I defer to no-one in my distaste for Windows, and I have GNU credentials stretching back twenty years (I've got code in emacs 17). However, it's
worth pointing out that EMC disk arrays, hardly pieces of kit that fall over at the drop of a hat, run Windows 2000 (on the CX200/400/600) and Windows XP (on
the CX300/500/700) quite happily. Note for admin: it's in the direct path from fibre channel to disk.
And I've used Datacore's SanSymphony product,
which runs on 2000, to serve up a virtualised SAN (consisting mostly of the
aforementioned EMC kit) to Sun NFS servers. No failures due to the OS in
either scenario in some years. And at the other extreme, my only Windows
machine, a home-built one used by my family, has fallen over precisely never in
over a year. Intel motherboard, decent disks and graphics cards, etc.
If you run Windows on a stable, properly supported, properly assembled
platform, running mainstream applications, it's as stable as anything else.
Throw in ill-behaved applications then it's worse than the alternatives,
because the scheduler and the GCI aren't as robust. Throw in bad hardware
and it's a pile of crap, but then so's pretty well any OS until you get to
the point of having memory retirement, processor retirement and all the rest
of the Solaris 10 mod cons. And to get the full benefit of Mike Shapiro et
al's work on fault management in s10, you currently need Sun hardware.
Ironically, as a desktop (where it dominates), Windows' poor behaviour on
marginal hardware and with weird application mixes shows up painfully. On
server-class hardware with stable job mixes it's fine, but in most shops
those jobs go to Unix.
It's almost universal to use the byte count as part of the checking of equivalence, either by
storing it as a distinct item or by using it as inital or final salt to the calculation of the hash.
You would expect the Dutch to be slightly more attuned to this.
The roundups in 1942 were massively aided by the Dutch census of 1937, which included religious affiliation. And massive collaboration by the police and civil service, of course, but few European countries reacted to roundups of Jews with anything other than enthusiasm. It's instructive to note how few Dutch Jews survived the war with how many Danish Jews did. In Denmark, there wasn't a population register with religion on it, and the civil service behaved impeccably.
If little Johnny brings home a game Mom doesn't approve of, Mom always has the option to destroy it. And if Mom doesn't know enough about Computers / Playstations / whatever to be able to impose whatever morality she deems appropriate, it's her house, and the electronics little Johnny has aren't ultimately his choice.
I left my kids hacking Garageband on the house iBook this morning. However, there's a ``no purchased computer games of any description'' policy, and the web browsers are sat behind squid plus squidguard plus decent logging. Age nine and seven these seem reasonable policies. If they don't like it, they know where the front door is.
I'm sick of parents buying their children things and claiming that it's then someone else's responsibility to police those things. Yes, I'm fortunate in that the ``kids these days know more about computers than their parents'' argument doesn't apply with me (if I can run a BSI- and BT- audited security infrastructure at a quarter-billion pound company, I can run enough to keep kids out of my servers in my house). But bluntly, if you've bought your child a computer, and you worry you don't what they're doing with it and you think you should, either move it into the living room or put a hammer through it.
It's hard to know what's true and what's not in Peter Wright's paranoid delusions (Spycatcher) but that book documents using a microphone to listen to the sounds of a cipher machine being set in an embassy circa 1955. The book was written in the late seventies. It doesn't matter if it's true or not: he knew the idea and wrote it down.
ian
I don't give a toss about any justification for calling me to
'educate' me: it's my phone, and I don't pay for it for random
companies and political interests to phone me on. But
handily I live in the UK, where the do not call list has some
vague teeth, and I'm XD. As a result I get a random marketing
call about once per year, which is how it should be.
The parent article believes that the telphone is like the telescreen
in 1984, alway there for the state to harrass the citizen.
Except in fact I needed to teach OSX about our on-site NTP servers. The dialog will let you synch to a local NTP server rather than a remote one, but the defaults for the minpoll and maxpoll figures aren't appropriate for a private NTP server on the local LAN. I also wanted to use NTP authentication, but I haven't got around to doing that yet.
It's perfectly reasonable that OSX doesn't expose this stuff in the dialogue boxes, as setting minpoll down to 4 (16 seconds) would be a bit anti-social for major public stratum one servers, the variety of authentication options is immense, and anyway in Windows you need your regedit mojo to be working to even change the polling strategy.
After 20 years of SunOS/Solaris on my desktop I'm having a little explore of OSX. Found a flimsy excuse for a Mac Mini and a 1G
stick of RAM, bought a couple of wallpaper strippers to open the
case and off I go. So I'm unusual in being a motivated Mac
switcher whose background is not Windows. Three days, and
I'm enjoying it at lot (although I got frustrated with the
limitations of the Date and Time dialogue and hacked/etc/ntp.conf by hand...)
Inconsistencies in the Mac UI? The most obvious one is that
you double click to launch applications from the finder but
single click them from the dock. Double click isn't always
safe, because sometimes it'll launch two copies.
Another is that some configuration dialogs have `OK'
or similar buttons, while others take effect immediately, while
others take effect when they are dismissed.
These are hardly earth-shattering, and as a long-term
GUI-distruster I'm very impressed (hell, I'm using `Mail' while
since 1988 I've used MH or mutt). But it's not perfect: it's just
very, very good.
Valuable in the same way that 8 track cassettes
are valuable, presumably? Or Philips V2000?
Or Philips N1500? Or any number of other failed
formats. Unless there happens to be fascinating
content encoded on the media, they're of almost
no interest.
$500 dollars is not going to make a mass market
product for film replay. DVD players are
about 30 pounds, so I presume about 40 dollars,
for perfectly usable quality. That drives
volume for the disks, not high-end exotica.
That a PS3 will play
them doesn't help, because families (you know,
involving adults that have had sex, in case/.
readers need that spelt out) might want to
watch a film when little Jimmy isn't
blowing things up. Not to mention that the user
interface on games-boxes-acting-as-DVD-players
isn't exactly slick.
Actually, it's not the competition or the lack of HDTV: it's the DRM. Not because the man in the street cares about the philosophical issues of information freedom, of course. But because a huge portion of the reason people have DVD players is to play pirate material. Not just slacker college kids, but yummy mummys outside
my kids' school are buying and watching hooky copies of films.
I have a moral aversion to piracy so
don't partake, but I routinely buy US region coded stuff in advance of its UK release, which will
also presumably go by the board in the new DRM
paradise.
Format wars and market confusion killed DCC and
(for practical purposes) MD, but they were
doomed anyway because of hard disk MP3 players
for portable and CD burners for archive.
However, no-one seriously doubted that cassette
was not a long term strategy, so there was a
niche to fight for.
VHS likewise had serious
issues (low quality, lack of random access) which
meant that DVD and TiVO-alikes were going to eat
its lunch. And going back in time, the lack
of random access and the (for consumers, not
geeky Linn LP12+Itok+Troika owners) poor quality
provided market pull for CD over 33pm 12" vinyl. But DVD? Who's
screaming ``not enough quality''? Who's screaming
``not enough capacity''? Who's screaming ``not
enough DRM?''
The heavy DVD users I know are all stashing the
DVD images on hard disks and streaming them over
wireless networks. They're not pleading for more
bits. And they're certainly not pleading for
more DRM.
There's actually winemaking in Staffordshire
(over a hundred miles north of West Sussex).
http://www.halfpenny-green-vineyards.co.uk/.
It sells at my local farmers' market, although
I've not tried it. My parents say it's good.
ian
Because when the cursor gets close to the end of the line, I press whatever you young people call `Return'. This automatic wrapping business will never catch on, I tell you.
(Actually, I need trying to wean myself off doing it when I'm typing into text boxes in web browsers that are narrower than God's Own 80 characters. But thirty-odd years of reflex force my hand to the key to the right of the ] character... ]]
Harrison Ford said of Lucas' ``dialogue'' for Star Wars that ``You can write this shit, George, but you sure as hell can't say it''. Seeing the writing of Star Trek laid out that nakedly on the page makes Star Wars read like Marlowe.
My ten year old's next trip to Stratford will most likely be Patrick Stewart as Prospero in the main house `Tempest'. Let's hope that doesn't give her a sudden interest in TNG...
Sure to God noone is doing authentication using something other than UTC? If you're using clock-on-the-wall time to do authentication, you're mad. You'll have a hideous window of vulnerability during the duplicate hour when the clocks go back, and tickets expiring suddenly when the clocks go forward. And that's before we ask how on earth you're handling the case of an authentication server handling requests from multiple time zones.
Any computer that uses anything other than UTC to to anything other than display things cosmetically is losing. You should be storing a timezone-neutral format, you should be issuing tickets ditto. Before someone even nerdier about clocks than me jumps in, I can understand people who want to tick UT0 or UT1 --- astronomers --- where the offset from UTC is non-integer, and I if I were in a bad mood I could make a case for storing dates in applications in TAI, so that time arithmetic is correct over leap-seconds.
ian
Re:CRL is also going - home of two X-perts
on
HP Fires Father of OOP
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
DEC had a huge research empire. CRL in MA, handy for the MIT diaspora. WRL in Palo Alto for the Stanford diaspora. And then for added flavour SRC a block down from WRL, created so that Bob Taylor could employ the PARC diaspora (Thacker, Lampson). What good did it do them? A lot of work on X --- the xterm(1) manual page has people from all three, I think. Alta Vista, which Mike Burrows and others did at SRC. Brian Reid did a load of interesting stuff at WRL. Lamport was at SRC at various points, for which us LaTeX users give much thanks. I'm told SRC people bailed the Alpha design out at various points. But after that? At least a thousand man-years to produce...?
Compaq kept it all going, but HP already had labs in Palo Alto and Bristol. How many research operations does a PC maker with a shrinking server market need? To do what?
It would be an interesting question to ask how many of Kay's projects have made money for his then employer. As to whose fault that is, that's another question, of course. But the idea that the business plan is:
Meadows has just been struck off. He was struck off for playing fast and loose with statistics at murder trials, but I suspect that M-b-P, his other Great Work, will get a fairly radical reassessment over the next few years.
Did you even read the article you linked to? The child wasn't born with condition, it was caused by the position they slept in. It wasn't life-threatening. The consequences of the treatment aren't described. It's something that the pages in turned link to admit is a cosmetic problem in the main, and something most children grow through anyway. But hey, you can spend lots of money to put your child in a brace 23 hours a day because you don't like people asking you why the back of their head's a bit flat.
I have quaint views on IPR, and all the 8000-odd tracks on my iPod are taken from my bought and paid for CDs. However, in two cases I've had to use cdparanoia and cdrecord in order to produce a CD that will play in my car. Both are BMG releases using their insane ``copy protection'' scheme. So, let's get this straight: they are making CDs with a copy protection scheme that is invisible to a widely used means of duplication, but which forces someone with an attitude to piracy that is unusually rigid to engage in piracy so he can play a paid-for CD in his car? Madness.
Internet? Arguable: packet switching was done by a team at NPL Teddington.
Man to Moon? Take Von Braun out and it's a different story.
A Bomb? Frisch and Peierls at Birmingham and later Liverpool did a lot of the theoretical work, and Birmingham Chemistry Dept did the UF6 gas diffusion method. The Tube Alloys project might have produced a viable device, although America certainly contributed the engineering and exploitation technologies.
H Bomb I don't know enough about.
Most of the rest arose in several places at about the same time, emerging from well-established science.
In what way are European countries analogous to US states? If you want to position yourself on the wacky fringe of unelectability in almost any European country, try proposing `Federalist' EU laws. `Federalist' has a ring to it akin to `Communist' in Texas.
Most European countries have ID card schemes, some of them compulsory carry. The UK doesn't, but it's on Labour's manifesto. My money's on it not happening this parliament, but for reasons of electoral arithmetic (Blair's majority is reduced and Labour MPs likely to vote blindly for his measures disproportionately lost their seats, so he has a bigger problem with --- largely anti ID-card --- backbench rebels).
You're right that European privacy laws are tighter than in the US --- how you tolerate not having the Data Protection Act and its EU analogues I don't know --- but it's naive to believe that the situation is entirely unlike the US.
Cheating death and changing fate is the exact antithesis of Greek tragedy. Once the fates have decreed, no man can avoid their wrath. Oedipus tries mightily, but he is destroyed, as is Creon. By the time of Shakespeare the tragedy flows from the `fatal flaw' within the individual (although they still usually wind up dead), but at the time of the Greeks men were just the playthings of the Gods. Contrast Lear with Oedipus.
Yeah, I always find it bizarre that in the US you go to see a film with an R rating and it's full of babies. I saw, for ironic purposes, `Body of Evidence' when it released, and someone had their six year old with them. I don't happen to think it's corrupting, dangerous, etc: just that the poor kid was bored rigid. Mind you, so was I...
In the UK, the PG-* ratings are indeed advisory, but everything else (12, 15, 18) are mandatory. Indeed, my recollection is that they are enforced by legislation, although no-one has ever been prosecuted. Cinemas do however make a vague attempt to enforce them, about as seriously as pubs do drinking laws (hint for those that haven't left the borders of the USA: there may be some heavy sarcasm in this sentence).
Slashdot Mirror
And I've used Datacore's SanSymphony product, which runs on 2000, to serve up a virtualised SAN (consisting mostly of the aforementioned EMC kit) to Sun NFS servers. No failures due to the OS in either scenario in some years. And at the other extreme, my only Windows machine, a home-built one used by my family, has fallen over precisely never in over a year. Intel motherboard, decent disks and graphics cards, etc.
If you run Windows on a stable, properly supported, properly assembled platform, running mainstream applications, it's as stable as anything else. Throw in ill-behaved applications then it's worse than the alternatives, because the scheduler and the GCI aren't as robust. Throw in bad hardware and it's a pile of crap, but then so's pretty well any OS until you get to the point of having memory retirement, processor retirement and all the rest of the Solaris 10 mod cons. And to get the full benefit of Mike Shapiro et al's work on fault management in s10, you currently need Sun hardware.
Ironically, as a desktop (where it dominates), Windows' poor behaviour on marginal hardware and with weird application mixes shows up painfully. On server-class hardware with stable job mixes it's fine, but in most shops those jobs go to Unix.
ian
ian
ian
I left my kids hacking Garageband on the house iBook this morning. However, there's a ``no purchased computer games
of any description'' policy, and the web browsers are sat behind
squid plus squidguard plus decent logging. Age nine and seven
these seem reasonable policies. If they don't like it, they know
where the front door is.
I'm sick of parents buying their children things and claiming
that it's then someone else's responsibility to police those things. Yes, I'm fortunate in that the ``kids these days know more about computers than their parents'' argument doesn't
apply with me (if I can run a BSI- and BT- audited security infrastructure at a quarter-billion pound company, I can run
enough to keep kids out of my servers in my house). But bluntly, if you've bought your child a computer, and you worry you don't what they're doing with it and you think you should, either move it into the living room or put a hammer through it.
ian
It's hard to know what's true and what's not in Peter Wright's paranoid delusions (Spycatcher) but that book documents using a microphone to listen to the sounds of a cipher machine being set in an embassy circa 1955. The book was written in the late seventies. It doesn't matter if it's true or not: he knew the idea and wrote it down. ian
The parent article believes that the telphone is like the telescreen in 1984, alway there for the state to harrass the citizen.
ian
Except in fact I needed to teach OSX about our on-site NTP servers.
The dialog will let you synch to a local NTP server rather than a
remote one, but the defaults for the minpoll and maxpoll figures
aren't appropriate for a private NTP server on the local LAN. I also
wanted to use NTP authentication, but I haven't got around to
doing that yet.
It's perfectly reasonable that OSX doesn't expose this stuff in the
dialogue boxes, as setting minpoll down to 4 (16 seconds) would
be a bit anti-social for major public stratum one servers, the
variety of authentication options is immense, and anyway in
Windows you need your regedit mojo to be working to even
change the polling strategy.
ian
Inconsistencies in the Mac UI? The most obvious one is that you double click to launch applications from the finder but single click them from the dock. Double click isn't always safe, because sometimes it'll launch two copies.
Another is that some configuration dialogs have `OK' or similar buttons, while others take effect immediately, while others take effect when they are dismissed.
These are hardly earth-shattering, and as a long-term GUI-distruster I'm very impressed (hell, I'm using `Mail' while since 1988 I've used MH or mutt). But it's not perfect: it's just very, very good.
ian
ian
That a PS3 will play them doesn't help, because families (you know, involving adults that have had sex, in case /.
readers need that spelt out) might want to
watch a film when little Jimmy isn't
blowing things up. Not to mention that the user
interface on games-boxes-acting-as-DVD-players
isn't exactly slick.
ian
I have a moral aversion to piracy so don't partake, but I routinely buy US region coded stuff in advance of its UK release, which will also presumably go by the board in the new DRM paradise.
Format wars and market confusion killed DCC and (for practical purposes) MD, but they were doomed anyway because of hard disk MP3 players for portable and CD burners for archive. However, no-one seriously doubted that cassette was not a long term strategy, so there was a niche to fight for.
VHS likewise had serious issues (low quality, lack of random access) which meant that DVD and TiVO-alikes were going to eat its lunch. And going back in time, the lack of random access and the (for consumers, not geeky Linn LP12+Itok+Troika owners) poor quality provided market pull for CD over 33pm 12" vinyl. But DVD? Who's screaming ``not enough quality''? Who's screaming ``not enough capacity''? Who's screaming ``not enough DRM?''
The heavy DVD users I know are all stashing the DVD images on hard disks and streaming them over wireless networks. They're not pleading for more bits. And they're certainly not pleading for more DRM.
ian
There's actually winemaking in Staffordshire (over a hundred miles north of West Sussex). http://www.halfpenny-green-vineyards.co.uk/. It sells at my local farmers' market, although I've not tried it. My parents say it's good.
ian
Because when the cursor gets close to the end
of the line, I press whatever you young people
call `Return'. This automatic wrapping business
will never catch on, I tell you.
(Actually, I need trying to wean myself off doing
it when I'm typing into text boxes in web browsers
that are narrower than God's Own 80 characters.
But thirty-odd years of reflex force my hand to
the key to the right of the ] character... ]]
ian
Harrison Ford said of Lucas' ``dialogue'' for
Star Wars that ``You can write this shit, George,
but you sure as hell can't say it''. Seeing the
writing of Star Trek laid out that nakedly on the
page makes Star Wars read like Marlowe.
My ten year old's next trip to Stratford will most
likely be Patrick Stewart as Prospero in the main
house `Tempest'. Let's hope that doesn't give
her a sudden interest in TNG...
ian
Sure to God noone is doing authentication using
something other than UTC? If you're using
clock-on-the-wall time to do authentication,
you're mad. You'll have a hideous window of
vulnerability during the duplicate hour when
the clocks go back, and tickets expiring
suddenly when the clocks go forward. And
that's before we ask how on earth you're
handling the case of an authentication
server handling requests from multiple time
zones.
Any computer that uses anything other than UTC
to to anything other than display things
cosmetically is losing. You should be storing
a timezone-neutral format, you should be
issuing tickets ditto. Before someone even nerdier
about clocks than me jumps in, I can understand
people who want to tick UT0 or UT1 --- astronomers
--- where the offset from UTC is non-integer,
and I if I were in a bad mood I could make a case
for storing dates in applications in TAI, so
that time arithmetic is correct over leap-seconds.
ian
DEC had a huge research empire. CRL in MA, handy
for the MIT diaspora. WRL in Palo Alto for the
Stanford diaspora. And then for added flavour
SRC a block down from WRL, created so that Bob
Taylor could employ the PARC diaspora (Thacker,
Lampson). What good did it do them? A lot of
work on X --- the xterm(1) manual page has people
from all three, I think. Alta Vista, which Mike
Burrows and others did at SRC. Brian Reid did a
load of interesting stuff at WRL. Lamport was
at SRC at various points, for which us LaTeX users
give much thanks. I'm told SRC people bailed
the Alpha design out at various points. But after
that? At least a thousand man-years to produce...?
Compaq kept it all going, but HP already had labs
in Palo Alto and Bristol. How many research
operations does a PC maker with a shrinking
server market need? To do what?
ian
It would be an interesting question to ask how
many of Kay's projects have made money for his
then employer. As to whose fault that is, that's
another question, of course. But the idea that
the business plan is:
1. Employ visionary CS giant
2. Shovel in money
3. ???
4. PROFIT!!!!
is somewhat naive. For example, none of the
luminaries were involved directly in Mac, which
has made money.
ian
Meadows has just been struck off. He was struck
off for playing fast and loose with statistics
at murder trials, but I suspect that M-b-P,
his other Great Work, will get a fairly
radical reassessment over the next few years.
ian
Did you even read the article you linked to?
The child wasn't born with condition, it was caused
by the position they slept in. It wasn't
life-threatening. The consequences of the
treatment aren't described. It's something
that the pages in turned link to admit is
a cosmetic problem in the main, and something
most children grow through anyway. But hey,
you can spend lots of money to put your child
in a brace 23 hours a day because you don't
like people asking you why the back of their
head's a bit flat.
ian
I have quaint views on IPR, and all the 8000-odd
tracks on my iPod are taken from my bought and
paid for CDs. However, in two cases I've had to
use cdparanoia and cdrecord in order to produce
a CD that will play in my car. Both are BMG
releases using their insane ``copy protection''
scheme. So, let's get this straight: they are
making CDs with a copy protection scheme that
is invisible to a widely used means of duplication,
but which forces someone with an attitude to
piracy that is unusually rigid to engage in
piracy so he can play a paid-for CD in his car?
Madness.
ian
Copland, Sagan, Butthead Astronomer: all these
were internal codenames that caused a ruckus.
ian
Internet? Arguable: packet switching was
done by a team at NPL Teddington.
Man to Moon? Take Von Braun out and it's
a different story.
A Bomb? Frisch and Peierls at Birmingham
and later Liverpool did a lot of the
theoretical work, and Birmingham Chemistry
Dept did the UF6 gas diffusion method. The
Tube Alloys project might have produced a
viable device, although America certainly
contributed the engineering and exploitation
technologies.
H Bomb I don't know enough about.
Most of the rest arose in several places at about
the same time, emerging from well-established
science.
ian
In what way are European countries analogous to
US states? If you want to position yourself on
the wacky fringe of unelectability in almost
any European country, try proposing `Federalist'
EU laws. `Federalist' has a ring to it akin to
`Communist' in Texas.
Most European countries have ID card schemes, some
of them compulsory carry. The UK doesn't, but
it's on Labour's manifesto. My money's on it not
happening this parliament, but for reasons of
electoral arithmetic (Blair's majority is reduced
and Labour MPs likely to vote blindly for his
measures disproportionately lost their seats, so
he has a bigger problem with --- largely anti
ID-card --- backbench rebels).
You're right that European privacy laws are
tighter than in the US --- how you tolerate not
having the Data Protection Act and its EU analogues
I don't know --- but it's naive to believe that
the situation is entirely unlike the US.
ian
Cheating death and changing fate is the exact
antithesis of Greek tragedy. Once the fates
have decreed, no man can avoid their wrath.
Oedipus tries mightily, but he is destroyed,
as is Creon. By the time of Shakespeare the
tragedy flows from the `fatal flaw' within the
individual (although they still usually wind up
dead), but at the time of the Greeks men were
just the playthings of the Gods. Contrast Lear
with Oedipus.
ian
Yeah, I always find it bizarre that in the US
you go to see a film with an R rating and it's
full of babies. I saw, for ironic purposes,
`Body of Evidence' when it released, and someone
had their six year old with them. I don't happen
to think it's corrupting, dangerous, etc: just that
the poor kid was bored rigid. Mind you, so was I...
In the UK, the PG-* ratings are indeed advisory,
but everything else (12, 15, 18) are mandatory.
Indeed, my recollection is that they are enforced
by legislation, although no-one has ever been
prosecuted. Cinemas do however make a vague
attempt to enforce them, about as seriously as
pubs do drinking laws (hint for those that haven't
left the borders of the USA: there may be some
heavy sarcasm in this sentence).
ian