Yup, Digital Had It Then too. DSIN subscribers could get any patch with a few keypresses, and we got emails whenever critical fixes (security, innocent-looking-command-hangs-system) were released. VMSINSTAL SOME.PATCH applied 'em -- no muss, no fuss, no bother.
Indeed, I think this points out a split that causes no end of confusion. While I'd agree that most CIOs would prefer a single opaque fix-pack every six months, I'm betting that most of the people who actually do the work would prefer to get a fix this afternoon for a problem discovered this morning, even if it does mean applying 21 piecemeal patches ASAP instead of one big one long after the problem has shut them down. I also think they'd prefer to know exactly what is being fixed. As one of the people who actually do the work, I know I would.
Anybody here from Brazil? Didn't I hear that you have cars running on 100% methanol? So the corrosion problem isn't insurmountable?
Re:How biodegradable & more ways to create plastic
on
Grow Your Own Plastic
·
· Score: 1
Is IS pretty cool that the plant is actually using carbon from the atmosphere to create the plastic. Could a plant be created which would create "fuel" (like ethanol or methanol or other hydrocarbon)
Look up jojoba. I think this was the plant researched as a fuel source during WWII.
The idea of a Cyberclysm seems to rest on the notion that, because we have 500 channels, I must examine them. Rubbish. I watch less TV than ever before, and then mostly what my kids are watching. I just received a cell phone and I've already made an iron rule that I do *not* attend to it in the car; I'll get back to you. When people offer me machines that speak, I usually ask where to find the switch that makes them silent.
The number one survival skill of the new millennium will be selectivity. Look over the options and throw away anything you don't see an immediate use for. Just don't use it. Be the master of the technology that you allow into your presence, not its servant.
I think that part of the problem is an unmet need for continuing education of lawyers on changes in distribution and business models. I've seen some real howlers -- like the company whose license said that you could install only one copy of their free download. Not a problem if you're an individual, but what if you're a corporate entity and want to deploy it on all your workstations? We contacted the vendor and discovered that there was not even any way we could *buy* the right to use more than one copy. Nobody had thought about users like us.
(That vendor eventually fixed the problem by working out a price structure and charging us for their formerly free viewer. Not what I would have liked but at least there was *some* legal way to use it.)
A lot of the people who draft software contracts have a solid grasp of traditional fee-per-installation licensing but have not even learned to ask the right questions about free products. If you run a law school, think about that.
Mr. Katz brings in Asimov at the end without saying much about Asimov's contention that machines won't try to take over the world because they'll be designed not to. Not just incapable of doing it, but (much more important) incapable of wanting to. A well-designed machine is the only object that it's 100% okay to enslave, because what it wants most from life is to serve you. At most I can see the situation evolving to something like the Lije/Daneel thing: the machine evolves from slave to partner, but it still "wants" to serve.
In VMS every system component is a part of some "facility", and each facility has a unique prefix used for avoiding symbol clashes. Some of the security code in VMS is allocated to facilities with the prefixes CIA and KGB. I really doubt that the latter was used to install a back door for someone else's spooks; it was just the developers having a little fun where (they thought) it wouldn't show too much.
Likely the same thing happened at MS but of course we're all primed to believe the worst of them. Sorta makes you glad your mother lectured you on the importance of maintaining a good reputation, doesn't it?:-}
One thing I find sorely lacking in many books on algorithms is any discussion of why you would select one over another. If you want to see a shining example of what I'm wanting, take a look at Knuth's _The Art of Computer Programming_ and see how he tests competing algorithms to compare their costs and benefits in actual use. I hope there's something in this book about how one would decide whether or not to use a genetic algorithm.
> Unisys did the same thing then, and there was an > effort way back then to come up > with a LZW-free image compression. I don't know > what ever happened to that issue,
Good blurbs on a variety of happenings. The tone isn't exactly respectful, though, peppered as it is with stuff like "Linux fever", "infatuation", and "cobble together". Wait, guys, S/370 support is on the way....
"ALL OS's are using old ideas, the basic OS concepts have been around for [around] 20 years."
Longer than that. Unix was already fairly well developed when "The Unix Timesharing System" was published in the 1970 volume of CACM. Think 1950s-60s, not late '70s, for the development of OS fundamentals.
I've seen a lot of phone booths that were trashed, but very few that were actually disabled. Put the display behind armor glass or thick polycarbonate, make the keyboard the same as the button panels they use now, and I think they will survive.
I'm looking forward to being able to pull up an electronic directory instead of just looking in disgust at where the paper one used to be.
*sigh* If they had suggested setting up a fund to receive voluntary contributions, I think that an awful lot of people would have cheerfully chipped in to spread the gospel of electronic communication. But most of those same people will dig in their heels and resist mightily any attempt at a "tax".
Figuring out when people are sending email is also going to be an interesting problem. A person like me who prefers to run his own SMTP daemons won't be noticed unless his ISP hacks its routers rather severely. And you know that many bright souls will get to work on tunnelling, etc. to evade the tax.
Didn't they take *any* advice from someone who knows something about email?
Anybody who remembers typing on an ASR33 knows how much force you can impart through typing if you really have to. Maybe they put harder springs on these keyboards.:-)
Indiana residents are already required to report sales tax on any out-of-state purchases when filing their state income tax returns. You mean, the rest of you have been getting a free ride?
Did the company you thought you were applying to give a name? Contact them directly. Find someone who works there who can tell you who actually wants to hire, and go direct. Sure, that person will have to go through HR, but by that point you already have an insider fighting on your side. It couldn't hurt. You've also demonstrated persistence and a bit of creativity, not to mention the much-touted "people skills" that it takes to gain such intelligence. And you've shown that you're serious, and not just "kicking tires" as one interviewer put it.
Surely/. *would* be censored. It often carries material denouncing Congress and other bits of the government, and that's dangerous if anything is, don't you think?:-[
The guy who writes the "Sector General Hospital" stories did one on some previously unknown species, a member of which was hauled into Sector General suffering from some unknown ailment. All he was able to say is that his doctor had made him sick. Turns out he'd been injected with some biotech thing that was supposed to keep some other species healthy and it was killing him by mistake.
Ok. Oddly enough, I want less than Microsoft is offering. Less "tight integration" so I can get into the joints between applications and modify the stuff that doesn't work out here in the Real World. Less hostility to anyone who is not an enduser. Less self-congratulation trying to pass as documentation. Less time and money spent trying to convince senior managers that they can and should do the job they hired me to do. Less insistence that all computer applications are or should be interactive.
I choose Linux because Linux knows how to stay out of my way.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, Digital Had It Then too. DSIN subscribers could get any patch with a few keypresses, and we got emails whenever critical fixes (security, innocent-looking-command-hangs-system) were released. VMSINSTAL SOME.PATCH applied 'em -- no muss, no fuss, no bother.
Indeed, I think this points out a split that causes no end of confusion. While I'd agree that most CIOs would prefer a single opaque fix-pack every six months, I'm betting that most of the people who actually do the work would prefer to get a fix this afternoon for a problem discovered this morning, even if it does mean applying 21 piecemeal patches ASAP instead of one big one long after the problem has shut them down. I also think they'd prefer to know exactly what is being fixed. As one of the people who actually do the work, I know I would.
Anybody here from Brazil? Didn't I hear that you have cars running on 100% methanol? So the corrosion problem isn't insurmountable?
No, you aren't. But you got there before I did.
Read it, and think.
The idea of a Cyberclysm seems to rest on the notion that, because we have 500 channels, I must examine them. Rubbish. I watch less TV than ever before, and then mostly what my kids are watching. I just received a cell phone and I've already made an iron rule that I do *not* attend to it in the car; I'll get back to you. When people offer me machines that speak, I usually ask where to find the switch that makes them silent.
The number one survival skill of the new millennium will be selectivity. Look over the options and throw away anything you don't see an immediate use for. Just don't use it. Be the master of the technology that you allow into your presence, not its servant.
I think that part of the problem is an unmet need for continuing education of lawyers on changes in distribution and business models. I've seen some real howlers -- like the company whose license said that you could install only one copy of their free download. Not a problem if you're an individual, but what if you're a corporate entity and want to deploy it on all your workstations? We contacted the vendor and discovered that there was not even any way we could *buy* the right to use more than one copy. Nobody had thought about users like us.
(That vendor eventually fixed the problem by working out a price structure and charging us for their formerly free viewer. Not what I would have liked but at least there was *some* legal way to use it.)
A lot of the people who draft software contracts have a solid grasp of traditional fee-per-installation licensing but have not even learned to ask the right questions about free products. If you run a law school, think about that.
Mr. Katz brings in Asimov at the end without saying much about Asimov's contention that machines won't try to take over the world because they'll be designed not to. Not just incapable of doing it, but (much more important) incapable of wanting to. A well-designed machine is the only object that it's 100% okay to enslave, because what it wants most from life is to serve you. At most I can see the situation evolving to something like the Lije/Daneel thing: the machine evolves from slave to partner, but it still "wants" to serve.
In VMS every system component is a part of some "facility", and each facility has a unique prefix used for avoiding symbol clashes. Some of the security code in VMS is allocated to facilities with the prefixes CIA and KGB. I really doubt that the latter was used to install a back door for someone else's spooks; it was just the developers having a little fun where (they thought) it wouldn't show too much.
:-}
Likely the same thing happened at MS but of course we're all primed to believe the worst of them. Sorta makes you glad your mother lectured you on the importance of maintaining a good reputation, doesn't it?
> I just wish I had a little arrow that said "You Are Here".
:-)
You mean, like the Total Perspective Vortex?
One thing I find sorely lacking in many books on algorithms is any discussion of why you would select one over another. If you want to see a shining example of what I'm wanting, take a look at Knuth's _The Art of Computer Programming_ and see how he tests competing algorithms to compare their costs and benefits in actual use. I hope there's something in this book about how one would decide whether or not to use a genetic algorithm.
This could get interesting.
> Unisys did the same thing then, and there was an > effort way back then to come up
> with a LZW-free image compression. I don't know > what ever happened to that issue,
It is alive and well and known as PNG.
Good blurbs on a variety of happenings. The tone isn't exactly respectful, though, peppered as it is with stuff like "Linux fever", "infatuation", and "cobble together". Wait, guys, S/370 support is on the way....
"ALL OS's are using old ideas, the basic OS concepts have been around for [around] 20 years."
Longer than that. Unix was already fairly well developed when "The Unix Timesharing System" was published in the 1970 volume of CACM. Think 1950s-60s, not late '70s, for the development of OS fundamentals.
I've seen a lot of phone booths that were trashed, but very few that were actually disabled. Put the display behind armor glass or thick polycarbonate, make the keyboard the same as the button panels they use now, and I think they will survive.
I'm looking forward to being able to pull up an electronic directory instead of just looking in disgust at where the paper one used to be.
Sorry, they'll have to get in line behind the estate of Isaac Asimov, who wrote about something quite similar in "Reason" decades ago.
(I thought of Walter O. Smith's Venus Equilateral stories too, but the solar power tube is just too different to count.)
*sigh* If they had suggested setting up a fund to receive voluntary contributions, I think that an awful lot of people would have cheerfully chipped in to spread the gospel of electronic communication. But most of those same people will dig in their heels and resist mightily any attempt at a "tax".
Figuring out when people are sending email is also going to be an interesting problem. A person like me who prefers to run his own SMTP daemons won't be noticed unless his ISP hacks its routers rather severely. And you know that many bright souls will get to work on tunnelling, etc. to evade the tax.
Didn't they take *any* advice from someone who knows something about email?
Anybody who remembers typing on an ASR33 knows how much force you can impart through typing if you really have to. Maybe they put harder springs on these keyboards. :-)
I'm still trying to figure out *why* the cops would want to know that my wife emailed to ask me to pick up some toothpaste on the way home.
Indiana residents are already required to report sales tax on any out-of-state purchases when filing their state income tax returns. You mean, the rest of you have been getting a free ride?
Did the company you thought you were applying to give a name? Contact them directly. Find someone who works there who can tell you who actually wants to hire, and go direct. Sure, that person will have to go through HR, but by that point you already have an insider fighting on your side. It couldn't hurt. You've also demonstrated persistence and a bit of creativity, not to mention the much-touted "people skills" that it takes to gain such intelligence. And you've shown that you're serious, and not just "kicking tires" as one interviewer put it.
Surely /. *would* be censored. It often carries material denouncing Congress and other bits of the government, and that's dangerous if anything is, don't you think? :-[
The guy who writes the "Sector General Hospital" stories did one on some previously unknown species, a member of which was hauled into Sector General suffering from some unknown ailment. All he was able to say is that his doctor had made him sick. Turns out he'd been injected with some biotech thing that was supposed to keep some other species healthy and it was killing him by mistake.
Oops.
Ok. Oddly enough, I want less than Microsoft is offering. Less "tight integration" so I can get into the joints between applications and modify the stuff that doesn't work out here in the Real World. Less hostility to anyone who is not an enduser. Less self-congratulation trying to pass as documentation. Less time and money spent trying to convince senior managers that they can and should do the job they hired me to do. Less insistence that all computer applications are or should be interactive.
I choose Linux because Linux knows how to stay out of my way.