You'd rather they evaporated entirely, disabling one of the internet backbones, leaving 75 government agencies and much of the Fortune 1000 without phone and internet service, putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work, and completely destroying the investments of people taken in by the accounting fraud? Maybe the assets and obligations should go to some organization capable of managing them honestly?
This isn't really the same MCI that was involved in accounting fraud, because the individuals involved in the fraud aren't there any more. Even if they were, after being bought by Verizon, they wouldn't be in charge any more. The idea that a corporation is a legal entity with rights and responsibilities is a useful fiction in making the law function at all, but it doesn't actually make sense to talk about "the same MCI" from then to now.
Standard Linux doesn't do hard real-time, but it is good for parts of the system which don't require hard real-time. If you write a hard real-time system suitably, also, you can use large and valuable portions of Linux with it. The point is really that you can get a programmer familiar with Linux to do all the relatively easy parts of the embedded system, instead of taking up your real-time specialist's time or needing to train someone on special-purpose APIs.
There's also a substantial market for non-real-time embedded systems. Just last week, a SuSE engineer released support for a number of different touchscreens, useful for stores and restaurants. Obviously, you don't need real-time on a cash register, but you have very limited resources and unusual peripherals (e.g., a computer with two touchscreens, a magnetic card reader, a barcode scanner, a lock, a cash drawer, and a line printer; no keyboard or mouse). And you want a pretty simple program, and you want it to be easy to write, easy to customize, and easy to test.
Search engine rankings? Google isn't Orbitz, so they have to quit linking to them. They could ask about the front page, and avoid linking to other pages, but it would be less trouble to simply exclude them entirely.
An ideal Turing machine only needs an arbitrary amount of storage, not an infinite amount. It is perfectly acceptable to pause in the middle of a run until more tape is added to one end.
A universal Turing machine has nothing to do with the size of the tape; it is a Turing machine whose FSM supports the emulation of any other Turing machine, when that machine's FSM is written in some format on the tape. That is, it's a computer that runs programs out of storage, rather that having them hardwired in (or, rather, the hardwired microcode runs arbitrary programs out of storage).
A regular computer is a limited-resource universal Turing machine, which is to say that it can run out of memory, but, if it doesn't, can, in principle, run any computer program in memory. (Actually, it can also do a few things that a Turing machine can't, like get input from a user while running, and some can get actual random values; these don't really change the theoretical power of the system for computing, but are important for practical applications.)
If you make all of the home directories live on file servers, the per-user configuration is all on the file server, where you can populate it on account creation, make it symlinks, deny users permission to change it, and so forth. MIT's been doing this (on AFS) for at least a decade. (Actually, they use a database for some of the configuration stuff, like mail servers, and prepopulate defaults on account creation and update accounts which still have the default with new Athena releases, so that users can customize things.)
On the other hand, it would be really nice if there were a config file that would set up talking to mail servers regardless of the client you're using, so you could set up one file and have it work regardless of the mail client the user ended up with.
Notice how all the users refer to themseleves as 'us', and everyone else as 'them'.
Not him! He refers to slashdot users as 'them', and everyone else as 'us'!
(When I say "him", I mean myself, of course. Maybe it's a good idea after all to refer to oneself and others as 'us', and everyone else as 'them', if only to be somewhat comprehensible.)
I really like the habit people have of specifying Windows-only (or only available by special download) fonts in web pages. It greatly improves the legibility of the page for me, because it means that the browser ignores it entirely and uses the default font, rather than picking a font that only looks good on some web designer's screen. The page about what's wrong with Verdana pleased me greatly, because all of the samples were rendered beautifully in Lucidux Serif. The samples of what happens if you use 85% size and the font isn't available were a bit smaller, but still perfectly legible. The only thing that looked ugly was the screenshot clip of what the named fonts looked like to the author of the page.
I still prefer X's "misc-fixed" for terminal windows at the particular size I use, but for non-terminal things, Lucidux has everything that ever gets specified by name on the web beat.
According to this site, Denmark was responsible for taking software patents off of the A-list for the 17th, somewhat unexpectedly. Not entirely clear what their motivation is, since there are a number of issues now, from software patents to the balance of power between the EU Parliament and Council to the procedures involved. But I expect a Slashdot story on Thursday praising Denmark for this move.
Basically, the BIOS has to manage the hardware before the OS boots. You can't rely on the OS to find the boot hard drive to load the OS from, or to arrange RAM to run the BIOS, or to interact with the user to configure the BIOS settings to determine what to boot from. This means that the BIOS has to understand the video card somewhat, hard drives, keyboards, mice, USB for some of these, PCI for others, IDE, SCSI, and so forth.
But it doesn't have to be efficient at any of it, because you're not going to do very much with the system as handled by the BIOS. It doesn't matter if you don't use DMA to load the bootloader, because it's small and you do it once per boot.
I don't think you can call answering "Do you think that another collapse is inevitable?" with "No... the core body of Macolytes is pretty inviolable." to be predicting the death of Apple. He's saying that Apple will never go out of business, but is going to have a hard time making a big breakthough. He's off base on his advice (selling NeXT to Apple was a good idea, but you can't sell Apple to Apple), but if he could come up with good ideas, he'd be an executive instead of a reporter. As far as judging the health of Apple, he seems to have been right. Apple basically lasts forever on income from Mac devotees, and that's basically what happened for the next several years.
If Europe were a utopia with perfect and just laws (according to Slashdot), software patents would be uniformly and clearly prohibited. In fact, Europe is a terrible place (according to Slashdot), except for Poland, which is valiantly fighting back against the forces of evil. No, wait. This week, Europe is a terrible place, except for the Netherlands, which is fighting back.
Be sure to tune in next week, when Europe is a terrible place, except for Denmark, which is fighting back.
Civil suits are never dismissed by judges without a motion by one side or the other. This case hasn't been dismissed because IBM hasn't moved to dismiss. IBM could say that they want the case over, and SCO would have to present some argument against it, which would have to include some sort of evidence of something. On the other hand, this would lead to the case being dismissed without prejudice (since IBM hasn't demonstrated that SCO doesn't have a case, simply that SCO hasn't presented a case), so SCO (or SCO's successor in some interests) could refile the case later.
Essentially, if the case were terminated at this point, the issue wouldn't be resolved. IBM doesn't want the issue remaining to be fodder for FUD in the future. SCO is obviously not going to drop it. The case can't end until someone in it complains, and that hasn't happened.
The thing that's unnatural is having to respond to things frequently while you work. Your average farmer works until he's tired, rests until he's not tired, and so forth. He doesn't get interrupted by much of anything, and people arriving are ignored until the next pause. A dock worker who picked up a crate at 10:29:55 wouldn't simply drop it five seconds later when the candyman came along. He'd pick up the crate, move it, and, before going for the next crate, he'd notice the candyman and take a break.
People conflate the time that humans spend resting between steps with interruptions imposed externally, when, in fact, they are entirely opposite effects.
That's because the composite manager used in the screenshot is just a little test program. Once the Composite extension is generally supported, window managers will handling that as well, and then effects can be done (conveniently) based on focus. Then people can experiment with a lot of different effects, and possibly come up with better ones than OS X has (perhaps all windows have done shadows, but the active window has a halo? Maybe the active window has a halo, and is a light source that other windows cast shadows away from?).
It is being maintained and developed as actively as it ever was, which is to say that there's a first release candidate for the first version after the split ready now. Whether that counts as "active" or not depends on your point of view.
The motions to strike material he ruled to be moot, because he didn't actually use the material and it only applied to a motion he already resolved. The motions for partial summary judgement he denied, but without prejudice, which means they can make them again later. Since he's given his reasons for not granting the partial summary judgement, and they are likely to be settled before the case goes to court, this only delays things until after discovery.
For that matter, it makes sense; IBM didn't ask for a summary judgement which would end the case entirely and make discovery moot. Despite what the article says, the case wouldn't really fall apart if IBM got their motion, because the claim that SCO is still maintaining is that IBM breached a contract to not do certain things, even though those things wouldn't violate copyrights. They're suggesting that they might find a contract with IBM that says that IBM agrees not to do any development on big systems that isn't the project they started with SCO and Dynix. Since discovery has to continue anyway, there's no reason to make partial summary judgements with less information than will be available later. Otherwise, SCO would be sure to turn something up during discovery which they would claim (falsely) pertains to the judgement, and it would have to go to an appeal to be argued.
None of these projects is about creating an innovative UI; they're about image and document processing. I see great possibilities in having an "Integrated App" which has the UI and which scripts operations on data in the different applications.
Those are electronic musical instruments. The Barrons created "recordings" of music by manipulating the tape directly, rather than by recording sound. Which can a better claim to "Electronic Music" is debatable, but they are clearly different things, like a scanner and a paint program are different. Of course, these days they are generally used together.
I suspect the Venezuela has more in common with the US than with sub-saharan africa, and may have a bigger investment in infrastructure than nearby countries. Not to argue over terminology, but a more useful distinction could possibly be made between areas with the necessary infrastructure for modern technology and areas which lack that infrastructure than the traditional idea of the third world, which is based more on national-level properties which don't really matter at the individual level.
One significant difference is that Firefox (1.0) uses a non-modal section for this sort of thing, so the user is much more likely to completely ignore it. Additionally, the section appears in the same area that the browser offers to let you see pop-ups, so users will quickly be trained to ignore that section as being for getting ads. It won't stop users from getting spyware, but the users will actually have to pay attention to figure out how to get it, rather than being bombarded with offers for it and having to refuse them intentionally.
It's worth noting that the gas they're talking about, octafluoropropane, has a mass of 188, which is substantially more than 32 or 44 for O2 or CO2, and ought to keep the air heavy, slow, and sweet-smelling (non-toxic, but unhelpful to breathe) for a long time.
It should also be fine with a 30% increase in temperature, which is what would be comfortable for people (Mars isn't really very cold, on an absolute scale, even now).
The other issue is actually wind; with a low atmospheric pressure, the forces on the atmosphere give it a high velocity. Just having a bunch of heavy gasses around should slow down the wind any reduce the portion of the atmosphere which blows right off the planet.
The main claim seems to be that, because there are multiple non-Microsoft platforms, a huge amount of testing must be done to ensure interoperability with them. On ther other hand, there is only one Microsoft platform (Windows XP, released in 1980) which has always interoperated perfectly with itself (obviously, so they didn't bother to test it).
The piece seems to say very little about open source, aside from a quick statement that business people are so stupid that they would confuse a development model with a design goal (do these people mistake CAD software for cars, too?) and that interoperability in a non-uniform world requires testing.
Mostly, it seems to be a claim that Microsoft is now putting a lot of work into interoperability and is designing an interoperable system which will distinguish them from everybody else.
I'm disappointed in your Canned Slashdot Reponse. It should be: In Soviet Russia, the phishers send you to пaяпал.
Not that there seems to be any way to include non-ascii characters in slashdot posts, which makes this a tad less clear. ("paypal" in cyrillic characters, except for a plain latin-1 "a")
Slashdot Mirror
You'd rather they evaporated entirely, disabling one of the internet backbones, leaving 75 government agencies and much of the Fortune 1000 without phone and internet service, putting hundreds of thousands of people out of work, and completely destroying the investments of people taken in by the accounting fraud? Maybe the assets and obligations should go to some organization capable of managing them honestly?
This isn't really the same MCI that was involved in accounting fraud, because the individuals involved in the fraud aren't there any more. Even if they were, after being bought by Verizon, they wouldn't be in charge any more. The idea that a corporation is a legal entity with rights and responsibilities is a useful fiction in making the law function at all, but it doesn't actually make sense to talk about "the same MCI" from then to now.
Standard Linux doesn't do hard real-time, but it is good for parts of the system which don't require hard real-time. If you write a hard real-time system suitably, also, you can use large and valuable portions of Linux with it. The point is really that you can get a programmer familiar with Linux to do all the relatively easy parts of the embedded system, instead of taking up your real-time specialist's time or needing to train someone on special-purpose APIs.
There's also a substantial market for non-real-time embedded systems. Just last week, a SuSE engineer released support for a number of different touchscreens, useful for stores and restaurants. Obviously, you don't need real-time on a cash register, but you have very limited resources and unusual peripherals (e.g., a computer with two touchscreens, a magnetic card reader, a barcode scanner, a lock, a cash drawer, and a line printer; no keyboard or mouse). And you want a pretty simple program, and you want it to be easy to write, easy to customize, and easy to test.
Search engine rankings? Google isn't Orbitz, so they have to quit linking to them. They could ask about the front page, and avoid linking to other pages, but it would be less trouble to simply exclude them entirely.
An ideal Turing machine only needs an arbitrary amount of storage, not an infinite amount. It is perfectly acceptable to pause in the middle of a run until more tape is added to one end.
A universal Turing machine has nothing to do with the size of the tape; it is a Turing machine whose FSM supports the emulation of any other Turing machine, when that machine's FSM is written in some format on the tape. That is, it's a computer that runs programs out of storage, rather that having them hardwired in (or, rather, the hardwired microcode runs arbitrary programs out of storage).
A regular computer is a limited-resource universal Turing machine, which is to say that it can run out of memory, but, if it doesn't, can, in principle, run any computer program in memory. (Actually, it can also do a few things that a Turing machine can't, like get input from a user while running, and some can get actual random values; these don't really change the theoretical power of the system for computing, but are important for practical applications.)
If you make all of the home directories live on file servers, the per-user configuration is all on the file server, where you can populate it on account creation, make it symlinks, deny users permission to change it, and so forth. MIT's been doing this (on AFS) for at least a decade. (Actually, they use a database for some of the configuration stuff, like mail servers, and prepopulate defaults on account creation and update accounts which still have the default with new Athena releases, so that users can customize things.)
On the other hand, it would be really nice if there were a config file that would set up talking to mail servers regardless of the client you're using, so you could set up one file and have it work regardless of the mail client the user ended up with.
Notice how all the users refer to themseleves as 'us', and everyone else as 'them'.
Not him! He refers to slashdot users as 'them', and everyone else as 'us'!
(When I say "him", I mean myself, of course. Maybe it's a good idea after all to refer to oneself and others as 'us', and everyone else as 'them', if only to be somewhat comprehensible.)
I really like the habit people have of specifying Windows-only (or only available by special download) fonts in web pages. It greatly improves the legibility of the page for me, because it means that the browser ignores it entirely and uses the default font, rather than picking a font that only looks good on some web designer's screen. The page about what's wrong with Verdana pleased me greatly, because all of the samples were rendered beautifully in Lucidux Serif. The samples of what happens if you use 85% size and the font isn't available were a bit smaller, but still perfectly legible. The only thing that looked ugly was the screenshot clip of what the named fonts looked like to the author of the page.
I still prefer X's "misc-fixed" for terminal windows at the particular size I use, but for non-terminal things, Lucidux has everything that ever gets specified by name on the web beat.
According to this site, Denmark was responsible for taking software patents off of the A-list for the 17th, somewhat unexpectedly. Not entirely clear what their motivation is, since there are a number of issues now, from software patents to the balance of power between the EU Parliament and Council to the procedures involved. But I expect a Slashdot story on Thursday praising Denmark for this move.
Basically, the BIOS has to manage the hardware before the OS boots. You can't rely on the OS to find the boot hard drive to load the OS from, or to arrange RAM to run the BIOS, or to interact with the user to configure the BIOS settings to determine what to boot from. This means that the BIOS has to understand the video card somewhat, hard drives, keyboards, mice, USB for some of these, PCI for others, IDE, SCSI, and so forth.
But it doesn't have to be efficient at any of it, because you're not going to do very much with the system as handled by the BIOS. It doesn't matter if you don't use DMA to load the bootloader, because it's small and you do it once per boot.
I don't think you can call answering "Do you think that another collapse is inevitable?" with "No... the core body of Macolytes is pretty inviolable." to be predicting the death of Apple. He's saying that Apple will never go out of business, but is going to have a hard time making a big breakthough. He's off base on his advice (selling NeXT to Apple was a good idea, but you can't sell Apple to Apple), but if he could come up with good ideas, he'd be an executive instead of a reporter. As far as judging the health of Apple, he seems to have been right. Apple basically lasts forever on income from Mac devotees, and that's basically what happened for the next several years.
If Europe were a utopia with perfect and just laws (according to Slashdot), software patents would be uniformly and clearly prohibited. In fact, Europe is a terrible place (according to Slashdot), except for Poland, which is valiantly fighting back against the forces of evil. No, wait. This week, Europe is a terrible place, except for the Netherlands, which is fighting back.
Be sure to tune in next week, when Europe is a terrible place, except for Denmark, which is fighting back.
Civil suits are never dismissed by judges without a motion by one side or the other. This case hasn't been dismissed because IBM hasn't moved to dismiss. IBM could say that they want the case over, and SCO would have to present some argument against it, which would have to include some sort of evidence of something. On the other hand, this would lead to the case being dismissed without prejudice (since IBM hasn't demonstrated that SCO doesn't have a case, simply that SCO hasn't presented a case), so SCO (or SCO's successor in some interests) could refile the case later.
Essentially, if the case were terminated at this point, the issue wouldn't be resolved. IBM doesn't want the issue remaining to be fodder for FUD in the future. SCO is obviously not going to drop it. The case can't end until someone in it complains, and that hasn't happened.
The thing that's unnatural is having to respond to things frequently while you work. Your average farmer works until he's tired, rests until he's not tired, and so forth. He doesn't get interrupted by much of anything, and people arriving are ignored until the next pause. A dock worker who picked up a crate at 10:29:55 wouldn't simply drop it five seconds later when the candyman came along. He'd pick up the crate, move it, and, before going for the next crate, he'd notice the candyman and take a break.
People conflate the time that humans spend resting between steps with interruptions imposed externally, when, in fact, they are entirely opposite effects.
That's because the composite manager used in the screenshot is just a little test program. Once the Composite extension is generally supported, window managers will handling that as well, and then effects can be done (conveniently) based on focus. Then people can experiment with a lot of different effects, and possibly come up with better ones than OS X has (perhaps all windows have done shadows, but the active window has a halo? Maybe the active window has a halo, and is a light source that other windows cast shadows away from?).
May 16, 1994, actually. But they haven't removed anything from the API.
It is being maintained and developed as actively as it ever was, which is to say that there's a first release candidate for the first version after the split ready now. Whether that counts as "active" or not depends on your point of view.
The motions to strike material he ruled to be moot, because he didn't actually use the material and it only applied to a motion he already resolved. The motions for partial summary judgement he denied, but without prejudice, which means they can make them again later. Since he's given his reasons for not granting the partial summary judgement, and they are likely to be settled before the case goes to court, this only delays things until after discovery.
For that matter, it makes sense; IBM didn't ask for a summary judgement which would end the case entirely and make discovery moot. Despite what the article says, the case wouldn't really fall apart if IBM got their motion, because the claim that SCO is still maintaining is that IBM breached a contract to not do certain things, even though those things wouldn't violate copyrights. They're suggesting that they might find a contract with IBM that says that IBM agrees not to do any development on big systems that isn't the project they started with SCO and Dynix. Since discovery has to continue anyway, there's no reason to make partial summary judgements with less information than will be available later. Otherwise, SCO would be sure to turn something up during discovery which they would claim (falsely) pertains to the judgement, and it would have to go to an appeal to be argued.
None of these projects is about creating an innovative UI; they're about image and document processing. I see great possibilities in having an "Integrated App" which has the UI and which scripts operations on data in the different applications.
Those are electronic musical instruments. The Barrons created "recordings" of music by manipulating the tape directly, rather than by recording sound. Which can a better claim to "Electronic Music" is debatable, but they are clearly different things, like a scanner and a paint program are different. Of course, these days they are generally used together.
I tried putting my PI Number into an AT Machine, and it didn't give me any money. On the other hand, I did manage to get an R Array ID...
I suspect the Venezuela has more in common with the US than with sub-saharan africa, and may have a bigger investment in infrastructure than nearby countries. Not to argue over terminology, but a more useful distinction could possibly be made between areas with the necessary infrastructure for modern technology and areas which lack that infrastructure than the traditional idea of the third world, which is based more on national-level properties which don't really matter at the individual level.
One significant difference is that Firefox (1.0) uses a non-modal section for this sort of thing, so the user is much more likely to completely ignore it. Additionally, the section appears in the same area that the browser offers to let you see pop-ups, so users will quickly be trained to ignore that section as being for getting ads. It won't stop users from getting spyware, but the users will actually have to pay attention to figure out how to get it, rather than being bombarded with offers for it and having to refuse them intentionally.
It's worth noting that the gas they're talking about, octafluoropropane, has a mass of 188, which is substantially more than 32 or 44 for O2 or CO2, and ought to keep the air heavy, slow, and sweet-smelling (non-toxic, but unhelpful to breathe) for a long time.
It should also be fine with a 30% increase in temperature, which is what would be comfortable for people (Mars isn't really very cold, on an absolute scale, even now).
The other issue is actually wind; with a low atmospheric pressure, the forces on the atmosphere give it a high velocity. Just having a bunch of heavy gasses around should slow down the wind any reduce the portion of the atmosphere which blows right off the planet.
The main claim seems to be that, because there are multiple non-Microsoft platforms, a huge amount of testing must be done to ensure interoperability with them. On ther other hand, there is only one Microsoft platform (Windows XP, released in 1980) which has always interoperated perfectly with itself (obviously, so they didn't bother to test it).
The piece seems to say very little about open source, aside from a quick statement that business people are so stupid that they would confuse a development model with a design goal (do these people mistake CAD software for cars, too?) and that interoperability in a non-uniform world requires testing.
Mostly, it seems to be a claim that Microsoft is now putting a lot of work into interoperability and is designing an interoperable system which will distinguish them from everybody else.
I'm disappointed in your Canned Slashdot Reponse. It should be: In Soviet Russia, the phishers send you to пaяпал.
Not that there seems to be any way to include non-ascii characters in slashdot posts, which makes this a tad less clear. ("paypal" in cyrillic characters, except for a plain latin-1 "a")