The trap I think you've fallen into here is to think that because something can be abused that it will be, on a large scale.
The fact is that aside from a certain initial novelty factor - most employees will spend most of their time focussing on their job. They'll occasionally use the IM for personal stuff, just like they make the odd personal phone call or email. If they abuse that then it'll show up in the quality of their work, because a few geniuses aside, most people can't make 2hours output look like 8. So there are always ways to spot and deal with lazy people. But if you start out assuming your workforce is lazy what does that say about you as an employer?
The remaining questions are - is it useful and is it safe. I suspect that it'll be more useful in some types of job than others. I work in Tech Support and we used to have a team based in 3 different countries. IM was very useful. Since then we've been centralised and we don't use it so much. (Note - we weren't ordered not to use it - we just stopped because it's no longer useful)
As for safety - it's definitely something that should be protected behind a firewall. I don't know the details of that but I assume it can be done.
ANGEL: I watched you, and I saw you called. It was a bright afternoon out in front of your school. You walked down the steps... and... and I loved you.
BUFFY: Why?
ANGEL: 'Cause I could see your heart. You held it before you for everyone to see. And I worried that it would be bruised or torn. And more than anything in my life I wanted to keep it safe... to warm it with my own.
{they embrace}
BUFFY: That's beautiful. Or taken literally, incredibly gross.
I have never been able to understand how (later) in a single company two such opposite culters could stay together (in DEC, the UNIX and VMS groups) and it turned out, not surprisingly, they could not.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that but HP now have two Unix groups (HP-UX and Tru64) and a VMS one.
I work for a large software company that sells software on many platforms and I can tell you that there's still a heck of a lot of VMS out there. Until I hear differently I'm assuming HP will be honouring Compaq's commitment to port VMS to Itanium so that VMS users have an upgrade path.
Maybe someone else can tell us exactly but I'm pretty sure that Digital started using OpenVMS instead of VMS. I'm thinking it was back in the days when Unix collectively was often called 'open systems' - describing open operability (i.e. standards) rather than open source.
I don't you need to be - because apparently this version of the future is based on a poor SciFi B-movie. They've probably got one a Blockbuster you can rent instead.
I've worked with Ingres, Oracle, SQL server and others and my opinion is that if you have to rely on fine tuning the DBMS to get adequate performance then I question whether it really was a "great financial software product". Maybe in terms of functionality it was great - but performance has to be designed in. Tuning the DBMS, like tuning the OS, will usually only give you the last few percent performance improvement.
One of the companies I've worked with provides billing systems for mobile phone companies. Millions of records, thousands of transactions a day. Due to pressure from their customers they tried to write it in Oracle and just couldn't get the performance. Runs fine with Ingres.
The point is - if we're arguing based on anecdotes then it's easy to point out individual cases where there was a big problem. We could do that for all the major DBMSs. I'm not going to get into a religious war about which is the best DBMS - but I know that Ingres is up there with the best.
Speaking as someone who's worked with another RDBMS which uses memory based locking (Ingres) for over 10 years, I can say that this can scale and scale very well.
Your application designers need to have concurrency issues in mind - but then that tends to make for better applications anyway. There's more to concurrency than simply the number of locks available in the system.
Ingres has always used memory-based locking and has only been extended to 64-bit addressing in the last couple of years. There are people using Ingres with databases in the hundreds of Gb or higher and with thousands of concurrent sessions.
I guarantee that any system of that size Ingres, Oracle, DB2 or Bob's own DBMS would need to consider concurrency pretty carefully regardless of how locking is implemented.
In the UK at least DECT phones (digital cordless) are the direct descendant of the Rabbit phones.
Remember this was 1989. Real mobile phones were cumbersome and very expensive. This was an attempt to make them more widely available - albeit in a less functional form.
I love That Hideous Strength and Out of the Silent Planet. Perelandra I've only read once and it was hard work.
It's a strange trilogy - 3 books in 3 very different styles.
I read somewhere that at the same time he was writing Perelandra he was writing a more scholarly commetary/analysis on Milton's Paradise Lost. Some see Perelandra as that commentary in novel form.
Slashdot Mirror
The word law implies that something is fixed, immutable. That's why, I think, serious scientists talk about theories and hypotheses not laws.
Ah I always wondered where that came from. Thanks
In science there are no laws, only theories which haven't been disproved yet.
This wasn't so much a fraud as a misunderstanding.
The guy bought 'London Bridge' and shipped it, brick by brick to Arizona where it was rebuilt exactly as it was.
However I think he thought he was buying Tower Bridge which is the one you've probably seen in postcards.
Neither has fallen down as far as I know. That's just a kid's rhyme.
I said misleading, not offtopic.
Your post is misleading.
There are less than 50,000 4-note melodies. 4 notes being all it took in one particular court case.
However that only means that there are 50,000 unique melodies in a legal sense.
In an artistic sense there are millions.
The trap I think you've fallen into here is to think that because something can be abused that it will be, on a large scale.
The fact is that aside from a certain initial novelty factor - most employees will spend most of their time focussing on their job. They'll occasionally use the IM for personal stuff, just like they make the odd personal phone call or email. If they abuse that then it'll show up in the quality of their work, because a few geniuses aside, most people can't make 2hours output look like 8. So there are always ways to spot and deal with lazy people. But if you start out assuming your workforce is lazy what does that say about you as an employer?
The remaining questions are - is it useful and is it safe. I suspect that it'll be more useful in some types of job than others. I work in Tech Support and we used to have a team based in 3 different countries. IM was very useful. Since then we've been centralised and we don't use it so much. (Note - we weren't ordered not to use it - we just stopped because it's no longer useful)
As for safety - it's definitely something that should be protected behind a firewall. I don't know the details of that but I assume it can be done.
Jabber is a protocol, not a client
Jabber is both a client and a protocol. It's an IM client which supports multiple protocols including its own.
It was the first host to connect to the first switch on what would become ARPANET
That logic only holds if more = better
Saying science fiction is about space is like saying crime fiction is about guns.
ANGEL: I watched you, and I saw you called. It was a bright afternoon out in front of your school. You walked down the steps... and... and I
loved you.
BUFFY: Why?
ANGEL: 'Cause I could see your heart. You held it before you for everyone to see. And I worried that it would be bruised or torn. And more than anything in my life I wanted to keep it safe... to warm it with my own.
{they embrace}
BUFFY: That's beautiful. Or taken literally, incredibly gross.
ANGEL: I was just thinking that, too.
From the episode "Helpless"
I have never been able to understand how (later) in a single company two such opposite culters could stay together (in DEC, the UNIX and VMS groups) and it turned out, not surprisingly, they could not.
I'm not quite sure what you mean by that but HP now have two Unix groups (HP-UX and Tru64) and a VMS one.
I work for a large software company that sells software on many platforms and I can tell you that there's still a heck of a lot of VMS out there. Until I hear differently I'm assuming HP will be honouring Compaq's commitment to port VMS to Itanium so that VMS users have an upgrade path.
Maybe someone else can tell us exactly but I'm pretty sure that Digital started using OpenVMS instead of VMS. I'm thinking it was back in the days when Unix collectively was often called 'open systems' - describing open operability (i.e. standards) rather than open source.
The only real similarity between VMS and NT are the kernels. That's what Dave Cutler worked on.
DOS command line is more like unix that VMS
They aren't distributing OpenVMS - they've just running it on some computers and allowing public access.
Their software license doesn't allow them to let you use it as a business platform.
Maybe you saw 'OpenVMS' and thought it was Open Source? It's not - it's proprietary, commercial software.
But then again, IMHO patents on "doing X with a computer when people are already doing X by hand" should be unpatentable.
So if I figure out how to create a robot that can dance a ballet or a new algorithm to beat the Turing Test I can't patent it?
I don't you need to be - because apparently this version of the future is based on a poor SciFi B-movie. They've probably got one a Blockbuster you can rent instead.
100 years seems about right for cutting edge maths to make it to practical use.
thank you
I'd be interested to know more details.
I've worked with Ingres, Oracle, SQL server and others and my opinion is that if you have to rely on fine tuning the DBMS to get adequate performance then I question whether it really was a "great financial software product". Maybe in terms of functionality it was great - but performance has to be designed in. Tuning the DBMS, like tuning the OS, will usually only give you the last few percent performance improvement.
One of the companies I've worked with provides billing systems for mobile phone companies. Millions of records, thousands of transactions a day. Due to pressure from their customers they tried to write it in Oracle and just couldn't get the performance. Runs fine with Ingres.
The point is - if we're arguing based on anecdotes then it's easy to point out individual cases where there was a big problem. We could do that for all the major DBMSs. I'm not going to get into a religious war about which is the best DBMS - but I know that Ingres is up there with the best.
Speaking as someone who's worked with another RDBMS which uses memory based locking (Ingres) for over 10 years, I can say that this can scale and scale very well.
Your application designers need to have concurrency issues in mind - but then that tends to make for better applications anyway. There's more to concurrency than simply the number of locks available in the system.
Ingres has always used memory-based locking and has only been extended to 64-bit addressing in the last couple of years. There are people using Ingres with databases in the hundreds of Gb or higher and with thousands of concurrent sessions.
I guarantee that any system of that size Ingres, Oracle, DB2 or Bob's own DBMS would need to consider concurrency pretty carefully regardless of how locking is implemented.
Guess where that technology comes from?
In the UK at least DECT phones (digital cordless) are the direct descendant of the Rabbit phones.
Remember this was 1989. Real mobile phones were cumbersome and very expensive. This was an attempt to make them more widely available - albeit in a less functional form.
I love That Hideous Strength and Out of the Silent Planet. Perelandra I've only read once and it was hard work.
It's a strange trilogy - 3 books in 3 very different styles.
I read somewhere that at the same time he was writing Perelandra he was writing a more scholarly commetary/analysis on Milton's Paradise Lost. Some see Perelandra as that commentary in novel form.
They were doing that when I was a kid. It was 'reading order' if you like. Although almost everyone read LW&W first