In fairness, Word is merely a program that displays a mixture of text and graphics, that can be formatted in numerous ways, with or without style sheets, viewable on a variety of different media types, with a turing complete scripting language that's capable of controlling every facet of how each document is viewed, including interacting with the user via forms, and modifying the document on the fly.
Whereas a web browser also has to be able to download those documents via HTTP, which totally justifies it needing several hundred times as much memory.
He recognized one part of the problem but it looks like he missed the bigger threat: that CPM was on the way out and thus their ability to differentiate themselves, which had been what made them successful, was going away
I think he most certainly did recognize that CP/M was on the way out. And as for CP/M (or rather, CP/M + S-100) being used to differentiate themselves, that never happened. Never. Vector Graphics' selling point was that it produced standardized hardware. It had many rivals, all of whom produced machines identical on architecture to their's, varying by style, bundled hardware modules, and bundled software. Their hardware was never a source of differentiation. They could have rebadged Northstar's products and nobody would even have noticed.
In 1980, S-100 + CP/M was Intel + Windows today. Vector Graphics was a Dell or HP of the time, not an Apple.
Vector Graphics didn't differentiate themselves by producing new innovative hardware. They marketed themselves to businesses in a way that other makers of virtually identical hardware, from Altair to Northstar, weren't as savvy with.
IBM's involvement changed the standard from S-100 to the PC. Bob Harp saw that and suggested producing a PC compatible. That would have been one solution. It might have worked. Given that even at the time, the PC was pretty poor value for money, underpowered and expensive to produce, a second option might have been to work on a new architecture, possibly with IBM's rivals. Bob Harp didn't suggest that, and I don't blame him.
But in the end, they didn't just reject Bob Harp's solution, they rejected Bob Harp's recognition there was a problem. They stuck with S-100+CP/M. They even tried S-100+CP/M+MSDOS. They couldn't even accept there was a problem.
I used to think that too. Things that made me realize it wasn't really pro-women, although we're certainly not the worst industry out there:
1. I kept concentrating on how my employers generally employed a small number of really talented female software engineers. Of course, this is the wrong way to look at it: the question is how many women equal in incompetence to our worst male engineers were we employing? If we're only employing the most talented women, and an average bunch of men, then we're requiring women adhere to higher standards than men, and raising the bar accordingly.
I've actually met a grand total of one godawful would-rather-write-the-same-stupid-code-ten-times-than-use-a-loop type female developer in my entire career. Every female dev I've known other than her was far, far, above average for the team male and female as a whole. I've lost count of the number of male developers who are that abysmal.
2. Developers rarely think in terms of management, so it's easy to forget such career paths exist, but men generally were having an easier time of getting into management at every place I've worked compared to women. Women could get to low level positions, but would be immediately labeled "difficult" even if they did exactly the same thing as male equivalents. Rarely would they rise any further. This may afflict other fields, but it's definitely a major problem in tech for some reason, and I'm not seeing it so much in non-tech departments.
3. Sexism, when it happens, tends to get... not ignored, so much as not dealt with. It's assumed that if the woman victimized by it is smiling, dealing with it, and getting her work done, that it's being handled. I've seen a very talented female Oracle specialist treated abusively by her team leader who seemed - in both his work and personal life - to have real problems with women. I noticed. Friends of his that were friends of mine noticed. Our boss noticed. Was anything done? Well, y'know, she's great, look at how she doesn't take shit from him (like we'd know), and that guy's unfireable, he's the only one who knows how the MAJOR_CLIENT database works...
4. You never notice systematic discrimination, frequently because it's entirely unintentional and done for the best reasons. I've interviewed normally for precisely one job in my life, my first. Word of mouth got me my other jobs. The word of mouth circuit seems harmless and perhaps even positive, after all, education and experience written on paper is rarely as informative as an actual "Yeah, I've worked with this guy, he's a miracle worker", "Nah, this one writes spaghetti you'll be maintaining for years afterwards."
The problem is the word-of-mouth network is actually a negative to any group that isn't part of the dominant social group in a particular industry. People recommend the people they know who'll do a good job, but they think first of people in that category that are friends, that they've had a chance to get to know on every level.
In conclusion, TL;DR and all that, determining whether an industry is women friendly or not takes rather more than a general feeling about the general attitude. Oh I know you don't personally intend to harm the career of any woman simply because she is one. But the system you're a part of might mean her career faces more hurdles than yours anyway.
1. Can you please, in a Slashdot Q&A, please confirm something deeply personal in public?
2. A question that's essentially marketing tips, and not hard hitting at all
3. A question that's (mostly - see last part of this comment) reasonable, and that actually she hasn't shied away from at all - she's actually publicly talked about the models being of inappropriate shapes on her Twitter feed, apologizing for it, and confirming all the characters are being redesigned. BTW though, did you seriously describe those characters as sexualized? I mean, seriously. Have you looked at them? You think anyone's sticking posters those up above their beds to masturbate to? That's not the objection...
4. Are you still beating your wife?
And you think it's a conspiracy that these ended up being modded down or not answered?
Oh I know people who were buying computers that were bundled with CP/M as their primary operating system in 1990. Amstrad made a lot of them. But the S-100 + CP/M combination was dead before 1983. Successful CP/M machines post 1981 were essentially devices that eschewed S-100, and were built at low cost using CP/M for its low resource usage to fulfill particular niches.
I think there's a mix of subjects people are talking about here. The GP references Commodore starting a price war circa 1983, which is right, and would have driven down the prices of pretty much all personal computers at that time.
That said... while there were CP/M machines in 1983, they were a dying breed. New S-100 designs were no longer the province of anything other than minor enthusiast supporting businesses. CP/M itself ran on machines like those produced by the two companies you mention, but largely because those were a way to get a cheap portable business machine out the door, at a time when PC compatibility was new and seen as expensive to develop and unlikely to result in a technically successful product.
My reference to Commodore wasn't the price war, but because it too was an example of engineers knowing better than management, with management simply controlled by their own inflated egos. I think Commodore might have survived to the present day (albeit it's hard to imagine a successor to the Amiga that lives up to the latter in the same way as a Mac OS X machine lives up to a Macintosh) had management been willing to listen to its engineers, brought in good marketing, and put into production the utterly awesome machines they had all ready to go.
Absolutely. What Bob said wasn't radical in any way, and management still ignored it. They insisted to the end on producing S-100 based systems, albeit the last model at least was capable, hamfistedly, of also running MS DOS (it wasn't PC compatible however.) Management made no serious attempt to change course or recognize that their entire product line was obsolete, despite it being obvious at the time, and despite their most senior engineers telling them this, and advising them of their capabilities.
Bob Harp (Vector's founding and leading engineer) wasn't simply talking about cloning though, he was essentially telling management:
1. They could product something broadly compatible, they knew how. (The part you picked up on but the important bit was capabilities not direction)
2. The IBM PC announcement meant the S-100 bus was now both technically and from a business point of view obsolete, and thus their entire product line was essentially obsolete.
(2) is the critical one. Bob Harp wasn't just doing some market research here, S-100 was a long-in-the-tooth architecture that was far from leading edge. It was overly expensive to build S-100 based systems, it required substantial computer knowledge from users if they wanted to take advantage of its supposed advantages, and it genuinely didn't offer any advantages over, say, the Apple or IBM approach of a primary motherboard with secondary functionality implemented as plug-in cards. Worse, S-100 had a shelf life, that it was well past. Boards implemented bus widths and clock rates that conformed to standards set in the mid seventies.
If Lore Harp had said "OK, well, maybe we can make a superior third architecture", then yeah, the dismissal of the first point might be easier to take. But Lore Harp apparently refused to listen to Bob Harp's concerns expressed in (2) because LH apparently felt she knew the market better than BH, despite Bob Harp's advice being rather obviously correct on every factual level.
It sounds like a somewhat familiar story to most people in tech: the engineers put out decent work and have a decent idea of what's possible and necessary, but are increasingly sidelined by a management that's far too egotistical to believe anyone else might know more than they do, and far too fawned upon to realize that.
See also: Commodore, a far bigger tragedy (S-100 was the Wintel platform of its day, it was never that great a tragedy that it was supplanted by the PC. Commodore, OTOH, was where the innovation was happening. *sigh*)
Actually I'm pretty sure circletimesquare was discussing factors that lead to age discrimination, including the fact that longish term maternity leave exists, but longish term paternity leave mostly doesn't, which, given the preponderance of men in running tech, means few of those running tech have experience of age discrimination.
Which is a reasonable and related thing to discuss. Whereas your whine about "SJWs" has nothing to do with the topic at hand. It's also a fitting example for how damaging the "Shut down any discussion of topics related to diversity" mentality destroys discourse here and makes it harder for us to have an adult discussion. We can't have discussions about diversity when Slashdot posts articles about diversity, and now, apparently, we can't discuss causes of other issues if there's any hint that they may touch on a subject occasionally brought up by feminists.
circletimesquare was entirely on-topic and was making an interesting point. He did not deserve your attack.
That's a lane widening of a major Interstate passing through a couple of large cities. It's peanuts. I'd rather do Mars, but if we can get back to the moon on that kind of budget...
Yeah, I bet AMD is really expecting to rake in the zillions for being known as "That graphics card maker that makes hardware that seems to handle all games really poorly except {hidden whitelist}."
It's not linked to karma, at least, not significantly. The algorithm uses a number of factors, including your overall meta moderation score (and, oddly enough, meta moderating is itself a factor - if you meta moderate regularly you're more likely to be picked.) At one point Malda also included - and it may still be there - logic based upon how frequently you visit Slashdot, trying to avoid either picking rare visitors or heavy visitors, to moderate.
If you have 50 karma, I can say from experience you're no more likely to get moderation privileges than if you have 25. In fact, the very behavior that got you to 50 in the first place is likely to count against you. It's designed that way because Malda didn't want groupthink to be an issue.
It's not perfect, there's a lot of bad moderation going on, but I can't fault what Malda was trying to achieve.
No, your point is wrong because the only people who have the legal right to do it are terrible at doing so. That is, the police regularly kill harmless mentally ill people they've been asked to detain for their own protection.
Look, it's four hours, and after that the patient has to be released or law enforcement involved (to assess, not to kill.) If a doctor starts using that already weak power abusively, they'll find themselves seeing LE's bad side. It's a good idea. Lives will be saved, and the system is difficult to abuse.
I don't want my PC to ever reboot without my permission. I would have no problem with the Windows Update system if it never needed to. It's rare I ever need to "reboot" (that is, kill my desktop and start afresh - which is what I'm really opposed to) my Ubuntu desktop - kernel updates are rarely important, and X server updates happen from time to time but not frequently enough to be a problem.
I didn't miss it actually, it's something I thought was blatantly obvious. Law enforcement evaluating the situation after four hours is an entirely reasonable thing to do. And law enforcement is going to mighty pissed if a doctor keeps detaining patients abusively.
The situation right now is when patients start having obvious problems (not even anti-social ones, just leaving their families supervision, for example, when they've demonstrated they can't take care of themselves) that law enforcement gets called immediately, with frequently devastating results. Police aren't trained to handle mentally ill people, and often misjudge the situation and resort to lethal force.
That is, the police kill mentally ill people on a regular basis.
Having a doctor be the first line of patient defense is fundamentally a good idea. The doctor has a chance to evaluate the situation, to calm down the patient, and ensure the situation is safe before police are involved.
The police are already called in on a regular basis to deal with patients whose guardians (be that family or whatever) have lost control of them, and frequently this has deadly results as handling psychiatric patients isn't something law enforcement does well or are trained to do. Substituting medical professionals, and having a four hour limit to prevent abuse, seems a fairly big improvement on the status quo.
I initially agreed with you, but then saw that they were talking only about the ability to detain a patient for a maximum of four hours. That seems reasonable, and unlikely to be seriously abused.
Poor people who live in the sticks are also screwed. And if you moved to an area where Google is running this program, you can get faster Internet from Google than the "charity cases" you're complaining about - AND you get the ability to not worry about whether you'll have food and shelter next week, or worrying about risks like having to spend a week in prison for not paying a traffic ticket.
What's your point?
Your life is good. Enjoy it. Don't envy those with less than you.
Slashdot Mirror
You are aware that Brianna Wu has nothing whatsoever to do with Gawker, right?
In fairness, Word is merely a program that displays a mixture of text and graphics, that can be formatted in numerous ways, with or without style sheets, viewable on a variety of different media types, with a turing complete scripting language that's capable of controlling every facet of how each document is viewed, including interacting with the user via forms, and modifying the document on the fly.
Whereas a web browser also has to be able to download those documents via HTTP, which totally justifies it needing several hundred times as much memory.
I think he most certainly did recognize that CP/M was on the way out. And as for CP/M (or rather, CP/M + S-100) being used to differentiate themselves, that never happened. Never. Vector Graphics' selling point was that it produced standardized hardware. It had many rivals, all of whom produced machines identical on architecture to their's, varying by style, bundled hardware modules, and bundled software. Their hardware was never a source of differentiation. They could have rebadged Northstar's products and nobody would even have noticed.
In 1980, S-100 + CP/M was Intel + Windows today. Vector Graphics was a Dell or HP of the time, not an Apple.
Vector Graphics didn't differentiate themselves by producing new innovative hardware. They marketed themselves to businesses in a way that other makers of virtually identical hardware, from Altair to Northstar, weren't as savvy with.
IBM's involvement changed the standard from S-100 to the PC. Bob Harp saw that and suggested producing a PC compatible. That would have been one solution. It might have worked. Given that even at the time, the PC was pretty poor value for money, underpowered and expensive to produce, a second option might have been to work on a new architecture, possibly with IBM's rivals. Bob Harp didn't suggest that, and I don't blame him.
But in the end, they didn't just reject Bob Harp's solution, they rejected Bob Harp's recognition there was a problem. They stuck with S-100+CP/M. They even tried S-100+CP/M+MSDOS. They couldn't even accept there was a problem.
Plus, seriously, who is idiotic enough to keep their phone in their rear pants pockets anyway? Some of us sit down once in a while...
I used to think that too. Things that made me realize it wasn't really pro-women, although we're certainly not the worst industry out there:
1. I kept concentrating on how my employers generally employed a small number of really talented female software engineers. Of course, this is the wrong way to look at it: the question is how many women equal in incompetence to our worst male engineers were we employing? If we're only employing the most talented women, and an average bunch of men, then we're requiring women adhere to higher standards than men, and raising the bar accordingly.
I've actually met a grand total of one godawful would-rather-write-the-same-stupid-code-ten-times-than-use-a-loop type female developer in my entire career. Every female dev I've known other than her was far, far, above average for the team male and female as a whole. I've lost count of the number of male developers who are that abysmal.
2. Developers rarely think in terms of management, so it's easy to forget such career paths exist, but men generally were having an easier time of getting into management at every place I've worked compared to women. Women could get to low level positions, but would be immediately labeled "difficult" even if they did exactly the same thing as male equivalents. Rarely would they rise any further. This may afflict other fields, but it's definitely a major problem in tech for some reason, and I'm not seeing it so much in non-tech departments.
3. Sexism, when it happens, tends to get... not ignored, so much as not dealt with. It's assumed that if the woman victimized by it is smiling, dealing with it, and getting her work done, that it's being handled. I've seen a very talented female Oracle specialist treated abusively by her team leader who seemed - in both his work and personal life - to have real problems with women. I noticed. Friends of his that were friends of mine noticed. Our boss noticed. Was anything done? Well, y'know, she's great, look at how she doesn't take shit from him (like we'd know), and that guy's unfireable, he's the only one who knows how the MAJOR_CLIENT database works...
4. You never notice systematic discrimination, frequently because it's entirely unintentional and done for the best reasons. I've interviewed normally for precisely one job in my life, my first. Word of mouth got me my other jobs. The word of mouth circuit seems harmless and perhaps even positive, after all, education and experience written on paper is rarely as informative as an actual "Yeah, I've worked with this guy, he's a miracle worker", "Nah, this one writes spaghetti you'll be maintaining for years afterwards."
The problem is the word-of-mouth network is actually a negative to any group that isn't part of the dominant social group in a particular industry. People recommend the people they know who'll do a good job, but they think first of people in that category that are friends, that they've had a chance to get to know on every level.
In conclusion, TL;DR and all that, determining whether an industry is women friendly or not takes rather more than a general feeling about the general attitude. Oh I know you don't personally intend to harm the career of any woman simply because she is one. But the system you're a part of might mean her career faces more hurdles than yours anyway.
So the questions are:
1. Can you please, in a Slashdot Q&A, please confirm something deeply personal in public?
2. A question that's essentially marketing tips, and not hard hitting at all
3. A question that's (mostly - see last part of this comment) reasonable, and that actually she hasn't shied away from at all - she's actually publicly talked about the models being of inappropriate shapes on her Twitter feed, apologizing for it, and confirming all the characters are being redesigned. BTW though, did you seriously describe those characters as sexualized? I mean, seriously. Have you looked at them? You think anyone's sticking posters those up above their beds to masturbate to? That's not the objection...
4. Are you still beating your wife?
And you think it's a conspiracy that these ended up being modded down or not answered?
Oh I know people who were buying computers that were bundled with CP/M as their primary operating system in 1990. Amstrad made a lot of them. But the S-100 + CP/M combination was dead before 1983. Successful CP/M machines post 1981 were essentially devices that eschewed S-100, and were built at low cost using CP/M for its low resource usage to fulfill particular niches.
I think there's a mix of subjects people are talking about here. The GP references Commodore starting a price war circa 1983, which is right, and would have driven down the prices of pretty much all personal computers at that time.
That said... while there were CP/M machines in 1983, they were a dying breed. New S-100 designs were no longer the province of anything other than minor enthusiast supporting businesses. CP/M itself ran on machines like those produced by the two companies you mention, but largely because those were a way to get a cheap portable business machine out the door, at a time when PC compatibility was new and seen as expensive to develop and unlikely to result in a technically successful product.
My reference to Commodore wasn't the price war, but because it too was an example of engineers knowing better than management, with management simply controlled by their own inflated egos. I think Commodore might have survived to the present day (albeit it's hard to imagine a successor to the Amiga that lives up to the latter in the same way as a Mac OS X machine lives up to a Macintosh) had management been willing to listen to its engineers, brought in good marketing, and put into production the utterly awesome machines they had all ready to go.
Seconded.
Absolutely. What Bob said wasn't radical in any way, and management still ignored it. They insisted to the end on producing S-100 based systems, albeit the last model at least was capable, hamfistedly, of also running MS DOS (it wasn't PC compatible however.) Management made no serious attempt to change course or recognize that their entire product line was obsolete, despite it being obvious at the time, and despite their most senior engineers telling them this, and advising them of their capabilities.
Were you hoping it would be the plumber or the pizza delivery guy?
Bob Harp (Vector's founding and leading engineer) wasn't simply talking about cloning though, he was essentially telling management:
1. They could product something broadly compatible, they knew how. (The part you picked up on but the important bit was capabilities not direction)
2. The IBM PC announcement meant the S-100 bus was now both technically and from a business point of view obsolete, and thus their entire product line was essentially obsolete.
(2) is the critical one. Bob Harp wasn't just doing some market research here, S-100 was a long-in-the-tooth architecture that was far from leading edge. It was overly expensive to build S-100 based systems, it required substantial computer knowledge from users if they wanted to take advantage of its supposed advantages, and it genuinely didn't offer any advantages over, say, the Apple or IBM approach of a primary motherboard with secondary functionality implemented as plug-in cards. Worse, S-100 had a shelf life, that it was well past. Boards implemented bus widths and clock rates that conformed to standards set in the mid seventies.
If Lore Harp had said "OK, well, maybe we can make a superior third architecture", then yeah, the dismissal of the first point might be easier to take. But Lore Harp apparently refused to listen to Bob Harp's concerns expressed in (2) because LH apparently felt she knew the market better than BH, despite Bob Harp's advice being rather obviously correct on every factual level.
Interesting contemporary commentary here.
It sounds like a somewhat familiar story to most people in tech: the engineers put out decent work and have a decent idea of what's possible and necessary, but are increasingly sidelined by a management that's far too egotistical to believe anyone else might know more than they do, and far too fawned upon to realize that.
See also: Commodore, a far bigger tragedy (S-100 was the Wintel platform of its day, it was never that great a tragedy that it was supplanted by the PC. Commodore, OTOH, was where the innovation was happening. *sigh*)
Actually I'm pretty sure circletimesquare was discussing factors that lead to age discrimination, including the fact that longish term maternity leave exists, but longish term paternity leave mostly doesn't, which, given the preponderance of men in running tech, means few of those running tech have experience of age discrimination.
Which is a reasonable and related thing to discuss. Whereas your whine about "SJWs" has nothing to do with the topic at hand. It's also a fitting example for how damaging the "Shut down any discussion of topics related to diversity" mentality destroys discourse here and makes it harder for us to have an adult discussion. We can't have discussions about diversity when Slashdot posts articles about diversity, and now, apparently, we can't discuss causes of other issues if there's any hint that they may touch on a subject occasionally brought up by feminists.
circletimesquare was entirely on-topic and was making an interesting point. He did not deserve your attack.
That's a lane widening of a major Interstate passing through a couple of large cities. It's peanuts. I'd rather do Mars, but if we can get back to the moon on that kind of budget...
Yeah, I bet AMD is really expecting to rake in the zillions for being known as "That graphics card maker that makes hardware that seems to handle all games really poorly except {hidden whitelist}."
Violence is a basic instinct in animal nature too.
It's not linked to karma, at least, not significantly. The algorithm uses a number of factors, including your overall meta moderation score (and, oddly enough, meta moderating is itself a factor - if you meta moderate regularly you're more likely to be picked.) At one point Malda also included - and it may still be there - logic based upon how frequently you visit Slashdot, trying to avoid either picking rare visitors or heavy visitors, to moderate.
If you have 50 karma, I can say from experience you're no more likely to get moderation privileges than if you have 25. In fact, the very behavior that got you to 50 in the first place is likely to count against you. It's designed that way because Malda didn't want groupthink to be an issue.
It's not perfect, there's a lot of bad moderation going on, but I can't fault what Malda was trying to achieve.
No, your point is wrong because the only people who have the legal right to do it are terrible at doing so. That is, the police regularly kill harmless mentally ill people they've been asked to detain for their own protection.
Look, it's four hours, and after that the patient has to be released or law enforcement involved (to assess, not to kill.) If a doctor starts using that already weak power abusively, they'll find themselves seeing LE's bad side. It's a good idea. Lives will be saved, and the system is difficult to abuse.
I don't want my PC to ever reboot without my permission. I would have no problem with the Windows Update system if it never needed to. It's rare I ever need to "reboot" (that is, kill my desktop and start afresh - which is what I'm really opposed to) my Ubuntu desktop - kernel updates are rarely important, and X server updates happen from time to time but not frequently enough to be a problem.
I didn't miss it actually, it's something I thought was blatantly obvious. Law enforcement evaluating the situation after four hours is an entirely reasonable thing to do. And law enforcement is going to mighty pissed if a doctor keeps detaining patients abusively.
The situation right now is when patients start having obvious problems (not even anti-social ones, just leaving their families supervision, for example, when they've demonstrated they can't take care of themselves) that law enforcement gets called immediately, with frequently devastating results. Police aren't trained to handle mentally ill people, and often misjudge the situation and resort to lethal force.
That is, the police kill mentally ill people on a regular basis.
Having a doctor be the first line of patient defense is fundamentally a good idea. The doctor has a chance to evaluate the situation, to calm down the patient, and ensure the situation is safe before police are involved.
The Baker Act would already give them that fear.
The police are already called in on a regular basis to deal with patients whose guardians (be that family or whatever) have lost control of them, and frequently this has deadly results as handling psychiatric patients isn't something law enforcement does well or are trained to do. Substituting medical professionals, and having a four hour limit to prevent abuse, seems a fairly big improvement on the status quo.
I initially agreed with you, but then saw that they were talking only about the ability to detain a patient for a maximum of four hours. That seems reasonable, and unlikely to be seriously abused.
That's cool, because I've been signed into Google Hangouts using MS Paint now all day.
Poor people who live in the sticks are also screwed. And if you moved to an area where Google is running this program, you can get faster Internet from Google than the "charity cases" you're complaining about - AND you get the ability to not worry about whether you'll have food and shelter next week, or worrying about risks like having to spend a week in prison for not paying a traffic ticket.
What's your point?
Your life is good. Enjoy it. Don't envy those with less than you.