You forgot CS Lewis. I think he was the first one to consider theological issues in SF, at least from the orthodox Christian standpoint, and also the first to picture ETs as better than us.
Besides, his Trilogy of Space is still great reading.
Because HP is already committed to IPF (IA-64, Itanium) and thinks it will become better than what Alpha could be. That's the official story. The unofficial is that they gave up competing on products a long time ago, and now just want to do services. Presumably that's a mixture of dumb MBAs who repeat the "services are key" mantra without understanding you must have a product to service, and if you didn't manufactured it, its manufacturer is more likely to service it than you; and of realising that people want Wintel or Lintel "just because they are used to it", and because of volume driving down prices.
In other words, the RISC market was too fragmented, and instead of coordinating the RISCs by phasing out PA-RISC and going all the way Alpha they decided to instead try to sell Intel on their VLIW, and thus IPF was born. To be fair, the first blunder was Digital's when they failed to win Apple and Novell as Alpha users, then consequently to make Alpha a volume architecture with several licensees, OEMs, foundries, notebook versions and all that you need to go heads on against a monopoly.
>
I'd think HP would keep it around just so IBM doesn't take over the top spots for supercomputers.
First, they do believe in IPF, or so it seems.
Second, is being in the top 500 supercomputers list important at all? I guess they'd rather be lucrative. I think the way they chose to be lucrative is mistaken, but that's probably their rationale.
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I'd say if they kept the Alpha, rather than their own processors, they'd have a chance at finally gaining ground on the hi-end Unix server market where IBM and Sun dominate.
Actually the PA-RISC has a nice position. Telcos tend to use predominantly the SuperDomes, due to HP's relationship with Amdocs. PA-RISCs are actually nice systems, and HP builds some nice systems around them. HP-UX isn't GNU/Linux or Solaris, but still it's Unix, so you can't throw it away. Too bad for them that Unisys will sell IPF machines that will be as nice as HP's, and so will other vendors, and some of them will have GNU/Linux or Unix to run on them.
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But, there's always hope for Alpha fans.
There isn't, see below.
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Intel bought the technology, so if their new 64-bit processor (which shatters compatibility anyhow) doesn't perform well enough, they could just start making Alphas and call them their own.
I doubt. Intel bought the patents and the documents, but most engineers left. Intel has lousy employee relationship, so they wouldn't be able to reproduce the in-house expertise Digital, Silicon Graphics, HP (before merge) had and that IBM, Sun now have. Also, they are already forcing customers to change the architecture. Would they risk it again, knowing each change in architecture is a chance of jumping ship to someone else with a better story to tell, like IBM or Sun?
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AFAIK, there's nothing stopping Samsung (or anyone else involved) from continuing to build Alpha processors...
First, there is no one else involved, only Samsung.
Second, Samsung can't compete. It does not have neither the focus, nor the ISVs, nor the customers, nor the applications, nor the systems, nor nothing needed to compete. Sun & IBM do, HP, Digital and Silicon Graphics had.
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Maybe API will try to keep the Alpha alive. It's been a good product for them for some time.
I doubt. Technically yes, but where are the volumes, the customers, the profits? Anyway they already jumped ship. They are now SiPackets, former API Networks, selling the HyperTransport stuff to AMD and the like.
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Or perhaps some other party might pick up the torch.
Forget it. Licenses are not available for the asking, even if you had loads of money. And you would have to get the engineers, and find the customers. Do you think anyone would, after the.com bubble?
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Sun would be a good candidate, since they're in a tight competition with IBM, and the Alpha seems to be the only thing to top IBM's Power3
Sun has already stated SPARC for them is binary compatibility and a viable future, not performance only. Their going Alpha would hurt more than help. They hope to get UltraSPARC to be competitive with POWER and IPF, and that's it.
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The Alpha has just as loyal a following as Apple...
There is a difference. There was never MS Office running on the Alpha, only MS Word and Excel, and these are gone now. There was never an Alpha notebook. Alphas and Macs were never in the same price bracket.
I would put relational modelling at a distant first, even if people almost universally do it wrong ("denormalising", even if this is a contradiction in a word), partly because ANSI SQL falls so short of the relational database possibilities, unlike defunct IBM BS12, Ingres QUEL and the new Alphora Dataphor.
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Palm's DragonBall is a RISC architecture, and things like speech recognition NEED floating point math which must be emulated
Dragonball's Motorala's, not Palm's. It is a CISC, not RISC, more specifically a M68K. RISC is usually better than CISC at floating point, but both architectures can go without a floating point unit, and that's what Dragonball does.
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SQL - This example is a straw man. The problem with SQL is not the abstraction it provides, but the complexity of dealing with unknown table sizes when you are trying to write fast generic queries.
Correct conclusion, wrong reasons. The problem with SQL is not the complexity of getting good performance, but the low quality of its abstraction. A truly relationalsystem might even be slow, but it would be uniformally, thus predictably and treatably, slow.
A relational system should never give different performance for different syntax if the result is the same. The optimizer should know the structure and sizes of all objects and always get the same access path if the result of the expression is the same. SQL fails because many SQL constructs are ill-defined or even wrong.
All performance tuning must be done by DBAs at the mapping between the logical and physical schemas, but SQL makes that impossible, specially after SQL:1999. See DBDebunk for more details.
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There's been a trend away from non-leaky abstractions.
[...]
> SQL offers an abstraction for which the underlying database layout is irrelevant except for performance issues.
Moral: a trend exists when there is awareness not only the problem, but also of possible solutions. Everyone knows SQL is a problem, but most people think the solution is OO, so the real solution is overlooked.
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Is the RPSL compatible with the GPL? - In most cases, probably not.
[...]
> standard GPL software probably can't be combined with RPSL software, due to restrictions in the GPL.
That makes it for me. These GPL restrictions are there to protect users; your license can be better than nothing, but not only it doesn't cover the most important thing, namely the codecs, but it isn't a good enough citizen.
Kinda... AMD is still Intel architecture, so it helps validate the Intel marchitecture and misfeatures, even if partially. And this architecture is seriously inefficient, with huge manufacturing costs hidden by scale, huge chip real state, power consumption and heat dissipation. Ah, and yet 32/36/64 bits hybrid instead of fully 64 such as the UltraSPARC or the coming AIM PowerPCs.
What if I do not want to feed the lesser known but equally evil half of the Wintel duopoly, and the TiBooks are either not good enough for me or produced by a equally evil company I do not trust.
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At the request of the civil authorities without the support of the Pope.
Now you will have to prove it. References, please.
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Southern Spain was taken and occupied by the Turks
You are mixing up the Turks and the Moors.
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and was in serious danger of falling completely.
By the time of Reformation, the Moors were already being totally routed from Spain, but the Inquisition continued in full force to erradicate the Reformation wherever it lacked civil authorities support or at leat protection.
Even pre-reformists in Central Europe were killed by the Inquisition (OK, by civil authorities because of Inquisition trials) and other branch of Romanism even if they were not connected neither to Turks nor to Moors, and very far away from the places of conflagration. One of them was assassinated by a Council even after the Emperor had guaranteed his personal safety.
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Under the RPSL (the license intended for the OSS community) code based on the Helix source needs to itself be released under the RPSL, but it can also be dual licensed with a great deal of Open Source licenses including, among others, the BSD license, the (L)GPL, and Apple's source license.
I will wait for FSF's word on it. I doubt this is feasible, but if it is I bet it will be effective.
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GStreamer is actually LGPL. As such, I think they are very complementary. GStreamer is working on a different architecture that supports different types of applications than our architecture supports. There's a lot of overlap, but there's also a lot of differing functionality. Over time, with the right effort, I could see there being a nice relationship between the two projects (similar to the relationship between Galeon and Mozilla).
Nice intentions. But is your code GPL-compatible? Mozilla had to be relicensed under GPL to be compatible, and now is a dual-license system.
I really have a problem with people creating yet another license. I never saw valid points to anything other than the small set of public domain, MIT and BSD-like, GPL and LGPL. Mostly everything else is either misunderstanding these or trying to give the people as little as possible.
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When the Bible was first assembled from the Gospels, Acts, Revelations, and the various letters of the apostiles to the early churches, there was much debate as to which versions of various books to include.
This I never heard of. Can you provide references?
The story I know is that when the texts were Canonised, they were still the near-to-the-originals second, third or nearly-that generations papirii and parchments, nowadays known as Minority Texts. During the centuries that followed, from the IV to the XVIII, the textual differents arose thru copying and have now being resolved by resourcing to the oldest available manuscripts and comparing to early translations and even original language texts in Aramaic and Hebrew.
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You obviously know absolutely nothing about Historical Criticism.
He didn't. I do and I don't like it.
So called High Criticism is just applying to Scripture a methodology that has long been discredited in both History and Literature.
I forgot the specifics, but around and after the turn from the XIX to the XX century there was an academic fashion that denied the historical existence of several authors, from Homer to Shakespeare. This based on differences found thru textual analysis between several texts attibuted to the same author.
The fashion got discredited both because of the good historical evidence for several so "deconstructed" authors and because it was realised that the differences found thru textual analysis where there for good reasons: different themes being tackled in different styles and forms at different times by the same author.
Archaeological discoveries of manuscripts and other evidence keep putting nails to High Criticism's coffin.
That Scriptural High Criticism still gets a following a century after being discredit says more about its proponents than about Scripture.
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You don't understand the concept of the trinity. God as the Father, God as the Son, God as the Holy Spirit. Since a person can't be literally three people at once (scizophrenia aside), the best analogy I can think of is if you're a married man with kids and a job. You're husband, father, and systems administrator. What you do in those positions is very different. God sent a part of himself to live as a man, to be the perfect sacrifice.
Actually you contradict yourself.
The orthodox, universal, apostholic and Scriptural historical doctrine of the Trinity says "One God, Three Persons". The One God is said to be not only One being, but a Triune one. While you can think of "parts" of God as you did, you can't think of modes or functions as in your analogy with a man; this would be the so-called modal heresy. Your error appeared when you wrote "a person can't be three people", because it is not one person and three people, but three persons in one being.
It is not clear by any means, but that's what comes of the finite (us) thinking about the infinite (Him).
Please read the Creeds, specially the Athanasian. And look for "The Forgotten Trinity" from James White.
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"Protestant" was created because of disagreements with decisions and politics of the Catholic and Orthodox Churches
Actually "Catholic" means "Universal", and thus apply to the set all faithful Christians, the specifics is known only to God. That the Roman Church calls itself Catholic is but propaganda.
The name was more properly applied in the middle ages to denote all the people who subscribed to the orthodox doctrines, but the whole point was lost when the Roman Church got corrupted from too much power and the Eastern Church got corrupted by submission to temporal power. Even so the name was never intended to denote an institution, just a body of people.
Anyway when there was the split between Rome and the East, both sides lost rights to the title "Catholic". Perhaps Rome lost it more clearly, because its doctrines had changed more, and strikingly continue to do so; by any standards but itself's, Rome is heretical against the Scriptures and the Apostles' standards, and becomes even more so every few decades by proclaiming new, Scripturally unwarranted dogma. The same holds mostly true for the Eastern churches, and BTW for all the self-named Catholic church at least since the Iconoclasts were defeated, and probably since somewhat before Constantine; it's just more striking about Rome.
The few Protestants who really know some History still call themselves Catholic, but with an eyewink. We know Rome won the propaganda war to call itself Catholic. Think Wintel calling Unix on RISC "proprietary" and itself "open standards".
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the first leader of the Roman Catholic Church, Simon Peter
That he wasn't, except retroactively in Papist spin. Simon Peter was one of the leaders (Apostles) of the so-called Primitive (first century) Church, together with Paul of Tarsis and Yagov the Just (James the brother of the Lord) among others, perhaps 12 in total. Actually Paul is the most influent in Scripture, and Yagov was probably the most respected of the original Apostles due to his blood brotherhood with the Messiah, to his living in Jerusalem, and to his reputation for fairness and pureness of heart.
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don't say the Inquisition because that was a POLITICAL phenomenon
No, it was religious. It was meant against hereticals, and the trials were by clerics according to canonical law.
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carried out by the civil authorities
Only after a religious trial, and with full support from the Roman hierarchy.
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in response to the very serious threat the Turks were posing to Eurpoe at the time.
Huh? The threat was restricted to South-Central Europe (Balkans), but the Inquisition ranged from the Americas to Prussia. And it was not target at heathens, but at reformists and heretics.
The day I can buy a GSM and GPRS GNU/Linux SIM phone to use in the Orange network in Switzerland I will be a happy geek. If it runs Gnome or at least Gtk+ so much the better.
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I was confused about "Borland" being in Cringely's "effectively dead" list as well. Borland has bounced back _amazingly_ over the past couple years under Dale Fuller's leadership.
There you have it. Borland has again a leadership. After its founder Kahn was sacked I don't remember for what offense, it went really bad. Even now they still can't get their act together with InterBase, but I digress.
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Cringely overestimates managerial influence on the companies that he mentions, but disregards other factors such as economic conditions and competition.
I think you got it wrong. He's not talking about managers as in MBAs. He's talking managers as in people who specialise in managing but don't know the business, and don't value the knowledge.
He does not restrict the causes of declining to MBAs as you seem to have interpreted him. Rather, he ascribes it to a wide-ranging cultural sickness he has been describing in his last three columns, and of which modern management culture and techniques are part and parcel.
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You forgot CS Lewis. I think he was the first one to consider theological issues in SF, at least from the orthodox Christian standpoint, and also the first to picture ETs as better than us.
Besides, his Trilogy of Space is still great reading.
Because HP is already committed to IPF (IA-64, Itanium) and thinks it will become better than what Alpha could be. That's the official story. The unofficial is that they gave up competing on products a long time ago, and now just want to do services. Presumably that's a mixture of dumb MBAs who repeat the "services are key" mantra without understanding you must have a product to service, and if you didn't manufactured it, its manufacturer is more likely to service it than you; and of realising that people want Wintel or Lintel "just because they are used to it", and because of volume driving down prices.
In other words, the RISC market was too fragmented, and instead of coordinating the RISCs by phasing out PA-RISC and going all the way Alpha they decided to instead try to sell Intel on their VLIW, and thus IPF was born. To be fair, the first blunder was Digital's when they failed to win Apple and Novell as Alpha users, then consequently to make Alpha a volume architecture with several licensees, OEMs, foundries, notebook versions and all that you need to go heads on against a monopoly.
First, they do believe in IPF, or so it seems.
Second, is being in the top 500 supercomputers list important at all? I guess they'd rather be lucrative. I think the way they chose to be lucrative is mistaken, but that's probably their rationale.
Actually the PA-RISC has a nice position. Telcos tend to use predominantly the SuperDomes, due to HP's relationship with Amdocs. PA-RISCs are actually nice systems, and HP builds some nice systems around them. HP-UX isn't GNU/Linux or Solaris, but still it's Unix, so you can't throw it away. Too bad for them that Unisys will sell IPF machines that will be as nice as HP's, and so will other vendors, and some of them will have GNU/Linux or Unix to run on them.
There isn't, see below.
I doubt. Intel bought the patents and the documents, but most engineers left. Intel has lousy employee relationship, so they wouldn't be able to reproduce the in-house expertise Digital, Silicon Graphics, HP (before merge) had and that IBM, Sun now have. Also, they are already forcing customers to change the architecture. Would they risk it again, knowing each change in architecture is a chance of jumping ship to someone else with a better story to tell, like IBM or Sun?
First, there is no one else involved, only Samsung.
Second, Samsung can't compete. It does not have neither the focus, nor the ISVs, nor the customers, nor the applications, nor the systems, nor nothing needed to compete. Sun & IBM do, HP, Digital and Silicon Graphics had.
I doubt. Technically yes, but where are the volumes, the customers, the profits? Anyway they already jumped ship. They are now SiPackets, former API Networks, selling the HyperTransport stuff to AMD and the like.
Forget it. Licenses are not available for the asking, even if you had loads of money. And you would have to get the engineers, and find the customers. Do you think anyone would, after the .com bubble?
Sun has already stated SPARC for them is binary compatibility and a viable future, not performance only. Their going Alpha would hurt more than help. They hope to get UltraSPARC to be competitive with POWER and IPF, and that's it.
There is a difference. There was never MS Office running on the Alpha, only MS Word and Excel, and these are gone now. There was never an Alpha notebook. Alphas and Macs were never in the same price bracket.
Problem solved.
I would put relational modelling at a distant first, even if people almost universally do it wrong ("denormalising", even if this is a contradiction in a word), partly because ANSI SQL falls so short of the relational database possibilities, unlike defunct IBM BS12, Ingres QUEL and the new Alphora Dataphor.
Dragonball's Motorala's, not Palm's. It is a CISC, not RISC, more specifically a M68K. RISC is usually better than CISC at floating point, but both architectures can go without a floating point unit, and that's what Dragonball does.
Correct conclusion, wrong reasons. The problem with SQL is not the complexity of getting good performance, but the low quality of its abstraction. A truly relational system might even be slow, but it would be uniformally, thus predictably and treatably, slow.
A relational system should never give different performance for different syntax if the result is the same. The optimizer should know the structure and sizes of all objects and always get the same access path if the result of the expression is the same. SQL fails because many SQL constructs are ill-defined or even wrong.
All performance tuning must be done by DBAs at the mapping between the logical and physical schemas, but SQL makes that impossible, specially after SQL:1999. See DBDebunk for more details.
If you are right, it means we will get a real relational DBMS soon. Wait, it already exists, but no one cares.
Moral: a trend exists when there is awareness not only the problem, but also of possible solutions. Everyone knows SQL is a problem, but most people think the solution is OO, so the real solution is overlooked.
That makes it for me. These GPL restrictions are there to protect users; your license can be better than nothing, but not only it doesn't cover the most important thing, namely the codecs, but it isn't a good enough citizen.
Sorry for being so blunt.
Forgot to mention the notebook Alpha that HP/Q and Intel aborted.
Kinda... AMD is still Intel architecture, so it helps validate the Intel marchitecture and misfeatures, even if partially. And this architecture is seriously inefficient, with huge manufacturing costs hidden by scale, huge chip real state, power consumption and heat dissipation. Ah, and yet 32/36/64 bits hybrid instead of fully 64 such as the UltraSPARC or the coming AIM PowerPCs.
What if I do not want to feed the lesser known but equally evil half of the Wintel duopoly, and the TiBooks are either not good enough for me or produced by a equally evil company I do not trust.
Now you will have to prove it. References, please.
You are mixing up the Turks and the Moors.
By the time of Reformation, the Moors were already being totally routed from Spain, but the Inquisition continued in full force to erradicate the Reformation wherever it lacked civil authorities support or at leat protection.
Even pre-reformists in Central Europe were killed by the Inquisition (OK, by civil authorities because of Inquisition trials) and other branch of Romanism even if they were not connected neither to Turks nor to Moors, and very far away from the places of conflagration. One of them was assassinated by a Council even after the Emperor had guaranteed his personal safety.
Nice site. Now if I could find something the like for Europe, better yet for Switzerland...
I will wait for FSF's word on it. I doubt this is feasible, but if it is I bet it will be effective.
Nice intentions. But is your code GPL-compatible? Mozilla had to be relicensed under GPL to be compatible, and now is a dual-license system.
I really have a problem with people creating yet another license. I never saw valid points to anything other than the small set of public domain, MIT and BSD-like, GPL and LGPL. Mostly everything else is either misunderstanding these or trying to give the people as little as possible.
This I never heard of. Can you provide references?
The story I know is that when the texts were Canonised, they were still the near-to-the-originals second, third or nearly-that generations papirii and parchments, nowadays known as Minority Texts. During the centuries that followed, from the IV to the XVIII, the textual differents arose thru copying and have now being resolved by resourcing to the oldest available manuscripts and comparing to early translations and even original language texts in Aramaic and Hebrew.
He didn't. I do and I don't like it.
So called High Criticism is just applying to Scripture a methodology that has long been discredited in both History and Literature.
I forgot the specifics, but around and after the turn from the XIX to the XX century there was an academic fashion that denied the historical existence of several authors, from Homer to Shakespeare. This based on differences found thru textual analysis between several texts attibuted to the same author.
The fashion got discredited both because of the good historical evidence for several so "deconstructed" authors and because it was realised that the differences found thru textual analysis where there for good reasons: different themes being tackled in different styles and forms at different times by the same author.
Archaeological discoveries of manuscripts and other evidence keep putting nails to High Criticism's coffin.
That Scriptural High Criticism still gets a following a century after being discredit says more about its proponents than about Scripture.
Actually you contradict yourself.
The orthodox, universal, apostholic and Scriptural historical doctrine of the Trinity says "One God, Three Persons". The One God is said to be not only One being, but a Triune one. While you can think of "parts" of God as you did, you can't think of modes or functions as in your analogy with a man; this would be the so-called modal heresy. Your error appeared when you wrote "a person can't be three people", because it is not one person and three people, but three persons in one being.
It is not clear by any means, but that's what comes of the finite (us) thinking about the infinite (Him).
Please read the Creeds, specially the Athanasian. And look for "The Forgotten Trinity" from James White.
Actually "Catholic" means "Universal", and thus apply to the set all faithful Christians, the specifics is known only to God. That the Roman Church calls itself Catholic is but propaganda.
The name was more properly applied in the middle ages to denote all the people who subscribed to the orthodox doctrines, but the whole point was lost when the Roman Church got corrupted from too much power and the Eastern Church got corrupted by submission to temporal power. Even so the name was never intended to denote an institution, just a body of people.
Anyway when there was the split between Rome and the East, both sides lost rights to the title "Catholic". Perhaps Rome lost it more clearly, because its doctrines had changed more, and strikingly continue to do so; by any standards but itself's, Rome is heretical against the Scriptures and the Apostles' standards, and becomes even more so every few decades by proclaiming new, Scripturally unwarranted dogma. The same holds mostly true for the Eastern churches, and BTW for all the self-named Catholic church at least since the Iconoclasts were defeated, and probably since somewhat before Constantine; it's just more striking about Rome.
The few Protestants who really know some History still call themselves Catholic, but with an eyewink. We know Rome won the propaganda war to call itself Catholic. Think Wintel calling Unix on RISC "proprietary" and itself "open standards".
That he wasn't, except retroactively in Papist spin. Simon Peter was one of the leaders (Apostles) of the so-called Primitive (first century) Church, together with Paul of Tarsis and Yagov the Just (James the brother of the Lord) among others, perhaps 12 in total. Actually Paul is the most influent in Scripture, and Yagov was probably the most respected of the original Apostles due to his blood brotherhood with the Messiah, to his living in Jerusalem, and to his reputation for fairness and pureness of heart.
No, it was religious. It was meant against hereticals, and the trials were by clerics according to canonical law.
Only after a religious trial, and with full support from the Roman hierarchy.
Huh? The threat was restricted to South-Central Europe (Balkans), but the Inquisition ranged from the Americas to Prussia. And it was not target at heathens, but at reformists and heretics.
I would love to. Where can I get a SIM GSM GPRS GNU/Linux PDA & cellphone in Switzerland that will run on the Orange network?
But is the Sharp Zaurus a GSM and GPRS phone?
The day I can buy a GSM and GPRS GNU/Linux SIM phone to use in the Orange network in Switzerland I will be a happy geek. If it runs Gnome or at least Gtk+ so much the better.
There you have it. Borland has again a leadership. After its founder Kahn was sacked I don't remember for what offense, it went really bad. Even now they still can't get their act together with InterBase, but I digress.
I think you got it wrong. He's not talking about managers as in MBAs. He's talking managers as in people who specialise in managing but don't know the business, and don't value the knowledge.
He does not restrict the causes of declining to MBAs as you seem to have interpreted him. Rather, he ascribes it to a wide-ranging cultural sickness he has been describing in his last three columns, and of which modern management culture and techniques are part and parcel.