Didn't Windows used to run on Alpha? Wasn't Alpha a 64bit chip?
If i do remember that right then MS has had a reasonable amount of experience with 64bit too.
Although note that IRIX was running on MIPS. MIPS and Alpha were both 64bit RISC chips. Whereas Itanium is VLIW. No one has had that much experience porting anything sizeable to a VLIW architecture, with linux it is fairly easy, a few Kernel and compiler mods, and your sorted for a fully working system...windows on the other hand...euuughhhh...I feel dirty;-)
I know that being Open Source fanatics we are supposed to love plain ASCII text and all, but when it comes to High-Level overviews how about a frickin' diagram.
I have played around with Dia, and despite some pretty big limitations, it is still possible to create a good looking pic.
I'm sorry to rant (is it just me?) but why is Linux and Open Source documentation so devoid of pretty pictures. If they can add to a persons understanding of a product or concept I would say they are not such a waste of bandwidth, as everyone in the OSS community tends to believe.
Only if we can convince legislators that they are doing what's right for the advancement of society and the economy will we allow them to see past their corporate contributors' interests.
It's been a long time since a politician was interested in advancing society. If you can argue why not-introducing patents can maintain the status quo, you might be able to convince them;-)
One problem with your argument is that any major player in Europe (it probably applies to the little guys) normally have a presence in the US, through which they can apply and be granted patents.
Furthermore, most European software vendors would like to sell there wares in the States, and to do so they must license the patents anyway.
Re:Speculating about AI in this way is ignorant
on
A.I. and the Future
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· Score: 1
Excellent Post. I think that during the discovery/creation of Artificial Intelligence we will no doubt discover ways of augmenting our own intelligence to a level above or equal to that of those machines we create. The main question is whether man is willing to undergo these augmentations be they genetic, nanotechnological or whatever.
In the current climate of emotionally charged, media hyped and generally irrational arguments for the preservation of a "natural" state of affairs, I think the general answer to this would be no. Think stem cells and cloning.
If we were able to augment ourselves. then the machines taking over the world argument would be baseless, since we would always be one step ahead, or at least equal.
I think it was Steve Mann (originally at MIT) who had a vest attached to some sort of Radar, so that when he was on his bike, he could 'feel' a car coming up behind him. Sounds a bit like a development of that tech.
If a waterproof version was available it would be good for people in Prison...if you drop the soap, you could feel the person approaching you, before you really feel that same person coming from behind;-)
In the context of Extreme Programming your arguments don't make sense.
You only ever put what the customer wants into the software, anything else is just wasting time.
If the customer asks for more features, and if product is to be released to a greater number of customers (with more demands) then those features are added.
With comprehensive unit testing and other mechanisms, a tenet of Extreme Programming is "don't be afraid to refactor",if it becomes clear that a generic architecture would become more mainainable and robust, during the addition of a variety of features then implement it. Otherwise don't go around wasting your's and the customer's time by following blind alleys of exensibility when you are not totally sure if it is warranted.
From the NY Times article, about Jobs' vision of the future I find I quite funny that they are chasing the PC market, and trying to extend it's lifespan.
If they had kept on plodding with newton, not only would they be ahead of game with the likes of Palm, but since their Newton OS was that much more beefier that the Palm it could have been the platform of choice for the wireless information device market.
This is a market in which Microsoft and it's primary competitor Symbian are going after, and to many it would appear to be the future of computing.
Had they kept on going the likes of Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia might have well been more interested in Apples product than Psions. Then they would not have to worry about making up silly visions of how they want the market to be, and instead deliver what the market wants.
This is not to say that I think the PC is dead, just that the broad appeal of having easy access to all your necessary information while on the move is a big draw to the general populace. The geeks will still of course prefer their fat pipes, multiple desktops and the raw power that their PCs provide as well as minimal exposure to sunlight. Although most likely they will still not want a Mac. Oh well...bye bye Apple.
For as long as I can remember, I have always hated be taught anything! Even my step-father recalls stories of trying to teach me to ride a bike and me going ballistic because I hated being told a) what to do, b) what I am doing wrong. This is generally down to an extreme amount of impatience that also effects my teaching abilities...I can't.
As such, I have more or less self-taught myself everything. And in my opinion that is one of the best ways to learn. What is more having information shoved down my neck has a worse effect in that I lose interest in it, because I associate the lecture/seminar/tutorial with boredom and then associate the boredom with the subject at hand.
This is why I left Uni, I turned out to be so disinterested in everyting I was supposed to be learning, that I couldn't bring myself to do the coursework, assignments and the main project, that I would have failed anyway.
However almost immediately after leaving, and getting a job, I started having ideas about a new programming language and OS and because I wasn't equipped to investigate these with my current knowledgebase, it pushed me into further investigation of the subjects involved. And now a almost 2 years after leaving uni, I am heavily involved in learning and applying princicples of computer architecture, microkernels, reflective object orientation, UI, programming language design and so on. I mean I am actually trying to learn lambda calculus and all the hard theory that goes behind all of this as well.
So while its horses for courses, no teacher has ever had an amazing effect on my life, except perhaps for Mr. Hartwright who told me not to use OO Pascal in my school project ('94), whose advice I promptly ignored, and went on to get highest in the class;-)
As it turns out EDGE is more like UMTS in current frequency bands. I was talking crap, but it is till unlikely to offer 2Mbps (its in the spec, but likely not to be implemented).
As far as 3G is concerned it is expected to offer 2Mbps for pico/microcells. The technology offering 112Kbps is GPRS which is an extension of the GSM standard offering "always on" mobile internet connections which are charged by the KB.
It is interesting that apparently the expectation of the US market is that 300Kbps is "enough" for most consumers, which is to be offered by EDGE, which I believe is a GPRS like upgrade of current CDMA infrastructure. This EDGE technology in the US is what is reffered to as 3G, but is really 2.5G!
To sum up the above rambling, America is still destined to lag behind the rest of the world in mobile telecoms for the forseeable (sp?) future.
If the range of 802.11 is 200ft then that would imply having towers every 400ft, I will admit to being particularly clued up on 802.11, however I assume it does not have a particularly efficient frequency reuse scheme, that would preclude it from being used as a pervasive carrier.
Did you know that that GSM compresses it's speech to about 12Kbps, with 11Mpbs that's about 916 users talking.
GPRS at the moment can manage ~30Kbps thats 366 users. While it can theoretically get up to 100kbps this is going to be very unlikely in practice.
UMTS I believe will try and offer 2Mbps per user. But this will only be in densely populated areas and picocells. 802.11 will likely be a real competitor in the picocell market, although the average user won't notice because by then a mobile handset will likely be compatible with every wireless service out there, such that you use what ever is quickest at the time, and the all the billing will be integrated behind the scenes.
I agree completely with your sentiments. The one thing that would probably scew things would be if she settles. Then their will be no precedent set either way.
A precedent would be good because in other cases regarding RIAA/Big Bad Record Company (TM), when they say (under oath noless) that they are looking after the artists interests, the defendents have a case to refer to which shows that this is obviously a complete load of bullshit.
The worst thing is when you are coding away, fag (UK to US: cigarette) in hand, tapping at the keyboard, and you drop ash and don't realise. Normally hits the delete key, and as I am a really shit typist and use the delete key constantly, I end up spreading said ash all across the keyboard, and over my fingers.
As for keyboard lint in general, I find once cleared, and neatly piled up, the best thing to do is get a razor, cut it up, snort, pretend it's crack, then post another really laim comment on slashdot;-]
Oooh...aren't you clever. Did you need university to do your own assembler and compiler? Or did you simply need the free time.
I would argue the latter. There are plenty of resources available to teach oneself how to do these things. And frankly that would be preferable for me than attending boring lectures. And with the 'net there are always plenty of people to talk to if you have problems.
Get a job, earn shitloads, take 2 years off to do your own stuff when you are that much more mature to appreciate it.
I would hazard a guess that the majority would answer no. I for example would much rather take on a technical lead rather than manage clueless and predominantly irritating people!
Besides which experience is far more important than having a piece of paper to tell you how smart you are. I left Uni after having a few personal problems, and managed to get myself a pretty good job, involved with GPRS, GSM etc.
Now I am looking for a new job, people couldn't care less if I have a degree or not. At the end of the day people are after your knowledge, your ability to express it (be it code, sys admin, consultancy etc.) and your ability to learn more.
With or without a degree, provided you can demonstrate the above characteristics you are sorted.
As an aside, how many muppet graduates are there?
Where I work, say 5% of the grads are worth their salt. We have a software engineering graduate, that can't even work out Word, Excel, and has trouble dealing with the concept of a command line.
I also think that failing Uni, or dropping out, or whatever, has the effect of giving people a reality check. All of a sudden, you are in the real world and you have to cope! You lose your newbieness quite quickly. On the other hand graduates, who go straight on some graduate training scheme with a big corp, tend to lead quite a sheltered existence, and hence rate highly on my cluelessometer.
I remember when the Olympics used to be a spectacle of human endeavor, and the teams which attended a symbol of national pride.
Now look at it. We have media interests paying upwards of a billion to get the rights to broadcast and report on the event. The corrupt IOC seems to just fsck everyone over, using the draw of participating in a world class event to silence and abuse the basic human rights of the contenders.
A friend of mine, Dave Millar, is likely to be cycling in the Olympics, however he also writes a column in a cycling magazine which is essentially a diary of his experiences and thoughts as a professional cyclist. As such he IS both a sportsman AND a journalist, and the IOC is effectively barring him from another professional activity.
All I can say is screw the olympics, I don't have a TV to watch it on anyway, I think it is about time some international legal juristiction be devised under which the IOC and other international events must operate, simply to tell them to fsck off when they get too big for there boots.
If music is protected under free-speech, could one not write say an old 300bps modem emulator, and run the bit stream of the DeCSS code through it to produce a sound file.
Then release the sound file on the web, and you might have a free speech rendition of the code. Would it pass as music? Or a copyrightable sound?
Once downloaded simply demodulate to text and woohoo an illegal device...in the US at least!
If such speech is protected, then this could be a method to protect all works that greedy corporate bastards have some kind of problem with.
Could even get DJs to mix it into some phat tunes! I've certainly heard some music with what sounds like modem connection sound effects, mixed in...radiohead springs to mind.
You are absolutely right with regards to financial houses using reliable systems.
I went for an interview with Chase Manhattan (sp?), the job was to provide programming support for traders. I didn't get the job (up too late the night before, brain wasn't working for the IQ tests...doh!) anyway, at the presentation when I asked about the tech they were using, they said that they normally stay about 2 years behind the bleeding edge. The interview was last year, and they were only just considering Java...
I now work in mobile telecoms, and the OMC (Operation and Maintenance Center) systems all run Solaris 2.5.1, yeah it's shit old, but when the job is mission/revenue critical, you need to go with something tried and tested.
GPRS is what is known as 2.5G as it is a bolt on to existing GSM networks, and offers about 128Kbps per cell (note, not per user) the bandwidth is shared between all users.
UMTS is 3G, and is going to be based on (ironically American) CDMA (aka Could have Done More Arithmetic) technology. It will offer 384Kbps per USER, say in your car on the motorway, or 2Mbps in a microcell say in a town centre or in your house (picocell).
It is worthy to note that the view of most American cellular providers is that EDGE/(IDEN?) which offers 384Kbps max, is 3G tech, and anything after that as 4G.
The net effect of this is that American mobile infrastructure will require 2 rounds of upgrades to get to UMTS equivalent. Because of this 3G view, interim solutions like EDGE will be around for at least 3-4 years, by which time, Europe and Japan will be riding high on UMTS (or equivalent) technlogy.
I have eaten the sun so my tongue has be burned of the taste - Alice in Chains
Fair Enough, they were not allocated enough funds for formalised and proveable specifcation.
Had they been using a more rigourous language like Eiffel all the way through, then perhaps it could have been prevented, simply because Eiffel gets you to think about your software in a different way. Although considering they were cutting costs by building on Ariane 4 software in the first place, this all seems a bit redundant!
Anyway no need for a flame war, I'll agree that Bertrand Meyer is a prick though;)
His claims that eiffel could have prevented Ariane 5 are not completely outrageous. B a specification language similar to Z and Eiffel is used in critical systems, and using preconditions, postconditions and invariants, one can inductively PROOVE that a piece of a code is correct.
Eiffel simply encapsulates these concepts into a complete OO language, albeit a little less rigourously.
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Funny considering how AMD used to have (still?) Windows Comapatible logos on their CPUs, that they can't get any firm MS support for their chip.
If i do remember that right then MS has had a reasonable amount of experience with 64bit too.
Although note that IRIX was running on MIPS. MIPS and Alpha were both 64bit RISC chips. Whereas Itanium is VLIW. No one has had that much experience porting anything sizeable to a VLIW architecture, with linux it is fairly easy, a few Kernel and compiler mods, and your sorted for a fully working system...windows on the other hand...euuughhhh...I feel dirty ;-)
I have played around with Dia, and despite some pretty big limitations, it is still possible to create a good looking pic.
I'm sorry to rant (is it just me?) but why is Linux and Open Source documentation so devoid of pretty pictures. If they can add to a persons understanding of a product or concept I would say they are not such a waste of bandwidth, as everyone in the OSS community tends to believe.
It's been a long time since a politician was interested in advancing society. If you can argue why not-introducing patents can maintain the status quo, you might be able to convince them ;-)
Furthermore, most European software vendors would like to sell there wares in the States, and to do so they must license the patents anyway.
In the current climate of emotionally charged, media hyped and generally irrational arguments for the preservation of a "natural" state of affairs, I think the general answer to this would be no. Think stem cells and cloning.
If we were able to augment ourselves. then the machines taking over the world argument would be baseless, since we would always be one step ahead, or at least equal.
If a waterproof version was available it would be good for people in Prison...if you drop the soap, you could feel the person approaching you, before you really feel that same person coming from behind ;-)
You only ever put what the customer wants into the software, anything else is just wasting time.
If the customer asks for more features, and if product is to be released to a greater number of customers (with more demands) then those features are added.
With comprehensive unit testing and other mechanisms, a tenet of Extreme Programming is "don't be afraid to refactor",if it becomes clear that a generic architecture would become more mainainable and robust, during the addition of a variety of features then implement it. Otherwise don't go around wasting your's and the customer's time by following blind alleys of exensibility when you are not totally sure if it is warranted.
Sorry to ramble...
If they had kept on plodding with newton, not only would they be ahead of game with the likes of Palm, but since their Newton OS was that much more beefier that the Palm it could have been the platform of choice for the wireless information device market.
This is a market in which Microsoft and it's primary competitor Symbian are going after, and to many it would appear to be the future of computing.
Had they kept on going the likes of Motorola, Ericsson and Nokia might have well been more interested in Apples product than Psions. Then they would not have to worry about making up silly visions of how they want the market to be, and instead deliver what the market wants.
This is not to say that I think the PC is dead, just that the broad appeal of having easy access to all your necessary information while on the move is a big draw to the general populace. The geeks will still of course prefer their fat pipes, multiple desktops and the raw power that their PCs provide as well as minimal exposure to sunlight. Although most likely they will still not want a Mac. Oh well...bye bye Apple.
As such, I have more or less self-taught myself everything. And in my opinion that is one of the best ways to learn. What is more having information shoved down my neck has a worse effect in that I lose interest in it, because I associate the lecture/seminar/tutorial with boredom and then associate the boredom with the subject at hand.
This is why I left Uni, I turned out to be so disinterested in everyting I was supposed to be learning, that I couldn't bring myself to do the coursework, assignments and the main project, that I would have failed anyway.
However almost immediately after leaving, and getting a job, I started having ideas about a new programming language and OS and because I wasn't equipped to investigate these with my current knowledgebase, it pushed me into further investigation of the subjects involved. And now a almost 2 years after leaving uni, I am heavily involved in learning and applying princicples of computer architecture, microkernels, reflective object orientation, UI, programming language design and so on. I mean I am actually trying to learn lambda calculus and all the hard theory that goes behind all of this as well.
So while its horses for courses, no teacher has ever had an amazing effect on my life, except perhaps for Mr. Hartwright who told me not to use OO Pascal in my school project ('94), whose advice I promptly ignored, and went on to get highest in the class ;-)
As it turns out EDGE is more like UMTS in current frequency bands. I was talking crap, but it is till unlikely to offer 2Mbps (its in the spec, but likely not to be implemented).
It is interesting that apparently the expectation of the US market is that 300Kbps is "enough" for most consumers, which is to be offered by EDGE, which I believe is a GPRS like upgrade of current CDMA infrastructure. This EDGE technology in the US is what is reffered to as 3G, but is really 2.5G!
To sum up the above rambling, America is still destined to lag behind the rest of the world in mobile telecoms for the forseeable (sp?) future.
Hehehehehe ;)
The worst thing is that most fuckers don't tick the "unavailable" check box once you've got a job, so the same damn agency phones up about 20 times.
Fucking desperate recruiting whores.
FWIW, the Pentium Pro started at 60 Mhz
Hmmm...that was the original Pentium, the Pentium Pro started at 180MHz and 200MHz. I've got one right here.
If the range of 802.11 is 200ft then that would imply having towers every 400ft, I will admit to being particularly clued up on 802.11, however I assume it does not have a particularly efficient frequency reuse scheme, that would preclude it from being used as a pervasive carrier.
Did you know that that GSM compresses it's speech to about 12Kbps, with 11Mpbs that's about 916 users talking.
GPRS at the moment can manage ~30Kbps thats 366 users. While it can theoretically get up to 100kbps this is going to be very unlikely in practice.
UMTS I believe will try and offer 2Mbps per user. But this will only be in densely populated areas and picocells. 802.11 will likely be a real competitor in the picocell market, although the average user won't notice because by then a mobile handset will likely be compatible with every wireless service out there, such that you use what ever is quickest at the time, and the all the billing will be integrated behind the scenes.
A precedent would be good because in other cases regarding RIAA/Big Bad Record Company (TM), when they say (under oath noless) that they are looking after the artists interests, the defendents have a case to refer to which shows that this is obviously a complete load of bullshit.
As for keyboard lint in general, I find once cleared, and neatly piled up, the best thing to do is get a razor, cut it up, snort, pretend it's crack, then post another really laim comment on slashdot ;-]
I would argue the latter. There are plenty of resources available to teach oneself how to do these things. And frankly that would be preferable for me than attending boring lectures. And with the 'net there are always plenty of people to talk to if you have problems.
Get a job, earn shitloads, take 2 years off to do your own stuff when you are that much more mature to appreciate it.
Do most geeks have upper management as a goal?
I would hazard a guess that the majority would answer no. I for example would much rather take on a technical lead rather than manage clueless and predominantly irritating people!
Besides which experience is far more important than having a piece of paper to tell you how smart you are. I left Uni after having a few personal problems, and managed to get myself a pretty good job, involved with GPRS, GSM etc.
Now I am looking for a new job, people couldn't care less if I have a degree or not. At the end of the day people are after your knowledge, your ability to express it (be it code, sys admin, consultancy etc.) and your ability to learn more.
With or without a degree, provided you can demonstrate the above characteristics you are sorted.
As an aside, how many muppet graduates are there? Where I work, say 5% of the grads are worth their salt. We have a software engineering graduate, that can't even work out Word, Excel, and has trouble dealing with the concept of a command line.
I also think that failing Uni, or dropping out, or whatever, has the effect of giving people a reality check. All of a sudden, you are in the real world and you have to cope! You lose your newbieness quite quickly. On the other hand graduates, who go straight on some graduate training scheme with a big corp, tend to lead quite a sheltered existence, and hence rate highly on my cluelessometer.
Now look at it. We have media interests paying upwards of a billion to get the rights to broadcast and report on the event. The corrupt IOC seems to just fsck everyone over, using the draw of participating in a world class event to silence and abuse the basic human rights of the contenders.
A friend of mine, Dave Millar, is likely to be cycling in the Olympics, however he also writes a column in a cycling magazine which is essentially a diary of his experiences and thoughts as a professional cyclist. As such he IS both a sportsman AND a journalist, and the IOC is effectively barring him from another professional activity.
All I can say is screw the olympics, I don't have a TV to watch it on anyway, I think it is about time some international legal juristiction be devised under which the IOC and other international events must operate, simply to tell them to fsck off when they get too big for there boots.
Then release the sound file on the web, and you might have a free speech rendition of the code. Would it pass as music? Or a copyrightable sound?
Once downloaded simply demodulate to text and woohoo an illegal device...in the US at least!
If such speech is protected, then this could be a method to protect all works that greedy corporate bastards have some kind of problem with.
Could even get DJs to mix it into some phat tunes! I've certainly heard some music with what sounds like modem connection sound effects, mixed in...radiohead springs to mind.
I went for an interview with Chase Manhattan (sp?), the job was to provide programming support for traders. I didn't get the job (up too late the night before, brain wasn't working for the IQ tests...doh!) anyway, at the presentation when I asked about the tech they were using, they said that they normally stay about 2 years behind the bleeding edge. The interview was last year, and they were only just considering Java...
I now work in mobile telecoms, and the OMC (Operation and Maintenance Center) systems all run Solaris 2.5.1, yeah it's shit old, but when the job is mission/revenue critical, you need to go with something tried and tested.
Although that said, were moving to NT....doh!
GPRS is what is known as 2.5G as it is a bolt on to existing GSM networks, and offers about 128Kbps per cell (note, not per user) the bandwidth is shared between all users.
UMTS is 3G, and is going to be based on (ironically American) CDMA (aka Could have Done More Arithmetic) technology. It will offer 384Kbps per USER, say in your car on the motorway, or 2Mbps in a microcell say in a town centre or in your house (picocell).
It is worthy to note that the view of most American cellular providers is that EDGE/(IDEN?) which offers 384Kbps max, is 3G tech, and anything after that as 4G.
The net effect of this is that American mobile infrastructure will require 2 rounds of upgrades to get to UMTS equivalent. Because of this 3G view, interim solutions like EDGE will be around for at least 3-4 years, by which time, Europe and Japan will be riding high on UMTS (or equivalent) technlogy.
I have eaten the sun so my tongue has be burned of the taste - Alice in Chains
Had they been using a more rigourous language like Eiffel all the way through, then perhaps it could have been prevented, simply because Eiffel gets you to think about your software in a different way. Although considering they were cutting costs by building on Ariane 4 software in the first place, this all seems a bit redundant!
Anyway no need for a flame war, I'll agree that Bertrand Meyer is a prick though ;)
Eiffel simply encapsulates these concepts into a complete OO language, albeit a little less rigourously.