I thought ENIAC was the first electronic programmable computer. That's what they told me in my CompSci classes.
They were probably American classes;-)
ENIAC was certainly the first something, but I forget what it was. It wasn't the first stored program computer; that came later. EDSAC was the first one of those IIRC.
Everyone: what was so great about ENIAC again? I can't remember!
British Telecom is kind of tied up in this regard due to the laws which were made when it was privatised in the 80's.
Do these laws apply to all telcos, or just BT? My phone is provided by ComTel, who provide my cable TV as well. If other telcos are exempt from some of the laws which apply to BT, they could gain an advantage in areas such as unmetered calls, and increase their market share.
The point being that instead of enforcing metering or not-metering there should be an option of both.
I agree entirely. More than one pricing plan would certainly benefit the end user. You could have a system in which metered is the default, and suits a lot of people, but a (fairly high) flat-rate charge is also available which would suit people who want to make heavy use of the network.
I think a system like this is in place in the UK for selling water - you can go on a water meter or pay a fixed charge depending on your usage. Don't quote me on that though - my water payments are included in my rent; I don't know how payment works for people in their own houses.
My phone and modem are going to be yanked out of the wall on Sunday, and will be plugged back in on Monday morning. I just hope that my parents don't try to call me and then get all panicky when they get a "disconnected" tone:-)
I actually doubt that this strike will do much good, but hey, it's the principle of the thing, isn't it:-) I hope that the strike generates some mainstream news in Monday's papers. Media publicity is more likely to get us noticed than the strike itself.
Of course, in France, you have a mandatory 6 weeks off per year, where as I get 0
Zero annual leave? Ouch! That is outrageous! I get five weeks per year; I don't know if that's mandated by law though. I would go crazy working non-stop without a break.
Of course, there are lots of other issues. For instance, the top level heirarchy makes very little sense.
It has got a bit large and unwieldly, hasn't it? Unfortunately, I fear that it's too late to do anything about it. The Great Renaming[1] probably confused a lot of people the first time round (it was before my time, so I don't know how bad it was). How many people will end up hideously confused if we try it again?
[1] Note to newbies: until the mid-1980s, all Usenet groups had names beginning "net.". The current hierarchy ("alt.", "comp.", "soc." etc) was started on a day which is now known as The Great Renaming, when all the old groups got renamed.
By the way, did you get your kippered herring with the university crest on it yet?
*falls off chair in astonishment at seeing that*
Okay, this is utterly off-topic, but I must explain this to everyone, as it's an inside joke. A friend of mine at university commented that he really wanted to get a first-class degree. I replied that everyone wants a first, but as time progresses you get more and more fed up with studying, until a kippered herring with a university crest on would be as welcome as a degree. This quote then showed up in my friend's sig block, and apparently has spread farther afield since then:-)
In response to the original poster: I got a lower second-class degree. Better than the forecasted herring. Tux would only have eaten it anyway.
I'm making 21-23k after bonuses and its all going into student debt repayments and rent
The trick for is to have parents as poor as church mice, so you get a student grant (even though it's a pittance), and to take out as small a student loan as you can get away with. Since I spent much of my free time in the Fyshbowl (look it up on Everything for an explanation), I incurred few costs apart from living expenses:-)
Personally I'd be willing to take pay cuts if it meant working on things I really liked.
Right on. I started full-time work as a software engineer last September. My salary is £20,000 before tax and deductions (that's about US$32,000 for the benefit of the Americans in the audience). This is more money than I know what to do with. I move some into a high-interest savings account every month, and put some into a pension scheme. I still have a surplus. I don't need any pay rises. I would like more interesting work though.
Atheists are not a majority. It must have been an unusual, nonrandom selection of people in your class if the majority were right-wingers and atheists.
Depends on the culture you're in, surely. I'm from a farming area in England; the majority of the local population are right-wingers. Farmers (i.e. landowners) tend to back the Conservative party in this country.
Maybe "atheist" was a bit unfair, but "agnostic" at most, and whatever their beliefs were, it didn't stop them from laying into mine.
Either that or you are using the overly broad definition of atheism that some Christains are guilty of and labelling every other religion as atheist.
Urgh, goodness no. Any religion with a deity or deities cannot be "atheist" by definition. I also never use the phrase "pagan" to describe non-Christians, as Paganism is a religion and its name should not be abused. I would not wish the name of my faith to be abused, so I do not abuse the name of another faith.
Totally off-topic, I know; just wanted to set the record straight.
I am both, geek and redhead. I stand out so unbelievably that I can identify with many of the posts here on/.
At school, I wasn't the only geek in my class. Like you, I stood out in more than one way, so copped more flak than those who were "just" geeks. As well as being a geek, I am below average height, socialist and Christian. The other kids in my class were mainly right-wingers and atheists. They thus had three ideological/personality trait type things to pick on me for, and the fact that I was short was apparently funny too.
You were very fortunate. If I ever have kids (which I doubt will happen because I think I'd be a really crummy father, but hey), I hope I will have the means to teach them at home. I wouldn't want my children to go through what I went through, and from the sounds of things I got off pretty lightly.
I bet a software company would love to see their logo positioned somewhere on a Star Trek computer screen. It would cost them a fortune, but would be a real advertising coup. Microsoft LCARS, anyone?:-)
Has anyone ever wondered what's at the edge of the universe?
Socks. A whole lot of non-matching socks.. And pens.
No; after disappearing down the back of the sofa/into the depths of the washing machine/through the lining of your coat pocket, those things actually appear as antisocks and antipens in a parallel universe. Down the back of some sofa in some universe there must be a fortune in anticoins.
Y'know, if some members of any other religion believed in a young universe and posted as such here, I doubt it would have been modded down to minus 1 and ridiculed. If you diss any other minority (Christianity is a minority faith in this country (UK), at any rate), you rightly get lambasted for prejudice. If you diss Christianity, or abuse the name of the Christian deity, no-one gives a monkeys. It's an utterly outrageous situation IMHO.
Have some respect the beliefs of others. You may find them daft, illogical, or downright ludicrous, and that's your right, but don't criticize them or ridicule the person because of his beliefs. You wouldn't behave in a racist or sexist manner in a public forum such as this (at least, I hope you wouldn't), so you shouldn't behave in a "beliefist" manner either.
all the Unix freeware of interest has been ported to NT as well.
It's been ported, but it doesn't necessarily work. I tried a port of zsh (my preferred Unix shell) under NT. I tried ^Cing a process. NT bluescreened. This is not intended as a slur againt NT, I'm just pointing out that OS to OS ports are often a bit flaky (as the HP-UX port of IE also illustrated). It always seems best to run an app natively on the OS it was designed for, rather than relying on a port.
ISTR that pre-integration versions of IE were available for free download. This is one way that MS managed to gain increased market share over Netscape, which was payware at the time.
I suspect that a hypothetical future version of IE for Linux would be freeware "for non-commercial use", in line with the versions for HP-UX, Solaris and Windows. Provided you're not charging for using it, you'll be free to install one copy of IE on your server and all your users will get unlimited access.
(donn't forget that this is speculation about a product which doesn't exist and may never exist)
Who knows what sort of nasty code will be in there. Such as code to steal your/etc/passwd, as one example.
I realize that this post wasn't meant to be taken seriously; however, I don't think this sort of comment is very wise. We get cross, and rightly so, when MS spin doctors spread FUD about Linux. Therefore, we really shouldn't be making unfounded allegations about MS, even in fun, lest we stoop to their level.
I am aware that I might provoke "shut up, you've got no sense of humour" type reactions for saying this. I just think that we need to be careful about what we say.
I remember, not too long ago, MS ported IE 3(?) to Solaris (?) and was saying that they were porting it to the two remaining big unicies (which were HP-UX and SCO, as I recall)
I tried IE for HP-UX last year. It stank: it was almost unbelievably slow; the GUI was a custom-designed job that looked like the illegitimate child of Windows and Motif; the Unix convention for config files (human-readable text files) was thrown out the window - the silly thing created a $HOME/.microsoft directory and wrote a registry into it.
It strikes me that Microsoft's engineers have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a port to Unix should be. It should have the functionality of the Windows original, but behave in a way typical of the target platform. The HP-UX port felt like a botched job.
The first showing (in New York, IIRC) was indeed a digital "film" shown with a digital projector. Most cinemas will get regular celluloid copies though. It was made digitally and then transferred onto celluloid, just like digital audio recordings can be transferred onto an analogue medium (cassette tape, vinyl etc).
Why should the Slashdot team do any "actual work" to "provide...members a real service"? Slashdot doesn't have members. No-one pays to use Rob's cool site. Rob and the team don't owe us anything.
I for one am delighted that the Slashdot team provide the service that they do at no charge to the users. Keep up the sterling work, people:-)
You put a lot of cross-references in that article. You've obviously been reading Everything:-)
(btw, I'd not call The Register the European equivalent of Slashdot, as The Register is just a news site, not news/comments/opinion/flamage like Slashdot. I think The Register reads more like a bizarre cross between news.com and Segfault).
Sure, we're lagging a bit behind Wintel boxes hardware wise, and the OS still lacks some important functions, but we are having fun
You just summed it up perfectly. I personally don't care that my machine is old, slow and outdated. It's fun, and that's important to me. I'd rather use an old computer that I can have fun with than get involved in the "my computer is better, newer and faster than your computer" wars that seem so prevelant everywhere these days.
Slashdot Mirror
They were probably American classes ;-)
ENIAC was certainly the first something, but I forget what it was. It wasn't the first stored program computer; that came later. EDSAC was the first one of those IIRC.
Everyone: what was so great about ENIAC again? I can't remember!
Do these laws apply to all telcos, or just BT? My phone is provided by ComTel, who provide my cable TV as well. If other telcos are exempt from some of the laws which apply to BT, they could gain an advantage in areas such as unmetered calls, and increase their market share.
I agree entirely. More than one pricing plan would certainly benefit the end user. You could have a system in which metered is the default, and suits a lot of people, but a (fairly high) flat-rate charge is also available which would suit people who want to make heavy use of the network.
I think a system like this is in place in the UK for selling water - you can go on a water meter or pay a fixed charge depending on your usage. Don't quote me on that though - my water payments are included in my rent; I don't know how payment works for people in their own houses.
My phone and modem are going to be yanked out of the wall on Sunday, and will be plugged back in on Monday morning. I just hope that my parents don't try to call me and then get all panicky when they get a "disconnected" tone :-)
I actually doubt that this strike will do much good, but hey, it's the principle of the thing, isn't it :-) I hope that the strike generates some mainstream news in Monday's papers. Media publicity is more likely to get us noticed than the strike itself.
If the story had been "CGI crashes Linux", would you have reacted the same way?
Zero annual leave? Ouch! That is outrageous! I get five weeks per year; I don't know if that's mandated by law though. I would go crazy working non-stop without a break.
It has got a bit large and unwieldly, hasn't it? Unfortunately, I fear that it's too late to do anything about it. The Great Renaming[1] probably confused a lot of people the first time round (it was before my time, so I don't know how bad it was). How many people will end up hideously confused if we try it again?
[1] Note to newbies: until the mid-1980s, all Usenet groups had names beginning "net.". The current hierarchy ("alt.", "comp.", "soc." etc) was started on a day which is now known as The Great Renaming, when all the old groups got renamed.
*falls off chair in astonishment at seeing that*
Okay, this is utterly off-topic, but I must explain this to everyone, as it's an inside joke. A friend of mine at university commented that he really wanted to get a first-class degree. I replied that everyone wants a first, but as time progresses you get more and more fed up with studying, until a kippered herring with a university crest on would be as welcome as a degree. This quote then showed up in my friend's sig block, and apparently has spread farther afield since then :-)
In response to the original poster: I got a lower second-class degree. Better than the forecasted herring. Tux would only have eaten it anyway.
The trick for is to have parents as poor as church mice, so you get a student grant (even though it's a pittance), and to take out as small a student loan as you can get away with. Since I spent much of my free time in the Fyshbowl (look it up on Everything for an explanation), I incurred few costs apart from living expenses :-)
Right on. I started full-time work as a software engineer last September. My salary is £20,000 before tax and deductions (that's about US$32,000 for the benefit of the Americans in the audience). This is more money than I know what to do with. I move some into a high-interest savings account every month, and put some into a pension scheme. I still have a surplus. I don't need any pay rises. I would like more interesting work though.
Depends on the culture you're in, surely. I'm from a farming area in England; the majority of the local population are right-wingers. Farmers (i.e. landowners) tend to back the Conservative party in this country.
Maybe "atheist" was a bit unfair, but "agnostic" at most, and whatever their beliefs were, it didn't stop them from laying into mine.
Urgh, goodness no. Any religion with a deity or deities cannot be "atheist" by definition. I also never use the phrase "pagan" to describe non-Christians, as Paganism is a religion and its name should not be abused. I would not wish the name of my faith to be abused, so I do not abuse the name of another faith.
Totally off-topic, I know; just wanted to set the record straight.
At school, I wasn't the only geek in my class. Like you, I stood out in more than one way, so copped more flak than those who were "just" geeks. As well as being a geek, I am below average height, socialist and Christian. The other kids in my class were mainly right-wingers and atheists. They thus had three ideological/personality trait type things to pick on me for, and the fact that I was short was apparently funny too.
You were very fortunate. If I ever have kids (which I doubt will happen because I think I'd be a really crummy father, but hey), I hope I will have the means to teach them at home. I wouldn't want my children to go through what I went through, and from the sounds of things I got off pretty lightly.
I bet a software company would love to see their logo positioned somewhere on a Star Trek computer screen. It would cost them a fortune, but would be a real advertising coup. Microsoft LCARS, anyone? :-)
No; after disappearing down the back of the sofa/into the depths of the washing machine/through the lining of your coat pocket, those things actually appear as antisocks and antipens in a parallel universe. Down the back of some sofa in some universe there must be a fortune in anticoins.
Y'know, if some members of any other religion believed in a young universe and posted as such here, I doubt it would have been modded down to minus 1 and ridiculed. If you diss any other minority (Christianity is a minority faith in this country (UK), at any rate), you rightly get lambasted for prejudice. If you diss Christianity, or abuse the name of the Christian deity, no-one gives a monkeys. It's an utterly outrageous situation IMHO.
Have some respect the beliefs of others. You may find them daft, illogical, or downright ludicrous, and that's your right, but don't criticize them or ridicule the person because of his beliefs. You wouldn't behave in a racist or sexist manner in a public forum such as this (at least, I hope you wouldn't), so you shouldn't behave in a "beliefist" manner either.
(deep breath)
If you like Star Wars, watch Star Wars. If you like Star Trek, watch Star Trek. If you like both, watch both. That's all there is to it. I think.
It's been ported, but it doesn't necessarily work. I tried a port of zsh (my preferred Unix shell) under NT. I tried ^Cing a process. NT bluescreened. This is not intended as a slur againt NT, I'm just pointing out that OS to OS ports are often a bit flaky (as the HP-UX port of IE also illustrated). It always seems best to run an app natively on the OS it was designed for, rather than relying on a port.
ISTR that pre-integration versions of IE were available for free download. This is one way that MS managed to gain increased market share over Netscape, which was payware at the time.
I suspect that a hypothetical future version of IE for Linux would be freeware "for non-commercial use", in line with the versions for HP-UX, Solaris and Windows. Provided you're not charging for using it, you'll be free to install one copy of IE on your server and all your users will get unlimited access.
(donn't forget that this is speculation about a product which doesn't exist and may never exist)
I realize that this post wasn't meant to be taken seriously; however, I don't think this sort of comment is very wise. We get cross, and rightly so, when MS spin doctors spread FUD about Linux. Therefore, we really shouldn't be making unfounded allegations about MS, even in fun, lest we stoop to their level.
I am aware that I might provoke "shut up, you've got no sense of humour" type reactions for saying this. I just think that we need to be careful about what we say.
I tried IE for HP-UX last year. It stank: it was almost unbelievably slow; the GUI was a custom-designed job that looked like the illegitimate child of Windows and Motif; the Unix convention for config files (human-readable text files) was thrown out the window - the silly thing created a $HOME/.microsoft directory and wrote a registry into it.
It strikes me that Microsoft's engineers have a fundamental misunderstanding of what a port to Unix should be. It should have the functionality of the Windows original, but behave in a way typical of the target platform. The HP-UX port felt like a botched job.
The first showing (in New York, IIRC) was indeed a digital "film" shown with a digital projector. Most cinemas will get regular celluloid copies though. It was made digitally and then transferred onto celluloid, just like digital audio recordings can be transferred onto an analogue medium (cassette tape, vinyl etc).
Why should the Slashdot team do any "actual work" to "provide...members a real service"? Slashdot doesn't have members. No-one pays to use Rob's cool site. Rob and the team don't owe us anything.
I for one am delighted that the Slashdot team provide the service that they do at no charge to the users. Keep up the sterling work, people :-)
You put a lot of cross-references in that article. You've obviously been reading Everything :-)
(btw, I'd not call The Register the European equivalent of Slashdot, as The Register is just a news site, not news/comments/opinion/flamage like Slashdot. I think The Register reads more like a bizarre cross between news.com and Segfault).
You just summed it up perfectly. I personally don't care that my machine is old, slow and outdated. It's fun, and that's important to me. I'd rather use an old computer that I can have fun with than get involved in the "my computer is better, newer and faster than your computer" wars that seem so prevelant everywhere these days.