While I don't know if BG actually made the 640K quote or not, the history that he provides (i.e., we really wanted to do things right, but the evil hardware people wouldn't let us) is self-serving and not exactly correct.
The Motorolla 68000 did have a 32-bit design, but it only had 24-bit addressing when it came out, which was the same as Intel was attempting to provide with the 80286.
However, it was impossible to use the address space of the 286 because it required the chip to go into protected mode, and MS-DOS made assumptions that made this impossible. While DOS 1.0 certainly couldn't have predicted this, MS had early access to the 286 specs, but they never made the appropriate changes. Digital Research did, with Concurrent CPM-86, but by that time, the MS-DOS juggernaught had pretty much rolled over everyone else.
Excuse me, but the article says that HTTP will still be around after the world ends, so that hardly implies it's going away. The implication is (correctly) that HTTP should be used for everything.
Inflammatory headlines and spinning of the stories really does no one any good, and we have to slog through dozens of responses by people frothing at the mouth because they only read the intro paragraph.
Foghorn Leghorn was created by Robert McKimson, who also created the Tasmanian Devil.
What part of the management is the problem
on
Do You Like Your Job?
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
You describe "management" as an issue, but you aren't specific. I can think of at least three things that the managerment should be doing that can be problems. 1) Process management - there's no excuse for a problem here. If the manager(s) don't understand the software development cycle, it's bad news. 2) People management - this is very much a personality issue. Some people are great at personal interaction, keeping up team morale, recognized personnel problems before they happen, etc. Others aren't. Depending on the situation, it can range from heaven to hell, with all variations in between. 3) Product management - this is the one where you have to give the most leeway. Yes, direction will change, after all, you are trying to sell something, and you've got to provide what the customers want and to do so, you're either anticipating their needs in advance, or trying to interpret them. If #1 and #2 are solid, you can live with some uncertainty here. All that said, someone who's truly horrible in any of the categories above can do a lot of damage. If you're lucky, you get someone who's excellent in one category and can get by in the other two. Mostly, however, you get people who are just muddling along in all three.
It's very interesting to note how the AP story spins the issue. The very first sentence:
The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to intervene in a fight over copyrights, deciding whether Congress has sided too heavily with writers and other inventors. [Emphasis mine.]
The phrase "writers and inventers" conjures up images of individuals, working alone, and immediately draws our sympathy. The fact is, that the major beneficiaries of the law are corporations, a fact that never comes out in the article. And, of course, "inventors" is completely irrelevent, since inventions are covered by patent law, not copyright.
Indeed, the article's favoring of the status quo shows up even more when they note that the Bono law brings us "in line with the EU," (those Europeans, always hip and up to date), and their characterization of the supporters of repeal as "businesses that specialize in former copyrighted material," (clearly a group that leeches off of those writers and, um, inventors.)
I don't know who'll win the war, but in the propaganda battle, Lessig et al, doesn't seem to have a chance.
Re:Those opening paragraphs...
on
.NETly News
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· Score: 2
Gates will go down in history, never fear. But I think it's pretty well accepted already that he's going to be recoginzed as an industry mogul along the lines of Rockefeller and Carnegie, the swooning sycophancy of those like Wright notwithstanding.
If you read closesly, even he admits that the ideas in.NET were not original (though hardly Sci-Fi), and that it's merely the monopoly power of Microsoft that allows it to push its "vision" onto the world.
Re:It's a big step up, but there is still distance
on
Java2 SDK v. 1.4 Released
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· Score: 4, Interesting
It's worth noting that the Berkeley NBIO package was part of the research that led to the 1.4 java.nio package.
Part of what makes this kind of research interesting is learning how to parallelize operations that we think of a serial with current technology.
The article mentions streaming a movie, which we typicaly think of as a server-to-client operation. However, companies like
KonTiki are already using techniques (their buzzword is Adaptive Rate Multiserving, wah!) involving peer-to-peer parallel operation to solve these kinds of problems.
As far as people lying, cheating, and stealing, you may as well suggest that checks and credit cards will never be "functional."
This is nice, and should lower the cost of digital cameras while improving the quality. But what ever happened to JPEG2000? I thought we were going to get a lot more pictures on our FlashCards but as far as I know, no one is yet shipping a JPG2K-enabled camera.
Well, trust TV to get it wrong. If you read the letters,
Bohr claims that had been obvious to him a few years earlier that a bomb was theoretically possible.
What the letters make clear is that Bohr felt very threatened by Heisenburg's visit and that he assumed that Heisenburg would be working to create a Nazi A-bomb.
What will never be known is what Heisenburg's intent actually was. Clearly his post-war statements should be viewed with suspicion, but, to give him the benefit of the doubt, he
claimed to have been misunderstood by Bohr because he was afraid that the SS was spying on them, which is certainly a possibility.
I wouldn't say that Reuters was completely scammed. They did, after all, put this page not in the Science,or Tech categories, but in the "Lifestyle" category, note that the link directly after the title is to "Ann Landers."
Their view of the thing seems to be along the lines of "Hey, some guy claims he saw the Loch Ness Monster and he's building a submarine to search the lake."
But the issue you want discussed is not asphalt, but the cost of goverment or too much control or interference by contractors and vendors. Asphalt will be but one example.
And you'd better be damn sure it's a significant issue, cost, or problem before you bring it up, because 1) your time to get an "elect me" message out is limited, and 2) if your constituents don't find it compelling you'll never get a chance to solve the problem.
Every politician has severe time/message/dollar optimization problem. That's why negative campaigning is so effective. It's often more efficient to say "My opponent is scum" that to build up a set of compelling arguments about why your position on all the key issues is superior.
But what about the voting citizens? They're alot smaller, some of them do care what kind of asphalt you use.
Invite all three of them to a public hearing.
Seriously, this is not a campaign issue. It is a means to an end, e.g., if I can save money, make govt. run more efficiently, etc., then you campaign on those items as issues and when or if you get into a discussion on details, then you bring up the processes and techniques you'll use.
As a citizen, do you think I want to know what brand asphalt you're going to use to fill the potholes? No, I just want to get it done. Details like that are for you and your staff to work out.
The flaw in the argument is the unspoken idea that you can have success or you can have integrity
But by the same token, your definition of success is "I made potloads of money." Isn't it perfectly valid to have an alternate definition?
If I define success as being able to support myself and seeing the look people have coming from my restaurant having had a really good meal, then isn't that a valid definition? I may not necessarily have any integrity, i.e., I may cheat the waiters and lie on my income tax forms, but I'm still successful.
Unless you apply the adjective financial, don't equate success and money.
I think this argument is like saying design doesn't matter for automobiles because we have problems with pollution, safety, and gridlock. When cars can fly, then it's time to worry about design.
Clearly this is nonsense. Computers are commodities now, despite their many imperfections. So a manufacturer must compete on price, service, and/or design.
Apple, which doesn't have the advantage of the WinTel community's oversupply of component options can't really compete on price. Service is a reasonable area, but there's a real lag between when the market acknowledges service as a value so it's not very cost-effective, at least early on. Therefore, their best differentiator is design and they clearly understand that.
Now I agree that it would be nice if a computer were as uncomplicated and reliable as a toaster, but it's simply not going to happen in the near future and its unfair to take Apple to task for not solving the problem with Microsoft has far more resources.
At least the audience at ZDNet is likely to be aware that such things happen.
What bothers me is when CNN puts up a poll like "Now that we've squashed the Taliban, should we go after Saddam Hussein?"
For one thing, their audience is less likely to be familiar with statistical methods, and for another, I'm sure I've heard them report the results of "an online survey" as news, which gives it far more weight than it deserves.
Re:What's Woz playing with?
on
Apple PDA?
·
· Score: 2
It's cleanly not a PDA. Not enough screen space. It looks more like a TV.
C'mon, a Lisa had the same hardware that people were running Unix variants (Xenix, SCO) on, I don't see that making it a web server in any big deal (except that the hardware is still running).
Now
this software, which lets you serve pages on a Newton handheld, pushes the envelope a bit.
Slashdot Mirror
While I don't know if BG actually made the 640K quote or not, the history that he provides (i.e., we really wanted to do things right, but the evil hardware people wouldn't let us) is self-serving and not exactly correct.
The Motorolla 68000 did have a 32-bit design, but it only had 24-bit addressing when it came out, which was the same as Intel was attempting to provide with the 80286.
However, it was impossible to use the address space of the 286 because it required the chip to go into protected mode, and MS-DOS made assumptions that made this impossible. While DOS 1.0 certainly couldn't have predicted this, MS had early access to the 286 specs, but they never made the appropriate changes. Digital Research did, with Concurrent CPM-86, but by that time, the MS-DOS juggernaught had pretty much rolled over everyone else.
A preview of 1.4.0 will be made available at WWDC, according to Apple.
Excuse me, but the article says that HTTP will still be around after the world ends, so that hardly implies it's going away. The implication is (correctly) that HTTP should be used for everything.
Inflammatory headlines and spinning of the stories really does no one any good, and we have to slog through dozens of responses by people frothing at the mouth because they only read the intro paragraph.
Some sort of black bird. Not a crow or raven, however.
Foghorn Leghorn was created by Robert McKimson, who also created the Tasmanian Devil.
You describe "management" as an issue, but you aren't specific. I can think of at least three things that the managerment should be doing that can be problems.
1) Process management - there's no excuse for a problem here. If the manager(s) don't understand the software development cycle, it's bad news.
2) People management - this is very much a personality issue. Some people are great at personal interaction, keeping up team morale, recognized personnel problems before they happen, etc. Others aren't. Depending on the situation, it can range from heaven to hell, with all variations in between.
3) Product management - this is the one where you have to give the most leeway. Yes, direction will change, after all, you are trying to sell something, and you've got to provide what the customers want and to do so, you're either anticipating their needs in advance, or trying to interpret them. If #1 and #2 are solid, you can live with some uncertainty here.
All that said, someone who's truly horrible in any of the categories above can do a lot of damage. If you're lucky, you get someone who's excellent in one category and can get by in the other two. Mostly, however, you get people who are just muddling along in all three.
It's very interesting to note how the AP story spins the issue. The very first sentence:
The Supreme Court agreed Tuesday to intervene in a fight over copyrights, deciding whether Congress has sided too heavily with writers and other inventors. [Emphasis mine.]
The phrase "writers and inventers" conjures up images of individuals, working alone, and immediately draws our sympathy. The fact is, that the major beneficiaries of the law are corporations, a fact that never comes out in the article. And, of course, "inventors" is completely irrelevent, since inventions are covered by patent law, not copyright.
Indeed, the article's favoring of the status quo shows up even more when they note that the Bono law brings us "in line with the EU," (those Europeans, always hip and up to date), and their characterization of the supporters of repeal as "businesses that specialize in former copyrighted material," (clearly a group that leeches off of those writers and, um, inventors.)
I don't know who'll win the war, but in the propaganda battle, Lessig et al, doesn't seem to have a chance.
Gates will go down in history, never fear. But I think it's pretty well accepted already that he's going to be recoginzed as an industry mogul along the lines of Rockefeller and Carnegie, the swooning sycophancy of those like Wright notwithstanding.
.NET were not original (though hardly Sci-Fi), and that it's merely the monopoly power of Microsoft that allows it to push its "vision" onto the world.
If you read closesly, even he admits that the ideas in
It's worth noting that the Berkeley NBIO package was part of the research that led to the 1.4 java.nio package.
Also, using their package, and a very interesting partitioned, event-based coding style, they wrote, in Java, a web server that out performs Apache (written in C).
Part of what makes this kind of research interesting is learning how to parallelize operations that we think of a serial with current technology.
The article mentions streaming a movie, which we typicaly think of as a server-to-client operation. However, companies like KonTiki are already using techniques (their buzzword is Adaptive Rate Multiserving, wah!) involving peer-to-peer parallel operation to solve these kinds of problems.
As far as people lying, cheating, and stealing, you may as well suggest that checks and credit cards will never be "functional."
This is nice, and should lower the cost of digital cameras while improving the quality. But what ever happened to JPEG2000? I thought we were going to get a lot more pictures on our FlashCards but as far as I know, no one is yet shipping a JPG2K-enabled camera.
Well, trust TV to get it wrong. If you read the letters, Bohr claims that had been obvious to him a few years earlier that a bomb was theoretically possible.
What the letters make clear is that Bohr felt very threatened by Heisenburg's visit and that he assumed that Heisenburg would be working to create a Nazi A-bomb.
What will never be known is what Heisenburg's intent actually was. Clearly his post-war statements should be viewed with suspicion, but, to give him the benefit of the doubt, he claimed to have been misunderstood by Bohr because he was afraid that the SS was spying on them, which is certainly a possibility.
Actually, it could be. Depends on the inflation rate. If it was more than 3% then it's less money in real dollars.
I think I remember hearing that Crowe and Nash have never actually met
No, they did meet, as this story shows.
I wouldn't say that Reuters was completely scammed. They did, after all, put this page not in the Science,or Tech categories, but in the "Lifestyle" category, note that the link directly after the title is to "Ann Landers."
Their view of the thing seems to be along the lines of "Hey, some guy claims he saw the Loch Ness Monster and he's building a submarine to search the lake."
I really do want politicians discuss such issues.
But the issue you want discussed is not asphalt, but the cost of goverment or too much control or interference by contractors and vendors. Asphalt will be but one example.
And you'd better be damn sure it's a significant issue, cost, or problem before you bring it up, because 1) your time to get an "elect me" message out is limited, and 2) if your constituents don't find it compelling you'll never get a chance to solve the problem.
Every politician has severe time/message/dollar optimization problem. That's why negative campaigning is so effective. It's often more efficient to say "My opponent is scum" that to build up a set of compelling arguments about why your position on all the key issues is superior.
But what about the voting citizens? They're alot smaller, some of them do care what kind of asphalt you use.
Invite all three of them to a public hearing.
Seriously, this is not a campaign issue. It is a means to an end, e.g., if I can save money, make govt. run more efficiently, etc., then you campaign on those items as issues and when or if you get into a discussion on details, then you bring up the processes and techniques you'll use.
As a citizen, do you think I want to know what brand asphalt you're going to use to fill the potholes? No, I just want to get it done. Details like that are for you and your staff to work out.
The flaw in the argument is the unspoken idea that you can have success or you can have integrity
But by the same token, your definition of success is "I made potloads of money." Isn't it perfectly valid to have an alternate definition?
If I define success as being able to support myself and seeing the look people have coming from my restaurant having had a really good meal, then isn't that a valid definition? I may not necessarily have any integrity, i.e., I may cheat the waiters and lie on my income tax forms, but I'm still successful.
Unless you apply the adjective financial, don't equate success and money.
I think this argument is like saying design doesn't matter for automobiles because we have problems with pollution, safety, and gridlock. When cars can fly, then it's time to worry about design.
Clearly this is nonsense. Computers are commodities now, despite their many imperfections. So a manufacturer must compete on price, service, and/or design.
Apple, which doesn't have the advantage of the WinTel community's oversupply of component options can't really compete on price. Service is a reasonable area, but there's a real lag between when the market acknowledges service as a value so it's not very cost-effective, at least early on. Therefore, their best differentiator is design and they clearly understand that.
Now I agree that it would be nice if a computer were as uncomplicated and reliable as a toaster, but it's simply not going to happen in the near future and its unfair to take Apple to task for not solving the problem with Microsoft has far more resources.
At least the audience at ZDNet is likely to be aware that such things happen.
What bothers me is when CNN puts up a poll like "Now that we've squashed the Taliban, should we go after Saddam Hussein?"
For one thing, their audience is less likely to be familiar with statistical methods, and for another, I'm sure I've heard them report the results of "an online survey" as news, which gives it far more weight than it deserves.
It's cleanly not a PDA. Not enough screen space. It looks more like a TV.
C'mon, a Lisa had the same hardware that people were running Unix variants (Xenix, SCO) on, I don't see that making it a web server in any big deal (except that the hardware is still running).
Now this software, which lets you serve pages on a Newton handheld, pushes the envelope a bit.
Hmmm. Look's more like Concerned Fundamentalist Women. They trash "Kiki" because it portrays "witches" in a favorable light. Can't have that.