I actually read the entire technical description and yes (bar the thin client, which I withdraw) I am correct. I'm just being as vague as the OP.
I also hold a patent of a technical nature (microwave PLL implementation) so I'm hardly biased. In fact I still state it's a load of shit as I've had to spend a lot of money defending the patent in the past resulting in me just saying "do what the fuck you like with it" (yes I let you do that Analog Devices).
Now I understand that your ID is several powers lower than mine, but not need to be an asshat.
Definitely prior art then. I did this in 1992 when we booted our PLCs (their programs that is) off RS485 drops. When they were turned off the program memory was cleared.
In 1996 we did it with Solaris by mounting/usr/local and/opt off an NFS share with automount. When they were turned off, it dismounted.
In 2008 we did this with thin clients (which pull their OS and configuration from a TFTP server).
In 2011 we did this with Office using App-V (not an OS but the principle is the same).
High frequency trading is ethically wrong and high risk so this sort of shit should just be accepted as collateral from the investors. Instead they sue the shit out of each other. Unfortunately, it's survival of the fittest and richest asshole with the best lawyers at the end of the day.
As for bugs, they happen. HFT/algothmic trading is based on constant optimisation hacks which are rarely tested properly. There are no test. A model is provided, someone codes it and they throw it out. This can take a matter of minutes to hours. Don't expect it to work every time.
If you piss around with funds via HFT, expect to get burned.
No it's not hard at all. Most PCs come with everything pre-installed including a seeded copy of Office ready to go. Anything past Windows+Office is likely to be specialist and to be honest, at least in the UK, most people just go to PC World and buy boxed software as there is a human there who can help them choose.
For the majority of users, they already have that through Windows Update/Microsoft Update which takes care of their PC, antivirus and Office quite happily. Apt is great when you're offline isn't it - I assume you have 73 CDs or 11 DVDs on you all the time.
I don't care if my disk dies. I have backups and a spare laptop (Lenovo T61's are cheap as chips). Windows 7 whinges at you persistently if you don't set up a regular backup routine so there is no excuse! You plug a USB stick in and it deals with it for you. Laziness or ignorance is not an excuse.
Java on Windows is absolutely fine. We've got Java auto updater installed on about 2000 Windows 7 workstations and use WebStart for some of our apps. It rarely goes wrong.
I would never use a system like this for business or produtivity (that includes all cloud crap like Office 365, Google Docs etc as well). The motivation is purely to stone-wall other app stores off (such as the Windows App Store) and take as much market share and control as possible rather than to provide a fair and reasonable service.
The moment you're a customer, they don't care about you as you're locked in. Also the motivations - sorry but:
easy installation - it's not hard to install anything.
automatic updating - most software does this.
ability to save your work to your personal Steam Cloud space so your files may travel with you - I've got a fucking laptop with a hard disk dammit.
I hate saying this but you've got to be very lazy or stupid to trust one of these services.
Your intellectual superiority and private school background obviously doesn't stretch to literacy as you miss the clearly defined point.
I said the school was ranked badly. The education and teaching was excellent. The other students were not, as they came from the background described.
Three of my cousins go to an expensive private school in Cobham and believe me, they are not getting their money's worth both on their results and general intelligence. It's a false dichotomy to state that private education is superior.
Saying people should be responsible for themselves and outlining the consequences is not fascism (or social darwinism which is what I assume you are referring to). It's a popular viewpoint but again, another false dichotomy. Alf Garnett was a parody of the people I included in the comment, most of which who are right-wing types or more generally, the hate rag readers.
Now please go and remove your head from your anus.
No you've got the wrong end of the stick. I myself went through the crappiest ranked school in Hertfordshire in the 1980s and 1990s and am currently dragging my three children through one of the crappiest schools in London. I did VERY well and achieved A/B passes in everything at GCSE and A level. My children are doing well.
There is literally NOTHING AT ALL wrong with the curriculum then or now. It's broad, but extremely relevant to life in the UK and always was.
There are two problems: apathy and ranking.
The first problem - socialism has bred people who don't care and expect a lot for nothing. Most of these individuals just do not have a place in society as they have precisely no skills worth using. This is not due to education but apathy towards it. They don't give a shit about it either as they always have the state to fall back on. I experience these people daily and have done for 20 years. Having 8 children is their career path these days where they get given a £450k house to put them in.
The ranking system. People are ranked in order statistically and prevented from progressing up the ranks. You have to be the best or you don't have a chance.
It's fucked up. People need to get some realisation that if they don't or can't help themselves (bar any exceptional circumstances such as disabilities), that they should probably die hungry like the do in a lot of countries. The opportunities are ALWAYS there - they just choose the safety net every time.
Check the OFSTED pass rates for GCSE level English. Across the nation, in the majority of areas, less than 30% of students are passing with an A-C grade
The majority are unfortunately, primarily the result of the last two major generations. It's a fine example of where socialism breeds it's own suicide by providing for everyone regardless of the effort they make. The uneducated masses are breeding less educated people. It's like H.G.Well's vision of the future where the human race divides into two distinct species.
I am a "prolific" reader as well, but I don't think having thousands of texts at hand is necessary, especially when they are DRM encumbered. I read a book and give it to someone, then they read it and give it to someone. This cycle continues. Usually I get given a book and either read it or pass it on.
I'm currently reading Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and the TI-86 calculator manual.
This is not because eBooks are taking off. It's because they are great for consuming inane trash like Fifty Shades which have no literary value or retention reason.
The majority of the people in the UK are illiterate and the rest of us would rather buy second hand books than fish out for the cash for a new copy.
I bet they conveniently ignore the second hand market on Amazon as well.
Cisco, Juniper, HP, Nortel, Ericsson are all proprietary black boxes as well. Perhaps they all have vulnerabilities like this? We will never know but perhaps our governments do?
Unfortunately, it's a niche and there are no open source carrier grade router platforms:(
I'm the GPI've sat in front of Windows 8 for 8 weeks now on a Touch PC (Sony VPC-J1). We're a MS Gold Partner so I get the joys of test it. I also have a Nokia Lumia 710 so I think my point is more than speculation. It's simply a visual and process clusterfuck for any user who invested any time in Windows, both metro and not. Office 2013 and Visual Studio 2010 are also Metro-ized which is just horrible (I've tested both). It's a step backwards.
I have a 5 year old Lenovo T61 with an SSD and Windows 7 starts up from scratch in about 22 seconds. No app starts in less than 2-3 seconds. It gets rebooted once every couple of weeks (the rest of the time it's hibernated which takes 5-10 seconds to recover) so what is the problem on boot time and startup time people moan about?
I'd be less pissed off if they just lost Metro and removed all the Metro styling from new apps.
The social and entertainment wankfest works, if it makes someone an advertising buck. The moment you're no longer earning for them, you're tossed on the street.
When it comes down to doing important things, it's a fucking disaster.
Config.sys? Yeah I remember that, setting IRQ7 and port 220h for my SoundBlaster AWE32. Hard times eh? Well compare that to trying to get VMWare ESX 4 talking to a SAN so I can persuade it that the LUN has more than 2Tb of capacity. Esp when your kit costs £0.5m a whack. Nope doesn't do it, so we have to fuck around and do volume spanning to get our desired 42Tb array (for storing real shit like financial documents and medical data, not pissy videos of your kids falling off shit and facebook wanking).
Autoexec.bat? Yeah I remember that, loading in my TSRs. Hard times eh? Well compare that to working out why the fuck an MS hotfix broke our entire.Net stack by setting cache expiry wrong, causing a problem with a certain version of IE8 which happened to be deployed to 20,000 of our client machines...
Haven't opened your PC since you bought it. We have 20x 48 Core Xeon boxes which needed assembly and arrive on pallets. That and 1540 workstations and laptops which need to be secured. We have 10-20 workstations cycled per week due to failures and users fucking them up.
I'm not doing it wrong - you're not doing enough to gain experience of how shitty it is. You are a consumer. You are the people who they bother to fix stuff for and the point of my email above. Unfortunately, what we do (the non consumerists), makes the world go round. Noone would blink an eye if half of the tech you mentioned above disappeared overnight.
Yes they are going through an extensive rebrand to make everything Metro-esque, including hardware. While I appreciate it for web sites and branding, it's shit if you have to do anything other than consume with it.
We appear to be entering the age where we are the mercy of the designer and the consumer.
Every "innovation" is now in the design space and is simply about establishing a brand and adding a layer of turd polish rather than solving problems or increasing efficiency.
Look at Metro, look at Windows Phone, look at these input devices, look at everything Apple has done for the last 10 years, look at everything.
It still takes us 3 months to knock out a simple bit of software, stuff still needs endless updates, problems haven't got any simpler to solve, nothing connects or works with other things properly without arguing with endless layers of configuration. Computing has become the activity, not the saviour of our time which is supposed to deliver us from mind numbing repetitiveness. We've gone nowhere.
We spend all day commuting between meetings with different companies, standing up on trains, sprinting for others, running between car rental lots, walking around offices swearing at developers, weight lifting a loaded out ThinkPad. It also teaches you zen-like patience and self control that no martial art can (to resist the temptation to go postal during a PowerPoint).
I spent the last 10 years sitting in front of Visual Studio all day, writing C# (since 2002) and LINQ (since 2008) and you are just wrong, so incredibly wrong. It's only better because you paid lots of moolah for it and it makes you feel all fuzzy. You know like cocaine. The recruitment pimps also pay better because you're tied into the ecosystem.
Give me C, Valgrind and Vi and I'll run rings round anything the Microsoft ecosystem can do, but I'll earn half as much and I won't get my warm fuzzy feeling.
The only problem with exploding population is that it's not profitable to move all the food around so some people throw 50% away and some people starve.
Oh and as for governments, they don't scale. We need to start chopping everything up into smaller bits.
Slashdot Mirror
Missionary!
I actually read the entire technical description and yes (bar the thin client, which I withdraw) I am correct. I'm just being as vague as the OP.
I also hold a patent of a technical nature (microwave PLL implementation) so I'm hardly biased. In fact I still state it's a load of shit as I've had to spend a lot of money defending the patent in the past resulting in me just saying "do what the fuck you like with it" (yes I let you do that Analog Devices).
Now I understand that your ID is several powers lower than mine, but not need to be an asshat.
Definitely prior art then. I did this in 1992 when we booted our PLCs (their programs that is) off RS485 drops. When they were turned off the program memory was cleared.
In 1996 we did it with Solaris by mounting /usr/local and /opt off an NFS share with automount. When they were turned off, it dismounted.
In 2008 we did this with thin clients (which pull their OS and configuration from a TFTP server).
In 2011 we did this with Office using App-V (not an OS but the principle is the same).
More proof that patents are a load of shit.
High frequency trading is ethically wrong and high risk so this sort of shit should just be accepted as collateral from the investors. Instead they sue the shit out of each other. Unfortunately, it's survival of the fittest and richest asshole with the best lawyers at the end of the day.
As for bugs, they happen. HFT/algothmic trading is based on constant optimisation hacks which are rarely tested properly. There are no test. A model is provided, someone codes it and they throw it out. This can take a matter of minutes to hours. Don't expect it to work every time.
If you piss around with funds via HFT, expect to get burned.
(I used to work in HFT - it's a scam).
No it's not hard at all. Most PCs come with everything pre-installed including a seeded copy of Office ready to go. Anything past Windows+Office is likely to be specialist and to be honest, at least in the UK, most people just go to PC World and buy boxed software as there is a human there who can help them choose.
For the majority of users, they already have that through Windows Update/Microsoft Update which takes care of their PC, antivirus and Office quite happily. Apt is great when you're offline isn't it - I assume you have 73 CDs or 11 DVDs on you all the time.
I don't care if my disk dies. I have backups and a spare laptop (Lenovo T61's are cheap as chips). Windows 7 whinges at you persistently if you don't set up a regular backup routine so there is no excuse! You plug a USB stick in and it deals with it for you. Laziness or ignorance is not an excuse.
Java on Windows is absolutely fine. We've got Java auto updater installed on about 2000 Windows 7 workstations and use WebStart for some of our apps. It rarely goes wrong.
I would never use a system like this for business or produtivity (that includes all cloud crap like Office 365, Google Docs etc as well). The motivation is purely to stone-wall other app stores off (such as the Windows App Store) and take as much market share and control as possible rather than to provide a fair and reasonable service.
The moment you're a customer, they don't care about you as you're locked in. Also the motivations - sorry but:
easy installation - it's not hard to install anything.
automatic updating - most software does this.
ability to save your work to your personal Steam Cloud space so your files may travel with you - I've got a fucking laptop with a hard disk dammit.
I hate saying this but you've got to be very lazy or stupid to trust one of these services.
Your intellectual superiority and private school background obviously doesn't stretch to literacy as you miss the clearly defined point.
I said the school was ranked badly. The education and teaching was excellent. The other students were not, as they came from the background described.
Three of my cousins go to an expensive private school in Cobham and believe me, they are not getting their money's worth both on their results and general intelligence. It's a false dichotomy to state that private education is superior.
Saying people should be responsible for themselves and outlining the consequences is not fascism (or social darwinism which is what I assume you are referring to). It's a popular viewpoint but again, another false dichotomy. Alf Garnett was a parody of the people I included in the comment, most of which who are right-wing types or more generally, the hate rag readers.
Now please go and remove your head from your anus.
No you've got the wrong end of the stick. I myself went through the crappiest ranked school in Hertfordshire in the 1980s and 1990s and am currently dragging my three children through one of the crappiest schools in London. I did VERY well and achieved A/B passes in everything at GCSE and A level. My children are doing well.
There is literally NOTHING AT ALL wrong with the curriculum then or now. It's broad, but extremely relevant to life in the UK and always was.
There are two problems: apathy and ranking.
The first problem - socialism has bred people who don't care and expect a lot for nothing. Most of these individuals just do not have a place in society as they have precisely no skills worth using. This is not due to education but apathy towards it. They don't give a shit about it either as they always have the state to fall back on. I experience these people daily and have done for 20 years. Having 8 children is their career path these days where they get given a £450k house to put them in.
The ranking system. People are ranked in order statistically and prevented from progressing up the ranks. You have to be the best or you don't have a chance.
It's fucked up. People need to get some realisation that if they don't or can't help themselves (bar any exceptional circumstances such as disabilities), that they should probably die hungry like the do in a lot of countries. The opportunities are ALWAYS there - they just choose the safety net every time.
You're confusing statistical ranking (the government's policy) with fair grading.
Everyone should be getting a fair education and A-C grades.
Thank you - you nailed my point.
Check the OFSTED pass rates for GCSE level English. Across the nation, in the majority of areas, less than 30% of students are passing with an A-C grade
The majority are unfortunately, primarily the result of the last two major generations. It's a fine example of where socialism breeds it's own suicide by providing for everyone regardless of the effort they make. The uneducated masses are breeding less educated people. It's like H.G.Well's vision of the future where the human race divides into two distinct species.
I am a "prolific" reader as well, but I don't think having thousands of texts at hand is necessary, especially when they are DRM encumbered. I read a book and give it to someone, then they read it and give it to someone. This cycle continues. Usually I get given a book and either read it or pass it on.
I'm currently reading Catch-22 by Joseph Heller and the TI-86 calculator manual.
This is not because eBooks are taking off. It's because they are great for consuming inane trash like Fifty Shades which have no literary value or retention reason.
The majority of the people in the UK are illiterate and the rest of us would rather buy second hand books than fish out for the cash for a new copy.
I bet they conveniently ignore the second hand market on Amazon as well.
Cisco, Juniper, HP, Nortel, Ericsson are all proprietary black boxes as well. Perhaps they all have vulnerabilities like this? We will never know but perhaps our governments do?
Unfortunately, it's a niche and there are no open source carrier grade router platforms :(
That's exactly my point :)
I can also hack the TI on a train/bus. I've built some software which does geometric calculations and BOM for building yurts recently.
I'm the GPI've sat in front of Windows 8 for 8 weeks now on a Touch PC (Sony VPC-J1). We're a MS Gold Partner so I get the joys of test it. I also have a Nokia Lumia 710 so I think my point is more than speculation. It's simply a visual and process clusterfuck for any user who invested any time in Windows, both metro and not. Office 2013 and Visual Studio 2010 are also Metro-ized which is just horrible (I've tested both). It's a step backwards.
I have a 5 year old Lenovo T61 with an SSD and Windows 7 starts up from scratch in about 22 seconds. No app starts in less than 2-3 seconds. It gets rebooted once every couple of weeks (the rest of the time it's hibernated which takes 5-10 seconds to recover) so what is the problem on boot time and startup time people moan about?
I'd be less pissed off if they just lost Metro and removed all the Metro styling from new apps.
Hardware is irrelevant. The software progress is non existent other than turd polish.
Great discussion here, which explains why I still lug a 17 year old Ti-85 calculator around for math related tasks: http://www.loper-os.org/?p=300
None of our software works on Linux, and it cost about £24m to build. I don't think there's a cost justification there.
The social and entertainment wankfest works, if it makes someone an advertising buck. The moment you're no longer earning for them, you're tossed on the street.
When it comes down to doing important things, it's a fucking disaster.
Config.sys? Yeah I remember that, setting IRQ7 and port 220h for my SoundBlaster AWE32. Hard times eh? Well compare that to trying to get VMWare ESX 4 talking to a SAN so I can persuade it that the LUN has more than 2Tb of capacity. Esp when your kit costs £0.5m a whack. Nope doesn't do it, so we have to fuck around and do volume spanning to get our desired 42Tb array (for storing real shit like financial documents and medical data, not pissy videos of your kids falling off shit and facebook wanking).
Autoexec.bat? Yeah I remember that, loading in my TSRs. Hard times eh? Well compare that to working out why the fuck an MS hotfix broke our entire .Net stack by setting cache expiry wrong, causing a problem with a certain version of IE8 which happened to be deployed to 20,000 of our client machines...
Haven't opened your PC since you bought it. We have 20x 48 Core Xeon boxes which needed assembly and arrive on pallets. That and 1540 workstations and laptops which need to be secured. We have 10-20 workstations cycled per week due to failures and users fucking them up.
I'm not doing it wrong - you're not doing enough to gain experience of how shitty it is. You are a consumer. You are the people who they bother to fix stuff for and the point of my email above. Unfortunately, what we do (the non consumerists), makes the world go round. Noone would blink an eye if half of the tech you mentioned above disappeared overnight.
Yes they are going through an extensive rebrand to make everything Metro-esque, including hardware. While I appreciate it for web sites and branding, it's shit if you have to do anything other than consume with it.
We appear to be entering the age where we are the mercy of the designer and the consumer.
Every "innovation" is now in the design space and is simply about establishing a brand and adding a layer of turd polish rather than solving problems or increasing efficiency.
Look at Metro, look at Windows Phone, look at these input devices, look at everything Apple has done for the last 10 years, look at everything.
It still takes us 3 months to knock out a simple bit of software, stuff still needs endless updates, problems haven't got any simpler to solve, nothing connects or works with other things properly without arguing with endless layers of configuration. Computing has become the activity, not the saviour of our time which is supposed to deliver us from mind numbing repetitiveness. We've gone nowhere.
Real technical innovation is dead. RIP.
We spend all day commuting between meetings with different companies, standing up on trains, sprinting for others, running between car rental lots, walking around offices swearing at developers, weight lifting a loaded out ThinkPad. It also teaches you zen-like patience and self control that no martial art can (to resist the temptation to go postal during a PowerPoint).
viper - http://www.informatik.uni-hamburg.de/RZ/software/emacs/viper/viper_3.html
A small piece of me weeps when I see this.
I spent the last 10 years sitting in front of Visual Studio all day, writing C# (since 2002) and LINQ (since 2008) and you are just wrong, so incredibly wrong. It's only better because you paid lots of moolah for it and it makes you feel all fuzzy. You know like cocaine. The recruitment pimps also pay better because you're tied into the ecosystem.
Give me C, Valgrind and Vi and I'll run rings round anything the Microsoft ecosystem can do, but I'll earn half as much and I won't get my warm fuzzy feeling.
Now there's the truth.
The only problem with exploding population is that it's not profitable to move all the food around so some people throw 50% away and some people starve.
Oh and as for governments, they don't scale. We need to start chopping everything up into smaller bits.