I'm sure a full investigation will be conducted, and they'll identify deficiencies in the CenturyLink infrastructure that must be immediately fixed through a government subsidy.
I chatted with a few guys from the Bonneville Power Administration over in Portland. They're absolutely paranoid about this -- and with good reason.
When you start drifting from the set frequency, it's an indication that you are under or oversupplying the grid. This leads to instability, which can lead to damage on a massive scale. They don't care about setting your clock correctly; they're worried about damaging the generators at all of their plants.
I wondered how they activate plants; after all, it's likely that the generators will be out of phase and wreak havoc when attached, right? Turns out, not so much. They do try to get it roughly in line, but the phase on the line quickly steers the generators into sync.
I bought a $20 alarm clock from Walmart something like 4 years ago that has radio Atomic Time sync. I haven't looked around lately, but I would think more clocks would have this feature these days since it should be even cheaper now that it was back then. It doesn't even plug in, just throw 4 AA batts in it every ~2.5 years.
Few do, because the number of additional parts adds a few cents to the cost (on an item that probably costs 40 cents to manufacture).
I do have a couple in my house, but they can't pick up WWVB indoors. I check after each DST switchover, grumble, put it outside for a few hours, then see that it's magically synced itself. I'm not sure if it's because they're cheap (they're ~$30 weather stations), if my house blocks signals too much, the terrain (picking up radio, TV, and cell signals is also exceedingly difficult), or my neck of the woods (Pacific Northwest).
I picked up a third one from Fry's that claims to never need to be set. Being curious about this claim, I took it apart; it just has a few coin cells in a hidden compartment. No radio.
Like, let's build 5 space stations, and bombard the moon and Mars with rockets until we acheive perfection?
Not a bad vision -- perhaps a touch wasteful of money and then some -- but the ISS doesn't help us here.
Just to put this in perspective, the moon is roughly 400,000 km (~ 250,000 miles) from Earth. By comparison, the ISS's altitude is 424 km (263 miles). This is like driving from San Diego to Boston and taking your first rest stop in Balboa Park. If we're talking Mars instead, that stop might be just beyond your neighbor's house (118 feet).
The ISS looks cool -- as do most multi-billion dollar construction projects -- but from a science and engineering standpoint we learned nothing by building or operating it.
I would love to see more spaceflight, but the next meaningful step has to be beyond Earth's gravity well. That means accelerating beyond the escape velocity, 11.2 km/s (40.3 km/h). We've come close, but in the wrong direction: Apollo 10's reentry speed (the fastest a human has ever gone) was 39,897 km/h. Personally, I think it would be interesting next step to put a human in the Earth's orbital path around the sun, but in the opposite direction. This gives you roughly six months to experiment and play, with recapture onto Earth almost guaranteed by gravity. This is more daunting than it sounds. You need to escape Earth's gravity (11.2 km/s), then achieve a velocity that gives you an orbit around the sun that doesn't decay (30 km/s), for a total velocity ("delta-v") of 41.2 km/s. Oh, and then you have to decelerate as you approach Earth.
I think the "this" refers to "shipping an obviously untested product."
Part of the problem is that we (collectively) just don't get how complex software is. Sure, a good software engineer who sits down and thinks through the implications of a change will do so, but in the modern rush to market that's a rare happening. In this case, I'm guessing something like the following happened:
"Hey, we're getting usability reports about widgets accidentally being double tapped while an app is being swapped in. What can we do to fix this?"
"We would need to do this in the UIKit. Maybe some visual indication it's been tapped with a lockout period?"
"Ok, great. We need this by next Friday to get it into the next iOS build."
"That's tight, but we'll manage."
Builds, tests... "Ok, let's see what apps use this. Calculator..." tapping deliberately "Right, looks good, results are correct. Ready to ship."
That said, much as we (software engineers) don't like it, there's something to be said for shipping quickly and, sometimes, before things are ready. Users reward this behavior, and shipping quickly can mean the difference between a product or company that succeeds vs. one that fails. The saying is "you can't shine shit," but I've seen countless examples otherwise (and the Mythbusters disproved this in, well, a literal sense). I hate it; despite it, in fact. Push back against it. But it's hard to argue when there's a throng of consumers ready to spend their money on it.
So, we're relegated to having to be judicious in what we push back against. Is it safety critical? Will someone get maimed or killed by this? If it's running on an iPhone, the answer is probably no. For Apple here, the main result is a bit of embarrassment -- a calculator that seems to give wacky results. A civil engineer using this for estimating should see this kind of issue immediately (and is unlikely to use the iOS calculator for final documents). Someone trying to split their restaurant bill, maybe not, it's an acceptable risk. The Excel 2007 multiplication bug was probably more serious because that's an application that is more likely to be used in civil engineering. If you're writing software that could lethally irradiate someone and encounter shady practices, immediately raise flags and alert everyone who will listen.
Ok, so we're not going to manually test everything on a smart phone before a new OS is released. What can we do? Push for more automation. Making aesthetic judgements automatically might still be a bit difficult, but we ought to be able to simulate key misregistrations. A quick check would be to do this in software to see the effect of a change while you're hacking away on your laptop, but a robot providing millions of taps and swipes on actual hardware would be even more insightful.
This would be daunting for most startups trying to make the next Zynbookwitter on shoestring VC funding, but child's play for the likes of Apple or Google.
As mentioned previously, I work for AWS, but I'm speaking personally here.
I'm not sure where this idea of "run them for less than fifteen minutes each, terminate them after the jobs run, and not have to pay for CPU time" has come from; this is the first I've heard of it. To my knowledge, this has never been the case. Currently usage from 0-59.999... minutes is billed as 1 instance-hour; 60.0-119.999... as 2 instance-hours; etc. Starting October 2, you will be billed by the second (with a 1 minute minimum). This should be a cost savings for everyone who's currently running on-demand instances.
There is a free tier for new accounts, in which you get 750 instance-hours of t2.micro usage (on Amazon Linux, RHEL, SLES, or Windows) free. However, if you run for 14 minutes (say), that still counts today as 1 instance-hour; there's no magic 15 minute cutoff.
Let's say you had a batch job that ran for 12 minutes, 4x/day, on Amazon Linux on a c4.large instance in the Oregon region ($0.100/instance-hour). Before this change, you would have paid $12.20/month (4 instance-hours/day x 30.5 days/month x $0.100/instance-hour). Starting October 2, you will pay $2.44/month (0.8 instance-hours/day x 30.5 days/month x $0.100/instance-hour).
AWS believes that cloud computing is going to be a high volume, relatively low margin business, and Amazon is very comfortable with these types of businesses. AWS has had (as of this writing) 62 price reductions in the last 9 years, largely in the absence of any competitive pressure. (And, since I pay for my personal usage -- no, we don't get a free lunch here! -- that's kept me happy as a customer.) Internally, it's a relentlessly customer-obsessed culture -- you can (and I have!) stopped a VP mid-speech by saying, "Wait, I don't think that's the right thing for the customer!" (We're also a very data-driven culture, so you're expected to have data to support this, of course.:-) )
Hope this helps clear up some of the confusion. Note that there are some cases where billing will continue to be per-hour (or fraction thereof), such as marketplace usage -- Jeff Barr's blog post has all the details.
One potential flaw in this mechanism: I think a malware image can prevent rolling back to a known-good image by setting the rollback indexes to ridiculously high value, say 2147483647 (2**31-1).
This diagram shows how the workflow is supposed to proceed. If Mallory gets her verification key onto your device (either by social engineering or another flaw), then her custom malware image can be booted by the device in locked mode. The user will get a warning about this being a custom OS (good!), but then the rollback index values in Mallory's image are written to the stored rollback index values (bad!). If I then attempt to go back to Oreo 8.0, it won't let me.
A better mechanism would be to have a set of stored rollback index values per verification key, not a global set per device. Then I could roll back to the stock factory image from a Mallory's malware image.
The 2008 Supreme Court decision in Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc., arguably leaves unclear the extent to which patentees can avoid the exhaustion doctrine by means of so-called limited licenses (...) At least two district courts have concluded that Mallinckrodt is no longer good law after Quanta.
It's bizarre that the case has made it this far. The Mallinckrodt ruling has been consistently invalidated at the district level; the US Federal Circuit continues to uphold it, though. SCOTUS had a chance to invalidate it earlier when it overturned the Federal Circuit's decision on Quanta, but sidestepped the whole Mallinckrodt issue.
I'm guessing the $3 price is in volume (10k or 100k+). There are a number of eBay listings under $3, but I wouldn't rely on eBay as a steady supply stream or for good documentation and support.
Whose idea was to choose an interpreted language for the extremely slow 8-bit home computers?
Because fitting a compiler into the tight memory constraints was next to impossible. The BASIC ROM on the C64 was 8 kB; per Wikipedia, this is what forced Commodore to revert to v2.0 BASIC, which lacked even disk directory listing commands (remember LOAD "$", 8 and how it would clobber whatever you had in memory?).
Applesoft BASIC, which had these features, used 10k of ROM by comparison. Apple's earlier Integer BASIC was about the same size, but gave up floating-point support.
BASIC made it easy for beginners (like myself) to get something working. If Commodore had only included an assembler, for example, this would have been too steep of a learning curve for most folks and they would likely have bought something else that did have an interpreter. That said, anyone writing "real" programs wrote them in assembly; you had to resort to extreme tricks to get decent graphics on these systems. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Racing the Beam, which documents all the trickery that programmers for the Atari 2600 (which had weirder hardware but still was 65xx-based) had to resort to in order to make even halfway decent games.
Makes you wonder what type of constraints they were working under to come up with a solutions like [the power switch rod]...
If memory serves, this was to meet UL certification rules. For some reason, line voltage was not allowed to cross the case to the switch. That said, my first PC was a whitebox clone that completely violated these rules, so don't be surprised if your no-name PC from that era also lacked the Rube Goldberg rod linkage.
The ATX form factor solved this by using a low voltage signal to control the power supply -- the wires crisscrossing the case for this carry no more than 5V (with a large series resistance). Shorting that to ground turns the power supply on; this (plus a 5V standby signal powering a small supervisor microcontroller) is how your motherboard can control the power to the system.
Increasingly, no. Many sports are switching to subscription channels (ESPN, Fox Sports, Root Sports, CNBC/MSNBC, etc.) with limited or no legal options for streaming. MLB is there today and has a decent product; Olympics are ok; NFL is pretty much absent. I'm not sure about the NBA or NHL.
Most of the channels I can receive over the air (networks) don't carry much of interest to anyone in my household. But we watched so little TV that we went ahead and got rid of cable anyway. I did subscribe to MLB.tv, though (and am much happier than what we had from basic cable since I can now watch the teams of interest to me).
I suspect cable companies will be in trouble should the NFL decide to start streaming their games. I doubt this will happen, though; they're getting a ton of money from ESPN to stay right where they are (and most folks are resigned to just keep paying for cable to watch NFL games).
However, if I reach that limit I'm pretty sure I can pick it up like every other programming or markup language that I've needed.
Unfortunately, this is only sort of true. The basic syntax is easily learnable and readable -- certainly easier than mentally parsing most regular expressions.
But, oh god, does CSS have a ton of implicit modes. Are your sizes content box or border box? Is this div we're positioning being displayed as a block, inline, or inline-block element? Is there a float active? Has it been cleared? Did we duplicate the appropriate styles with -webkit- and -ms-? Why is it working in Firefox but not Chrome?...
Layouts that would be a simple command in Tk (button.foo; pack.foo -expand both -fill 1) end up being head scratchers.
The purists then snootily point out, "Well, your problem is you're trying to build a GUI from a markup language." Fine, then: Give me a freaking proper GUI toolkit already. I'm reminded of Jamie Zawinski's quote (though he was referring to XWindows): Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.
So when you plug in a cable, the logo on the top is always correct. When it is a sideways plug, you are on your own.:)
I have a few cables which violate this spec (despite the USB spec being quite clear on this point). I'm not sure if it's a manufacturing error (cable assemblies sent to the molding process upside-down) or the manufacturer just being egotistical ("We want our logo to be visible to the user"). Western Digital, I'm looking at you...
I really ought to toss them (along with my collection of USB 1.1 cables and hubs).
I have a FTA system which is half setup, cobbled together from some spare parts plus a new receiver and LNBF.
The terrain near my house has proven to be unfriendly. I live on the west side of Puget Sound, so the satellites are already fairly close to the horizon. We're in a old-growth forest area; most of the trees around my house are around the 100' mark. We're just on the other side of a few hills which block antenna reception from any of the local networks, hence my tinkering with FTA equipment.
Even so, Satellite AR shows that I should just be able to pick up AMC 6 which has the NBC feeds. Alas, despite a few hours of trying, I haven't been able to get a signal.
Why not DOS 6.22? They're not making a bundle on that, either.
Distributing the source code to a proprietary product has a number of potential legal hurdles. If there are parts of the source which were licensed from another company (as would be the case with MS-DOS and SCP, IBM, Stac, and possibly others), those agreements need to be revisited and you may need to get permission from that company (or its successors) to do so. (I include IBM because, I believe, they took over much of the development for the 4.x series.)
MS-DOS 2.x might be the latest version they (currently) feel confident in being able to release free of these restrictions.
This brings a different kind of problem, which is that there becomes a whole new management level of keeping the two groups in sync. Otherwise, the "Canonical Labs" group might run off and do all kinds of things that are great, but which never get integrated into the main project.
But PARC was so successful! Oh, wait...;-)
Your point is well taken. I believe it's a problem they already have, though: the Mir slip, shipping Unity before it was really ready, etc. Reorganizing -- even if it's done purely in Shuttleworth's mind and not on paper -- would bring these issues to the forefront.
I've found (as a rule of thumb) that, when asking a grad student "How much time do you think you have left before you can write up your thesis?", if the answer is two or more years out then it really means "I don't know." The student honestly believes this answer, but in reality he/she doesn't know how much he/she doesn't know.
I'm starting to feel about the same with Mir and Canonical here. Shuttleworth is the tenured but aloof professor who casually coaxes his students (employees) toward completing milestones but without too much urgency. Money's not plentiful, but the professor has enough contacts and contracts to keep his lab going and give a stipend to his students. They put out a few papers (releases) each year, and each time the students think this grand project is "almost done"... only to discover that there's still more left to do.
There's tremendous value in this kind of exploratory research. I'm just not sure it makes sense to package it up for end users.
If I were Mark Shuttleworth's technical advisor, I'd suggest examining RedHat's Fedora model. Create a small group called Canonical Labs where stuff like Mir and Unity can flourish, with continuous releases and without the artificial constraint of a set release date. (If this makes the environment too lackadaisical and development isn't progressing fast enough, find some other way to instill discipline and/or motivation; don't make it the threat of moving alpha code to end-users.) When it's stabilized (no longer shuffling menus and window icons around, for example), then integrate it with the main Ubuntu branch. Something a bit more edgy and up-to-date than Debian Stable or RHEL, but not so much that it constantly upends your users.
How are we going to arrest people on frivolous charges when movies are streamed? I suppose we could make it a felony to fail to rewind a stream when you're done viewing it...
I've know a lot of really food engineering managers.
Obviously you meant "good" here, but it made me pause: is there a correlation between food and good managers? I've been reading more than a handful of materials (e.g. Peopleware) which have mentioned eating together as a helping to build strong teams (arguably the most important job of a manager). A number of companies have caught on, from the big (like Google) to startups (one of my favorites, The Omni Group here in Seattle even has a full-time kitchen staff who are listed by name on their about us page).
Obviously, it's not a catch-all solution; heck, I suspect it's more correlation (that is, the managers who get their teams to eat together are more likely to care about their teams) than causation. But still gave me a pause.
Japanese companies [...] genuinely want to know how to make the business better by finding out how people actually work.
Their website actually bears this out. The good use of this technology will map out how well teams are communicating (which can sometimes make or break a project). We say that inter-team communication is good, and sometimes have meetings to this effect; but this can show whether the company is practicing what it preaches.
Alas, I share the same concerns as the naysayers. I highly doubt this would be used by any American company in a way other than to penalize individual workers for brief moments of inactivity.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sure a full investigation will be conducted, and they'll identify deficiencies in the CenturyLink infrastructure that must be immediately fixed through a government subsidy.
I chatted with a few guys from the Bonneville Power Administration over in Portland. They're absolutely paranoid about this -- and with good reason.
When you start drifting from the set frequency, it's an indication that you are under or oversupplying the grid. This leads to instability, which can lead to damage on a massive scale. They don't care about setting your clock correctly; they're worried about damaging the generators at all of their plants.
I wondered how they activate plants; after all, it's likely that the generators will be out of phase and wreak havoc when attached, right? Turns out, not so much. They do try to get it roughly in line, but the phase on the line quickly steers the generators into sync.
I bought a $20 alarm clock from Walmart something like 4 years ago that has radio Atomic Time sync. I haven't looked around lately, but I would think more clocks would have this feature these days since it should be even cheaper now that it was back then. It doesn't even plug in, just throw 4 AA batts in it every ~2.5 years.
Few do, because the number of additional parts adds a few cents to the cost (on an item that probably costs 40 cents to manufacture).
I do have a couple in my house, but they can't pick up WWVB indoors. I check after each DST switchover, grumble, put it outside for a few hours, then see that it's magically synced itself. I'm not sure if it's because they're cheap (they're ~$30 weather stations), if my house blocks signals too much, the terrain (picking up radio, TV, and cell signals is also exceedingly difficult), or my neck of the woods (Pacific Northwest).
I picked up a third one from Fry's that claims to never need to be set. Being curious about this claim, I took it apart; it just has a few coin cells in a hidden compartment. No radio.
Like, let's build 5 space stations, and bombard the moon and Mars with rockets until we acheive perfection?
Not a bad vision -- perhaps a touch wasteful of money and then some -- but the ISS doesn't help us here.
Just to put this in perspective, the moon is roughly 400,000 km (~ 250,000 miles) from Earth. By comparison, the ISS's altitude is 424 km (263 miles). This is like driving from San Diego to Boston and taking your first rest stop in Balboa Park. If we're talking Mars instead, that stop might be just beyond your neighbor's house (118 feet).
The ISS looks cool -- as do most multi-billion dollar construction projects -- but from a science and engineering standpoint we learned nothing by building or operating it.
I would love to see more spaceflight, but the next meaningful step has to be beyond Earth's gravity well. That means accelerating beyond the escape velocity, 11.2 km/s (40.3 km/h). We've come close, but in the wrong direction: Apollo 10's reentry speed (the fastest a human has ever gone) was 39,897 km/h. Personally, I think it would be interesting next step to put a human in the Earth's orbital path around the sun, but in the opposite direction. This gives you roughly six months to experiment and play, with recapture onto Earth almost guaranteed by gravity. This is more daunting than it sounds. You need to escape Earth's gravity (11.2 km/s), then achieve a velocity that gives you an orbit around the sun that doesn't decay (30 km/s), for a total velocity ("delta-v") of 41.2 km/s. Oh, and then you have to decelerate as you approach Earth.
Space is so passe... Coal is the future!
Clearly, what we need to do is build a coal power plant on the ISS...
How does this happen?
It explains how it happened in the summary...
I think the "this" refers to "shipping an obviously untested product."
Part of the problem is that we (collectively) just don't get how complex software is. Sure, a good software engineer who sits down and thinks through the implications of a change will do so, but in the modern rush to market that's a rare happening. In this case, I'm guessing something like the following happened:
That said, much as we (software engineers) don't like it, there's something to be said for shipping quickly and, sometimes, before things are ready. Users reward this behavior, and shipping quickly can mean the difference between a product or company that succeeds vs. one that fails. The saying is "you can't shine shit," but I've seen countless examples otherwise (and the Mythbusters disproved this in, well, a literal sense). I hate it; despite it, in fact. Push back against it. But it's hard to argue when there's a throng of consumers ready to spend their money on it.
So, we're relegated to having to be judicious in what we push back against. Is it safety critical? Will someone get maimed or killed by this? If it's running on an iPhone, the answer is probably no. For Apple here, the main result is a bit of embarrassment -- a calculator that seems to give wacky results. A civil engineer using this for estimating should see this kind of issue immediately (and is unlikely to use the iOS calculator for final documents). Someone trying to split their restaurant bill, maybe not, it's an acceptable risk. The Excel 2007 multiplication bug was probably more serious because that's an application that is more likely to be used in civil engineering. If you're writing software that could lethally irradiate someone and encounter shady practices, immediately raise flags and alert everyone who will listen.
Ok, so we're not going to manually test everything on a smart phone before a new OS is released. What can we do? Push for more automation. Making aesthetic judgements automatically might still be a bit difficult, but we ought to be able to simulate key misregistrations. A quick check would be to do this in software to see the effect of a change while you're hacking away on your laptop, but a robot providing millions of taps and swipes on actual hardware would be even more insightful. This would be daunting for most startups trying to make the next Zynbookwitter on shoestring VC funding, but child's play for the likes of Apple or Google.
As mentioned previously, I work for AWS, but I'm speaking personally here.
I'm not sure where this idea of "run them for less than fifteen minutes each, terminate them after the jobs run, and not have to pay for CPU time" has come from; this is the first I've heard of it. To my knowledge, this has never been the case. Currently usage from 0-59.999... minutes is billed as 1 instance-hour; 60.0-119.999... as 2 instance-hours; etc. Starting October 2, you will be billed by the second (with a 1 minute minimum). This should be a cost savings for everyone who's currently running on-demand instances.
There is a free tier for new accounts, in which you get 750 instance-hours of t2.micro usage (on Amazon Linux, RHEL, SLES, or Windows) free. However, if you run for 14 minutes (say), that still counts today as 1 instance-hour; there's no magic 15 minute cutoff.
Disclaimer: I work for AWS, but I'm speaking personally here.
This will always be cheaper for on-demand users. Previously, you were charged a full hour for any fractional usage. As soon as you start an instance, you're being billed -- even a start and stop a second later counted as 1 hour. (There is a free tier: you get 750 hours/month of t2.micro usage on Linux, RHEL, SLES, or Windows, during the first 12 months.)
Let's say you had a batch job that ran for 12 minutes, 4x/day, on Amazon Linux on a c4.large instance in the Oregon region ($0.100/instance-hour). Before this change, you would have paid $12.20/month (4 instance-hours/day x 30.5 days/month x $0.100/instance-hour). Starting October 2, you will pay $2.44/month (0.8 instance-hours/day x 30.5 days/month x $0.100/instance-hour).
AWS believes that cloud computing is going to be a high volume, relatively low margin business, and Amazon is very comfortable with these types of businesses. AWS has had (as of this writing) 62 price reductions in the last 9 years, largely in the absence of any competitive pressure. (And, since I pay for my personal usage -- no, we don't get a free lunch here! -- that's kept me happy as a customer.) Internally, it's a relentlessly customer-obsessed culture -- you can (and I have!) stopped a VP mid-speech by saying, "Wait, I don't think that's the right thing for the customer!" (We're also a very data-driven culture, so you're expected to have data to support this, of course. :-) )
Hope this helps clear up some of the confusion. Note that there are some cases where billing will continue to be per-hour (or fraction thereof), such as marketplace usage -- Jeff Barr's blog post has all the details.
One potential flaw in this mechanism: I think a malware image can prevent rolling back to a known-good image by setting the rollback indexes to ridiculously high value, say 2147483647 (2**31-1).
This diagram shows how the workflow is supposed to proceed. If Mallory gets her verification key onto your device (either by social engineering or another flaw), then her custom malware image can be booted by the device in locked mode. The user will get a warning about this being a custom OS (good!), but then the rollback index values in Mallory's image are written to the stored rollback index values (bad!). If I then attempt to go back to Oreo 8.0, it won't let me.
A better mechanism would be to have a set of stored rollback index values per verification key, not a global set per device. Then I could roll back to the stock factory image from a Mallory's malware image.
The 2008 Supreme Court decision in Quanta Computer, Inc. v. LG Electronics, Inc., arguably leaves unclear the extent to which patentees can avoid the exhaustion doctrine by means of so-called limited licenses (...) At least two district courts have concluded that Mallinckrodt is no longer good law after Quanta.
It's bizarre that the case has made it this far. The Mallinckrodt ruling has been consistently invalidated at the district level; the US Federal Circuit continues to uphold it, though. SCOTUS had a chance to invalidate it earlier when it overturned the Federal Circuit's decision on Quanta, but sidestepped the whole Mallinckrodt issue.
I'm guessing the $3 price is in volume (10k or 100k+). There are a number of eBay listings under $3, but I wouldn't rely on eBay as a steady supply stream or for good documentation and support.
My preferred hobby vendors (because they've been supportive to me over the years; I'm not affiliated with them) are SparkFun and AdaFruit. SparkFun has them for $6.95, while AdaFruit has a hacker-friendly version for $9.95 and a surface-mount version for $6.95.
Whose idea was to choose an interpreted language for the extremely slow 8-bit home computers?
Because fitting a compiler into the tight memory constraints was next to impossible. The BASIC ROM on the C64 was 8 kB; per Wikipedia, this is what forced Commodore to revert to v2.0 BASIC, which lacked even disk directory listing commands (remember LOAD "$", 8 and how it would clobber whatever you had in memory?).
Applesoft BASIC, which had these features, used 10k of ROM by comparison. Apple's earlier Integer BASIC was about the same size, but gave up floating-point support.
BASIC made it easy for beginners (like myself) to get something working. If Commodore had only included an assembler, for example, this would have been too steep of a learning curve for most folks and they would likely have bought something else that did have an interpreter. That said, anyone writing "real" programs wrote them in assembly; you had to resort to extreme tricks to get decent graphics on these systems. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend picking up a copy of Racing the Beam , which documents all the trickery that programmers for the Atari 2600 (which had weirder hardware but still was 65xx-based) had to resort to in order to make even halfway decent games.
Since it was the first flight, the EULA popped up, and the crew made the mistake of hitting "decline" instead of "accept"?
Makes you wonder what type of constraints they were working under to come up with a solutions like [the power switch rod]...
If memory serves, this was to meet UL certification rules. For some reason, line voltage was not allowed to cross the case to the switch. That said, my first PC was a whitebox clone that completely violated these rules, so don't be surprised if your no-name PC from that era also lacked the Rube Goldberg rod linkage.
The ATX form factor solved this by using a low voltage signal to control the power supply -- the wires crisscrossing the case for this carry no more than 5V (with a large series resistance). Shorting that to ground turns the power supply on; this (plus a 5V standby signal powering a small supervisor microcontroller) is how your motherboard can control the power to the system.
It's called an Antenna....
Increasingly, no. Many sports are switching to subscription channels (ESPN, Fox Sports, Root Sports, CNBC/MSNBC, etc.) with limited or no legal options for streaming. MLB is there today and has a decent product; Olympics are ok; NFL is pretty much absent. I'm not sure about the NBA or NHL.
Most of the channels I can receive over the air (networks) don't carry much of interest to anyone in my household. But we watched so little TV that we went ahead and got rid of cable anyway. I did subscribe to MLB.tv, though (and am much happier than what we had from basic cable since I can now watch the teams of interest to me).
I suspect cable companies will be in trouble should the NFL decide to start streaming their games. I doubt this will happen, though; they're getting a ton of money from ESPN to stay right where they are (and most folks are resigned to just keep paying for cable to watch NFL games).
However, if I reach that limit I'm pretty sure I can pick it up like every other programming or markup language that I've needed.
Unfortunately, this is only sort of true. The basic syntax is easily learnable and readable -- certainly easier than mentally parsing most regular expressions.
But, oh god, does CSS have a ton of implicit modes. Are your sizes content box or border box? Is this div we're positioning being displayed as a block, inline, or inline-block element? Is there a float active? Has it been cleared? Did we duplicate the appropriate styles with -webkit- and -ms-? Why is it working in Firefox but not Chrome? ...
Layouts that would be a simple command in Tk (button .foo; pack .foo -expand both -fill 1) end up being head scratchers.
The purists then snootily point out, "Well, your problem is you're trying to build a GUI from a markup language." Fine, then: Give me a freaking proper GUI toolkit already. I'm reminded of Jamie Zawinski's quote (though he was referring to XWindows): Using these toolkits is like trying to make a bookshelf out of mashed potatoes.
So when you plug in a cable, the logo on the top is always correct. When it is a sideways plug, you are on your own. :)
I have a few cables which violate this spec (despite the USB spec being quite clear on this point). I'm not sure if it's a manufacturing error (cable assemblies sent to the molding process upside-down) or the manufacturer just being egotistical ("We want our logo to be visible to the user"). Western Digital, I'm looking at you...
I really ought to toss them (along with my collection of USB 1.1 cables and hubs).
I have a FTA system which is half setup, cobbled together from some spare parts plus a new receiver and LNBF.
The terrain near my house has proven to be unfriendly. I live on the west side of Puget Sound, so the satellites are already fairly close to the horizon. We're in a old-growth forest area; most of the trees around my house are around the 100' mark. We're just on the other side of a few hills which block antenna reception from any of the local networks, hence my tinkering with FTA equipment.
Even so, Satellite AR shows that I should just be able to pick up AMC 6 which has the NBC feeds. Alas, despite a few hours of trying, I haven't been able to get a signal.
Actual link to the source appears to be http://www.computerhistory.org/atchm/microsoft-ms-dos-early-source-code, but it's throwing 503s at me right now.
Why not DOS 6.22? They're not making a bundle on that, either.
Distributing the source code to a proprietary product has a number of potential legal hurdles. If there are parts of the source which were licensed from another company (as would be the case with MS-DOS and SCP, IBM, Stac, and possibly others), those agreements need to be revisited and you may need to get permission from that company (or its successors) to do so. (I include IBM because, I believe, they took over much of the development for the 4.x series.)
MS-DOS 2.x might be the latest version they (currently) feel confident in being able to release free of these restrictions.
This brings a different kind of problem, which is that there becomes a whole new management level of keeping the two groups in sync. Otherwise, the "Canonical Labs" group might run off and do all kinds of things that are great, but which never get integrated into the main project.
But PARC was so successful! Oh, wait... ;-)
Your point is well taken. I believe it's a problem they already have, though: the Mir slip, shipping Unity before it was really ready, etc. Reorganizing -- even if it's done purely in Shuttleworth's mind and not on paper -- would bring these issues to the forefront.
I've found (as a rule of thumb) that, when asking a grad student "How much time do you think you have left before you can write up your thesis?", if the answer is two or more years out then it really means "I don't know." The student honestly believes this answer, but in reality he/she doesn't know how much he/she doesn't know.
I'm starting to feel about the same with Mir and Canonical here. Shuttleworth is the tenured but aloof professor who casually coaxes his students (employees) toward completing milestones but without too much urgency. Money's not plentiful, but the professor has enough contacts and contracts to keep his lab going and give a stipend to his students. They put out a few papers (releases) each year, and each time the students think this grand project is "almost done"... only to discover that there's still more left to do.
There's tremendous value in this kind of exploratory research. I'm just not sure it makes sense to package it up for end users.
If I were Mark Shuttleworth's technical advisor, I'd suggest examining RedHat's Fedora model. Create a small group called Canonical Labs where stuff like Mir and Unity can flourish, with continuous releases and without the artificial constraint of a set release date. (If this makes the environment too lackadaisical and development isn't progressing fast enough, find some other way to instill discipline and/or motivation; don't make it the threat of moving alpha code to end-users.) When it's stabilized (no longer shuffling menus and window icons around, for example), then integrate it with the main Ubuntu branch. Something a bit more edgy and up-to-date than Debian Stable or RHEL, but not so much that it constantly upends your users.
How are we going to arrest people on frivolous charges when movies are streamed? I suppose we could make it a felony to fail to rewind a stream when you're done viewing it...
I've know a lot of really food engineering managers.
Obviously you meant "good" here, but it made me pause: is there a correlation between food and good managers? I've been reading more than a handful of materials (e.g. Peopleware ) which have mentioned eating together as a helping to build strong teams (arguably the most important job of a manager). A number of companies have caught on, from the big (like Google) to startups (one of my favorites, The Omni Group here in Seattle even has a full-time kitchen staff who are listed by name on their about us page).
Obviously, it's not a catch-all solution; heck, I suspect it's more correlation (that is, the managers who get their teams to eat together are more likely to care about their teams) than causation. But still gave me a pause.
Japanese companies [...] genuinely want to know how to make the business better by finding out how people actually work.
Their website actually bears this out. The good use of this technology will map out how well teams are communicating (which can sometimes make or break a project). We say that inter-team communication is good, and sometimes have meetings to this effect; but this can show whether the company is practicing what it preaches.
Alas, I share the same concerns as the naysayers. I highly doubt this would be used by any American company in a way other than to penalize individual workers for brief moments of inactivity.