You seem to have been a little behind the curve. 15 years ago... 1987? By then I had already filled several 10MB, a few 20MB, and at least one 40Mb drive and was just installing a 120Mb ESDI drive (remember ESDI?) into a Novell server (it took me and Krazee Kev just 2 months to fill that baby with Occam, PLM and C code).
So, your old crocker having problems with filling a 10Mb drive was probably still chocking on his punched cards, or he was suffering too much sunburn from the awesome 12" CRT's of the day.
Our first 10Mb drive cost 3000 UK Pounds, it was hung off a GPIB adapter on a Commodore 8096.
Oddly enough the record industry used to do special editions of records. Many LP's came out in quite fancy release cases or sleeves (some with the lyrics!), the LP's themselves were often referred to as 'Picture Disks' because some image would be put into the plastic disc. When CD's came along, it seems the silver disc was cachet enough, though I have a few picture disc CD's, too. I was buying CD's in 1984 and the premium we paid was staggering - just to get that digital sound.
So, it's not that the record industry needs to learn from the Movie industry, it just has to remember its own past.
Hang around those pinball and foosball machines Compaq had out for long enough and I guess you could have seen anything. The pinball was free.
The usual suspects in this case were: IBM, Compaq, HP, Intel and AMD - no SGI, just about everyone else had tiny looking stands by comparison. However, size doesn't matter, they tell me...
In the UK all Parliament minutes are recorded in a roomful of books called Hansard, I am sure the US has something similar. It is never destroyed.
Many companies are obliged to keep records of products for as long as those products are in use, this is particularly important in the Pharmaceutical industry. A few years ago Schering-Plough had their off-site document store (in Elizabeth, NJ) torched. They have had a fun time trying to put back together all the relevant documenation for the FDA inspectors.
Much documentation is about what companies research. It really needs to be held indefinitely, as current products or potential products are likely to be based on that research, directly or indirectly. Destroying knowledge is not what most companies really like to do (though you would be hard pressed to tell sometimes.)
Tax documents obviously only need to be kept for the duration of tax liability periods, though sales receipts that show customer information may be of more worth for longer.
One of my first jobs was programming a catalog system for a secondhand machine tool company. They sold drillstands, lathes, and all sorts of immense tools to anyone that wanted the junk. Many of these machines had been made in the early 1900's. For every machine there was a parts manual and an operations guide.
Some writers in the forum are getting tempestuous about this book, but it must be born in mind that Beck lives in Germany, a country known for extremely high output, stable jobs and 3 month employee vacation allowances. This does not reflect, for the most part on how things are going on in the USA. If anything, this book is a treatise about the fear Germans have of their economy becoming more like Americas!
The US has some old hold outs (The Bells, the Auto makers, old Unionized industries) but for the most part people live and work in the US in a very fluid work place. They don't have jobs for life, they don't expect to work in the same industry for ever.
This is not the way it is in Germany, or across much of Europe, either (Britain being a bit of an exception). In Europe Union power is still strong, but eroding. Employees are protected by massive EU based social treaties that establish 'basic' rights for workers, even in the face of simple economic sense. Economics will win out. These old state supported industries will wane. A new Europe will not be like the 20th Century Europe - in fact it may have more in common with 18th Century Europe when attitudes like 'A Job For Life' simply did not exist.
This is rubbish. There were very few computers in the 60's, yet they still had substantial teams working them - it required a lot of assembly programmers and card punch operators to write a programme. In the 70's we saw the era of MASSIVE computer programming teams - some as large as several thousands of programmers. The 80's saw the introduction of the IBM PC and a vast explosion in the number of computers, hence programmers. The 90's saw the introduction of the web as a means to do business and a further burgeoning of the industry. Y2K alone probably accounts for a 10% rise in programmer numbers.
Assuming that there is no more business being done, no new products being developed, and companies don't want to do further office automation, there has to be a weeding out of the programming labour pool.
The IT industry in the USA currently employs about 2.9 million people (analysts, programmers and operators).
I content that this so called decline is more likely the a reflection of the fact that there are hundreds of millions of PC's today, and in the early 1960's there were probably only a few thousand computers worldwide.
If we can stop the emission of light and trap the little photons, then what is to say we can't determine their spin, hence have a good look at everyones wonderful quantum encrypted messages. Stuff a crystal of this in the fiber and start to monitor the structure of the data packets, pick out your favourite light encrypted message, pass on, then look at the trail it made.
I'm old, my brain is addled, but being able to stop light, or its immediate emission, has to have counter intelligence uses.
Moderation isn't control. It's censure. Control would be CowboyNeal coming over to your place of computing, chopping off your fingers for typing the blasphemy, then dusting you over, imprisoning your loved ones, having your car repossessed, strangling the cat... Oh, I'm enjoying this too much!
Tossing something like 50,000 to 100,000lbs out the back door of a C-5 or C-17 is not for the faint of heart. The Angle of Attack change you mention would likely rip the wings of one of these boys.
Such large objects heaved out the rear are tricky, and made more so at 40,000ft where you need all the lift you can get because the jets are not making too much thrust. The change in fore to rear weight distribution as this thing moved would be a tough thing to handle, especially given that the heavyest bit is at the front of the rocket (the last bit to leave) hence has the greatest moment.
The L1011 launches its Pegasus from the underside of the aircraft so it will just respond by climbing. Opening rear doors and ejecting a larger mass will not be the same.
I have used MS products for 20+ years, I have made a good living riding BillG's coat tails, I think the company should be split, and they have been found to be a monoploy.
So what the F%%K does the DOJ think it's doing? This isn't an agreement, it's a legal burp. It basically says that things as they are, are the way they are going to stay.
Every Man and Woman in the DOJ should be fired. The whole darned lot.
MS spent millions defending itself, out of its own deep pockets. The DOJ spend yours and my tax money, millions of dollars, and managed to do what? They used MS-WOrd to type out an agreement that says go about your business as normal.
A first week legal student could blow away most of the "limits" in this agreement, some are not even effective now, and the ink hasn't dried on the signatures (Didn't XP replace 2000 a few days ago?). We have to remember that these documents have to be precise, that means when they mention things in detail there are easy routes round them.
This agreement is pure corruption. Corruption from the highest levels of Government, Heads should role for this.
Wasn't this Valley company proposing just a few weeks ago that it be the host of the system that would hold the National Identity system? So, let me get this straight... Sun has servers, and presumably the support contract for the NI system that has data on all 260M Americans (and a good few others besides), and thinks this is less intrusive that M$ with Passport on "160 Million" users systems (spread across occasional and repeat users throughout the world - only about 20 million of whom reside in the USA) I for one don't have passport - deleting MSN and its cohorts is a favourite pastime.
I would wholeheartedly agree with this. I have seen quite impressive hardware brought to its knees in educational surroundings. Students do more than just surf the web, the Comp Sci's are frequently compiling and running quite nasty code, this influences what all other users percieve as the systems' performance.
Rudgers (for one) has labs full of Sun and HP *nix workstations, in part to offset this performance bottleneck at the server. Rudgers system was almost completely donated don't think for a moment they could have afforded such a system - not without the football team selling the Stadium anyway.
A dual processor Sun is not the screamer it once seemed. Actually was it ever a screamer?
I could not disagree more with this story. Before the telegraph (remember Sam Morse?) we would have hung out at the local Inn, quaffing fine ales, and muttering in hushed tones about the traveller that just passed through. His stories and polemic would be how we got our 'news.'
Today we have the electronic means of hearing 6 billion peoples rumours. You naturally filter what you want. If you get overloaded, stop listening, wait a week and things will be clearer. We are a country obsessed with the 5 second sound bite: the clicker culture.
As they say, if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
If anything, the current tidal wave of nauseous news is the consequence of a total vacuum of real facts. The Pentagon is silent about Afghanistan, the FBI is silent on its efforts to find the terrorists, and we end up inventing stories to fill the time. Accept it, get over it. See the re-run in 2 months and decide then what was pertinent.
If the doorstep price for a subscription to VS.NET is lower than the outright purchase price, you might find a lot of people getting on this one, epecially if it ensures that bugs will be fixed and development tools kept up to date.
Put up your hands all those that religiously keep gcc and emacs current.
IF (and it's a big if) M$ keeps the tools and frameworks current and makes updates painless then it should not be an issue if either the dev tools or the ".NET My Services" junk is subscription. The fact that I received 2 years of VS 6.0 service packs, on CD, in the mail, for my outlay, was a minor surprise to me.
Do not underestimate the cost of keeping dev tools current, anyone that bought Borland Turbo C or MS C v4.0, and still has C++Builder, or VS 6.0, can tell you that the cost of upgrading is appreciable, unforgiving and a permenant feature of being a active developer.
I started up my Cold Fusion. It has a copyright notice of 1995 - 1999 (so, I haven't upgraded recently.)
Also, the patent description seems to be intimating that this autodetects browsers... We did that in CF before 1998, too.
I worked at Ittsy Bittsy Machines in the early 90's. I thought initially the security (no offices had windows, no office had a door that faced a window) was for the protection of IBM's lauded secrets, then I realised that this was not so... it was to make sure the World was protected from the fact that IBM was 25 years behind the times.
I feel that the CIO's are battling the wrong foe. Too many have gone the way of ERP systems because the vendors are big and powerful. They have been suckered into paying huge amounts for what is essentially garbage. Monolithic garbage. Companies are not monolithic so why should the software be?
These CIO's are poorly clued into how their business works, and even less well able to understand what their own departments are doing. For the most part these CIO's sound more like the political wannabes that other professions have thrown up for years (look at the number of CEO's that are former sales people).
By not being bright about the software they bought in the first place, these CIO's seek to parry their failure by blaming the vendors for poor quality.
If you find a NEW bug in an MS product then you get the call for free (they actually re-credit your call count, I think). If you call about an existing bug, one that someone else located your paying for the call, like it or not.
"and I've never heard of a case where a product was intentionally shipped with bugs"
Software is always delivered with bugs. Just because the testers didn't find them, does not mean they are not there. We often sent out systems riddled with bugs, accompanied by a huge rap sheet of listed, but unfixed bugs. A found bug is still a bug, it still gets delivered if found too late.
I don't think Fred Brooks ever said anything was a Silver Bullet, he pre-dates the concept of Silver Bullets, and is a little too sensible to fall for that one.
So a JVM, application code, no doubt written to the lastest J3EE spec's, probably including an EJB server and web server...
A database, Oracle rarely runs in under 512MB RAM (it needs it for its JVM, too), and don't forget the disk drive to take the GBytes of code bloat that Oracle sells as a product..
And we have a "Really Smart Card(tm)" that probably weights a couple of pounds, runs on two car batteries for about 2 or 3 days and has all the usefulness of a... dead dog.
I don't want no stinking Sun/Oracle solution, it's no solution, it's the problem.
Thinking too literally again: 13 yrs old is only US law. The rules under which Santa operates are open to interpretation.
However, the traffic indicates that whomever created his infrastructure (router, server, etc) should be hired away immediately, this is a true Geek Gnome!
There was an effort to kick Political Correctness in the teeth - I rather liked that.
People and things had a real connection with where we are today - people wore ties, computer screens looked like a demented hackers X window fantasy. Screens were even partially readable to 21st Century eyes.
There was a grittiness through most of the sets: bare metal, dirt, and the look of people just surviving. A nice effort to get away from the plastic sets of, erm, yore - the future?.
I still want to find out how we move from these strange beginnings, 100 yrs after first contact, to later images of this fictional world. The writers have a great continuity issue to address.
Just got my attempt to opt-out declined. Seems their web page has the wrong email address or something is a bit flaky in their processing of these messages.
Not knowing diddly about Fry's (they are a West Coast company, we're on the bombed side) I don't want them to have my info and the potential to abuse it.
But then you could run these Linux applications more cheaply still on one of the 50 boxes that have been somehow put to pasture.
Further, these TCO figures do not take into account that anyone with 50 or more servers generally has multiple locations, with multiple locations comes added recurring network costs.
WANs are never as fast as LANs, so now the people have to get their email and applications over slow links to far off Mainframes.
Strikes me I battled 20 years to educate people in distributed high-performance systems to no avail!
A single point of service is a single point of failure, too.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to have been a little behind the curve. 15 years ago... 1987? By then I had already filled several 10MB, a few 20MB, and at least one 40Mb drive and was just installing a 120Mb ESDI drive (remember ESDI?) into a Novell server (it took me and Krazee Kev just 2 months to fill that baby with Occam, PLM and C code).
So, your old crocker having problems with filling a 10Mb drive was probably still chocking on his punched cards, or he was suffering too much sunburn from the awesome 12" CRT's of the day.
Our first 10Mb drive cost 3000 UK Pounds, it was hung off a GPIB adapter on a Commodore 8096.
Oddly enough the record industry used to do special editions of records. Many LP's came out in quite fancy release cases or sleeves (some with the lyrics!), the LP's themselves were often referred to as 'Picture Disks' because some image would be put into the plastic disc. When CD's came along, it seems the silver disc was cachet enough, though I have a few picture disc CD's, too. I was buying CD's in 1984 and the premium we paid was staggering - just to get that digital sound.
So, it's not that the record industry needs to learn from the Movie industry, it just has to remember its own past.
Hang around those pinball and foosball machines Compaq had out for long enough and I guess you could have seen anything. The pinball was free.
The usual suspects in this case were: IBM, Compaq, HP, Intel and AMD - no SGI, just about everyone else had tiny looking stands by comparison. However, size doesn't matter, they tell me...
I think we /.'ed the SEC!
A new way to bring down Government!
In the UK all Parliament minutes are recorded in a roomful of books called Hansard, I am sure the US has something similar. It is never destroyed.
Many companies are obliged to keep records of products for as long as those products are in use, this is particularly important in the Pharmaceutical industry. A few years ago Schering-Plough had their off-site document store (in Elizabeth, NJ) torched. They have had a fun time trying to put back together all the relevant documenation for the FDA inspectors.
Much documentation is about what companies research. It really needs to be held indefinitely, as current products or potential products are likely to be based on that research, directly or indirectly. Destroying knowledge is not what most companies really like to do (though you would be hard pressed to tell sometimes.)
Tax documents obviously only need to be kept for the duration of tax liability periods, though sales receipts that show customer information may be of more worth for longer.
One of my first jobs was programming a catalog system for a secondhand machine tool company. They sold drillstands, lathes, and all sorts of immense tools to anyone that wanted the junk. Many of these machines had been made in the early 1900's. For every machine there was a parts manual and an operations guide.
Sometimes you just have to keep the paperwork.
Some writers in the forum are getting tempestuous about this book, but it must be born in mind that Beck lives in Germany, a country known for extremely high output, stable jobs and 3 month employee vacation allowances. This does not reflect, for the most part on how things are going on in the USA. If anything, this book is a treatise about the fear Germans have of their economy becoming more like Americas!
The US has some old hold outs (The Bells, the Auto makers, old Unionized industries) but for the most part people live and work in the US in a very fluid work place. They don't have jobs for life, they don't expect to work in the same industry for ever.
This is not the way it is in Germany, or across much of Europe, either (Britain being a bit of an exception). In Europe Union power is still strong, but eroding. Employees are protected by massive EU based social treaties that establish 'basic' rights for workers, even in the face of simple economic sense. Economics will win out. These old state supported industries will wane. A new Europe will not be like the 20th Century Europe - in fact it may have more in common with 18th Century Europe when attitudes like 'A Job For Life' simply did not exist.
Hocus pocus!
This is rubbish. There were very few computers in the 60's, yet they still had substantial teams working them - it required a lot of assembly programmers and card punch operators to write a programme. In the 70's we saw the era of MASSIVE computer programming teams - some as large as several thousands of programmers. The 80's saw the introduction of the IBM PC and a vast explosion in the number of computers, hence programmers. The 90's saw the introduction of the web as a means to do business and a further burgeoning of the industry. Y2K alone probably accounts for a 10% rise in programmer numbers.
Assuming that there is no more business being done, no new products being developed, and companies don't want to do further office automation, there has to be a weeding out of the programming labour pool.
The IT industry in the USA currently employs about 2.9 million people (analysts, programmers and operators).
I content that this so called decline is more likely the a reflection of the fact that there are hundreds of millions of PC's today, and in the early 1960's there were probably only a few thousand computers worldwide.
If we can stop the emission of light and trap the little photons, then what is to say we can't determine their spin, hence have a good look at everyones wonderful quantum encrypted messages. Stuff a crystal of this in the fiber and start to monitor the structure of the data packets, pick out your favourite light encrypted message, pass on, then look at the trail it made.
I'm old, my brain is addled, but being able to stop light, or its immediate emission, has to have counter intelligence uses.
Moderation isn't control. It's censure. Control would be CowboyNeal coming over to your place of computing, chopping off your fingers for typing the blasphemy, then dusting you over, imprisoning your loved ones, having your car repossessed, strangling the cat... Oh, I'm enjoying this too much!
But '-1' is NOT control, no way, no how.
Tossing something like 50,000 to 100,000lbs out the back door of a C-5 or C-17 is not for the faint of heart. The Angle of Attack change you mention would likely rip the wings of one of these boys.
Such large objects heaved out the rear are tricky, and made more so at 40,000ft where you need all the lift you can get because the jets are not making too much thrust. The change in fore to rear weight distribution as this thing moved would be a tough thing to handle, especially given that the heavyest bit is at the front of the rocket (the last bit to leave) hence has the greatest moment.
The L1011 launches its Pegasus from the underside of the aircraft so it will just respond by climbing. Opening rear doors and ejecting a larger mass will not be the same.
I have used MS products for 20+ years, I have made a good living riding BillG's coat tails, I think the company should be split, and they have been found to be a monoploy.
So what the F%%K does the DOJ think it's doing? This isn't an agreement, it's a legal burp. It basically says that things as they are, are the way they are going to stay.
Every Man and Woman in the DOJ should be fired. The whole darned lot.
MS spent millions defending itself, out of its own deep pockets. The DOJ spend yours and my tax money, millions of dollars, and managed to do what? They used MS-WOrd to type out an agreement that says go about your business as normal.
A first week legal student could blow away most of the "limits" in this agreement, some are not even effective now, and the ink hasn't dried on the signatures (Didn't XP replace 2000 a few days ago?). We have to remember that these documents have to be precise, that means when they mention things in detail there are easy routes round them.
This agreement is pure corruption. Corruption from the highest levels of Government, Heads should role for this.
Ya think I'm angry?
Wasn't this Valley company proposing just a few weeks ago that it be the host of the system that would hold the National Identity system? So, let me get this straight... Sun has servers, and presumably the support contract for the NI system that has data on all 260M Americans (and a good few others besides), and thinks this is less intrusive that M$ with Passport on "160 Million" users systems (spread across occasional and repeat users throughout the world - only about 20 million of whom reside in the USA) I for one don't have passport - deleting MSN and its cohorts is a favourite pastime.
More Sun FUD.
I would wholeheartedly agree with this. I have seen quite impressive hardware brought to its knees in educational surroundings. Students do more than just surf the web, the Comp Sci's are frequently compiling and running quite nasty code, this influences what all other users percieve as the systems' performance.
Rudgers (for one) has labs full of Sun and HP *nix workstations, in part to offset this performance bottleneck at the server. Rudgers system was almost completely donated don't think for a moment they could have afforded such a system - not without the football team selling the Stadium anyway.
A dual processor Sun is not the screamer it once seemed. Actually was it ever a screamer?
I could not disagree more with this story. Before the telegraph (remember Sam Morse?) we would have hung out at the local Inn, quaffing fine ales, and muttering in hushed tones about the traveller that just passed through. His stories and polemic would be how we got our 'news.'
Today we have the electronic means of hearing 6 billion peoples rumours. You naturally filter what you want. If you get overloaded, stop listening, wait a week and things will be clearer. We are a country obsessed with the 5 second sound bite: the clicker culture.
As they say, if you can't stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.
If anything, the current tidal wave of nauseous news is the consequence of a total vacuum of real facts. The Pentagon is silent about Afghanistan, the FBI is silent on its efforts to find the terrorists, and we end up inventing stories to fill the time. Accept it, get over it. See the re-run in 2 months and decide then what was pertinent.
If the doorstep price for a subscription to VS.NET is lower than the outright purchase price, you might find a lot of people getting on this one, epecially if it ensures that bugs will be fixed and development tools kept up to date.
Put up your hands all those that religiously keep gcc and emacs current.
IF (and it's a big if) M$ keeps the tools and frameworks current and makes updates painless then it should not be an issue if either the dev tools or the ".NET My Services" junk is subscription. The fact that I received 2 years of VS 6.0 service packs, on CD, in the mail, for my outlay, was a minor surprise to me.
Do not underestimate the cost of keeping dev tools current, anyone that bought Borland Turbo C or MS C v4.0, and still has C++Builder, or VS 6.0, can tell you that the cost of upgrading is appreciable, unforgiving and a permenant feature of being a active developer.
Dah! Wimp.
Go with Beryllium... Much lighter, slightly more poisonous and a whole bunch more exotic.
I started up my Cold Fusion. It has a copyright notice of 1995 - 1999 (so, I haven't upgraded recently.)
Also, the patent description seems to be intimating that this autodetects browsers... We did that in CF before 1998, too.
I worked at Ittsy Bittsy Machines in the early 90's. I thought initially the security (no offices had windows, no office had a door that faced a window) was for the protection of IBM's lauded secrets, then I realised that this was not so... it was to make sure the World was protected from the fact that IBM was 25 years behind the times.
I feel that the CIO's are battling the wrong foe. Too many have gone the way of ERP systems because the vendors are big and powerful. They have been suckered into paying huge amounts for what is essentially garbage. Monolithic garbage. Companies are not monolithic so why should the software be?
These CIO's are poorly clued into how their business works, and even less well able to understand what their own departments are doing. For the most part these CIO's sound more like the political wannabes that other professions have thrown up for years (look at the number of CEO's that are former sales people).
By not being bright about the software they bought in the first place, these CIO's seek to parry their failure by blaming the vendors for poor quality.
Tish!
You are not correct in some of your assertions.
If you find a NEW bug in an MS product then you get the call for free (they actually re-credit your call count, I think). If you call about an existing bug, one that someone else located your paying for the call, like it or not.
"and I've never heard of a case where a product was intentionally shipped with bugs"
Software is always delivered with bugs. Just because the testers didn't find them, does not mean they are not there. We often sent out systems riddled with bugs, accompanied by a huge rap sheet of listed, but unfixed bugs. A found bug is still a bug, it still gets delivered if found too late.
I don't think Fred Brooks ever said anything was a Silver Bullet, he pre-dates the concept of Silver Bullets, and is a little too sensible to fall for that one.
A database, Oracle rarely runs in under 512MB RAM (it needs it for its JVM, too), and don't forget the disk drive to take the GBytes of code bloat that Oracle sells as a product..
And we have a "Really Smart Card(tm)" that probably weights a couple of pounds, runs on two car batteries for about 2 or 3 days and has all the usefulness of a... dead dog.
I don't want no stinking Sun/Oracle solution, it's no solution, it's the problem.
Thinking too literally again: 13 yrs old is only US law. The rules under which Santa operates are open to interpretation.
However, the traffic indicates that whomever created his infrastructure (router, server, etc) should be hired away immediately, this is a true Geek Gnome!
I still want to find out how we move from these strange beginnings, 100 yrs after first contact, to later images of this fictional world. The writers have a great continuity issue to address.
Just to prove what a bunch of gibbons these censoring cretins are, they forgot to include America's all time favorite TV show theme tune...
The theme to M*A*S*H: "Suicide is Painless"
Just got my attempt to opt-out declined. Seems their web page has the wrong email address or something is a bit flaky in their processing of these messages.
Not knowing diddly about Fry's (they are a West Coast company, we're on the bombed side) I don't want them to have my info and the potential to abuse it.
Further, these TCO figures do not take into account that anyone with 50 or more servers generally has multiple locations, with multiple locations comes added recurring network costs.
WANs are never as fast as LANs, so now the people have to get their email and applications over slow links to far off Mainframes.
Strikes me I battled 20 years to educate people in distributed high-performance systems to no avail!
A single point of service is a single point of failure, too.