could have overcome that advantage is not the advantages of the competition, but the extreme crappiness of IE itself.
Hey, since you work for NAOJ, perhaps you know somebody who actually speaks Japanese? If so, please ask them what the literal translation of "Suburu" actually is. If my "5 brothers" story is nonsense, I'd love to know for sure.
Well, the Pleiades cluster has has a lot more than 7 stars &mdash hundreds in fact. How many of these stars count as part of the star formation is a cultural matter. Western tradition says 7, but I believe Japanese tradition says 6. I could be mistaken.
You'll notice that the Suburu logo has 6 stars. Not 4. That because FHI's current structure of 4 divisions didn't exist in 1953. That was when the company was formed out of 5 smaller companies. Hence the one big star and the 5 little ones.
Slashdot Mirror
Haven't seen Doubt, but I do recall that the Streep character was an extremely conservative nun, the sort of person who thinks of all change as evil. I don't think her attitudes were being held up as something to emulate
The problem with your argument is that you don't say how you think ballpoint pens cause bad penmanship. Without some hypothetical mechanism all you've got is just another post hoc argument. You could just as easily claim that the decline in penmanship was caused by the invention of TV, the construction of the Interstate Highway System, or fluoridation. That last one is probably very popular in some circles.
Here's a much simpler mechanism: when skills stop being valuable, people stop learning them. What's the value of handwriting? Well, if your business correspondence is handwritten, then you better make sure that whoever writes out the "fair copy" has really good handwriting. And indeed, there used to be professional scriveners whose sole job skill was extremely good penmanship.
But businesses stopped hiring scriveners after typewriters became common about 125 years ago. There are other uses for handwriting, but they've been gradually eaten away by technology. Nowadays, ability to hack out text on a QWERTY keyboard is a lot more valuable than good penmanship. And that's the skill people have.
Incidentally, a certain politician is considered to have pretty good penmanship, despite having grown up after the decline of the fountain pen. Judging from his autobiography, I suspect his achievement-oriented mother stood over him as he practiced it. Which is the only way you can get a kid to acquire such a skill.
And notice from the document that I link: the dude writes with a felt tip!!!
Jeez, next you'll be telling us that there's no such thing as perpetual motion!
... or to spend less by investing in a few additional systems to be used as dedicated render nodes.
Especially if you buy used systems. Computer hardware depreciates fast.
Good point. I had forgotten that non-votes counted as no votes.
Not pedantic, an important distinction. In fact, I suspect that a majority of the individual stockholders are against the merger. Many of small stockholders will have paid $20 or more for each share, and would be in denial about the fact that it's never getting up there again. So of course they balk at being forced to sell to Oracle for $9.50. How else to account for 38% of the shares voting against a purchase at a nice premium over market?
Another important distinction:
As a result of this Sun's stock will be taken from the stock market as of Friday.
Not true. The stock doesn't get delisted until the sale is final. What the submitter is probably thinking of is the removal of Sun from the NASDAQ 100 index. That removes some prestige from the stock, but doesn't remove it from the market.
My theory is that the highly reliable hardware Sun Microsystems sells is no longer popular because it is far cheaper to use consumer-grade hardware with software that is fault-tolerant.
That's not a theory, that's the accepted industry paradigm. Even Sun has accepted it, at least on paper. Which is why Sun now sells hardware with commodity processors.
Which nobody seems to know about. That's because Sun still has a lot of people (too many of them in sales and marketing) that are in total denial about the end of the Sparc era.
That's a common outcome when a big company acquires a product. Sun itself is a past master of this kind of self-inflicted foot shooting — remember Cobalt Networks?
But Oracle actually seems to do a lot better with its acquisitions than do other companies. Have a look at this list of recent acquisitions. Notice that each item points to a current product page. The one that fascinates me is Rdb — a relational database! — that probably would have died if Oracle hadn't acquired it and thrown resources at it.
Uhm, you want the same programmers who couldn't keep track of their pointers to add validity checks? Yeah, that'll work.
This kind of error is actually nothing new. The business with all those 0x20s (do they really store dollar values in 64-bit integers?) Is reminiscent of a snafu I read about back when punched cards where the main data input medium.
To understand what happened you need to know how 80-column IBM punched cards worked. (Here's a picture of such a card. It's printed to show how the columns are allocated for FORTRAN source code, but that doesn't affect how the card actually works.) Each column represents an alphanumeric value. A single punch in the numbered rows meant a numeric digit. Other characters were encoded by combinations I won't go into (more details here); suffice to say that the letters A through R were represented by a punch in the zone rows (the top two rows above the numeric rows) combined with a numeric punch. In particular, the later A is represented by a punch in the top row combined with a punch in the 1 row.
Now then, one fine day a keypunch operator is inputting data for a town that taxes personal property. (I don't remember the specific figures, so I'll make some up to illustrate what happened.) A guy owns a car valued at $200. In the card used for inputting the tax data for the car, ten columns are set aside for the assessed value. The operator should have punched "_____20000" (using _ to represent blank columns with no punch). But his finger slipped, and he input "A____20000".
Any properly designed language runtime would have choked on this input (alphabetic data in a numeric field). The language runtime (FORTRAN I think, or maybe COBOL) was not properly designed. In a numeric field, any blank column in a numeric field was assumed to represent 0 — and the zone punches were simply ignored! End result: the value of the car was recorded as $10,000,200.00. With a 0.5% tax on personal property, the guy was sent a bill taxing his $200 car at $50,001. (Like I said, these figures are imaginary, but they're in the ballpark.) He didn't have to pay, of course, but by the time he protested his bill, the city budget had already been drawn up, and had to be hastily revised based on $50K (about $300K in today's money) suddenly evaporating.
It's all part of Obama's Socialist Agenda. Tax all the quadrillionaires until they're poor starving billionaires!
Dude, these things add up! Aquadrillion here, a quadrillion there, and before you know it you're talking about a lot of money!
Now that's a good suggestion. The only risk is that all the students will become fans of really weird movies!
Not a marketing gimmick. If you did any component-based programming, you'd see a lot of utility in ActiveX objects. They allow people to write libraries that you easily plug into your application and interact with at design time using a GUI like pre-.NET Visual Basic or Delphi.
What really made this kind of object valuable is that it allowed you to use an object-oriented framework like MFC or VCL without knowing jack about object-oriented programming. Unfortunately, this capability was simply ignored when they moved from COM to .NET.
Now, it's perfectly true that the implementation of the ActiveX concept is a horror. Bad API design, bad documentation, buggy code. But those are not marketing fuckups.
I can double nitpick your nitpick!
First, you're not being pedantic at all. The confusion about what "ASCII" means has caused no end of grief. Look at all the web pages that are full of "?" glyphs because people are confused about what characters they can safely use. And that's actually an improvement over they way things used to be. For a long time most web pages didn't even specify character set, and browsers were supposed to guess. One resulting glitch: Internet Explorer tended to assume that any page containing a right-curly-quote was in Japanese!
One reason I parted ways with Project Gutenberg and Distributed Proofreaders was their stubborn insistence that anything you can type on a U.S. PC keyboard is "ASCII" and therefore universally readable. They've since discovered their mistake, but are still sort of in denial about the consequences.
Other nitpick: strictly speaking, there's no such thing as an ANSI character set. It's not even sloppy usage, because when somebody says "ANSI character" it's less than obvious what they're talking about. Probably CP 1252, or maybe CP 437. The Wikipedia article on CP 1242 claims that it's called "ANSI" because of confusion with Latin 1, which supposedly started out as an ANSI spec. (CP 1242 and Latin 1 are the same except that the former uses some codes that the latter doesn't; and yes, that does cause problems.) That rates a big {Citation Needed} from me.
Ooh! One more nitpick! CP 437 is often referred to as "extended ASCII". Now, this game looks like it's running on a PC using CP 437 displayed on MS-DOS's "ANSI" terminal emulator. (So called because it implements ANSI X3.64.) So EVERYBODY'S RIGHT!!!!
"Domestication" doesn't imply "obedience", as any mule skinner will tell you. It just means that you have a population of animals (or plants!) that have lived with humans long enough to be physically distinct from their wild ancestors.
I think it counts as neotenous cultural behavior. "Neoteny" refers to a juvenile characteristic that's retained into adulthood, like those salamanders that never lose their gills because they live in the desert. Now, domestic cats retains lots of kitten behaviors that disappear if they're not socialized with humans early on: purring, that habit of "making bread" in your lap (kittens need to massage momma's mammaries in order to get them to work), and of course that pitiful meow they resort to whenever they want you to do something for them.
I was amused by this thought from the submitter:
Cat owners may have suspected as much, but it seems our feline friends have found a way to manipulate us humans.
Suspected? Suspected??? Every cat lover knows they are the most manipulative, self-centered creatures on the planet! God knows what it says about us that we love them all the more for it!
It's nice to own your own OS stack. It's nicer to offer what you customers want. Sun owned the same stack and they still had to offer Linux support, because it would have hurt their x64 sales big time if they hadn't. Management will have changed, but not the needs of customers. If anything, there will be a stronger emphasis on Linux, because management will lose a lot of its Solaris-uber-alles bigotry.
All these prognostications about Sun under Oracle are ridiculous. They're all made by people who don't know the first thing about the computer systems business. We start out with people assuming that Oracle will shut down Sun's hardware business "because Oracle is a software company." Now it's a lot of bugs either-or logic about OS choices.
Come to think of it, all of the prognostications people make when Oracle makes an acquisition end up being pretty lame. They're usually based on lame assumptions, like "oh, this acquisition also does databases, they must be buying it in order to shut it down." Which never turns out to be the case.
No they haven't. They've done a fair amount of science, but there have been very long periods when there wasn't enough crew to do more than maintenance. These include the 30 months that the entire shuttle fleet was grounded after the loss of Columbia. Other periods have been forced by budget cutbacks.
I think it's only news when a shuttle launch isn't delayed.
Presenting results of an experiment is "flamebait"? Please.
I can't be bothered to tell you.
I got the 5-brothers story from a flyer written by a Suburu dealer. Obviously not carefully researched!
If it didn't suck so much it also wouldn't matter so much to have alternatives be popular.
I disagree. If the alternatives hadn't started getting a following, web developers would have gone on coding for IE, and not worrying about being standards compliant. IE-compatibility would have ended up being the de-facto standard for web applications.
Look at what Microsoft did when they created the de-facto standard for desktop platforms. Monopoly issues aside, do you really want the web to be designed around the kind of complicated, inconsistent, and poorly documented conventions that Microsoft invents?
So it will probably be healthy to remain skeptical until trend this is confirmed by other organizations.
Especially after all the breathless "Firefox is taking over" stories on Slashdot, submitted by fanboys every time there's a spike in downloads (like after a release!) or the browser's market share gains a tiny fraction of a percent.
Mind you, I'm really glad to see that we're finally getting some serious competition in the browser marketplace. But before you congratulate yourselves too much, send a psychic "Thanks for Shooting Yourselves in the Foot!" to Steve and Bill. Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Opera all have real advantages, but none of these would have overcome IE's big advantage: being the default browser on the desktop OS that owns 90% of its market. The only thing that could have overcome that advantage is not the advantages of the competition, but the extreme crappiness of IE itself.
Hey, since you work for NAOJ, perhaps you know somebody who actually speaks Japanese? If so, please ask them what the literal translation of "Suburu" actually is. If my "5 brothers" story is nonsense, I'd love to know for sure.
Well, the Pleiades cluster has has a lot more than 7 stars &mdash hundreds in fact. How many of these stars count as part of the star formation is a cultural matter. Western tradition says 7, but I believe Japanese tradition says 6. I could be mistaken.
You'll notice that the Suburu logo has 6 stars. Not 4. That because FHI's current structure of 4 divisions didn't exist in 1953. That was when the company was formed out of 5 smaller companies. Hence the one big star and the 5 little ones.