USAF's manned space program was killed by USAF's unmanned space program.
Basically, they proved that spy satellites and ASATs could do just as good a job (if not better) than a man on-location (as opposed to a man in a bunker pushing remote control buttons) could do, cheaper and safer.
This is a vast over-simplification of the history involved, but it's essentially accurate. The entire story is a triumph of technology over human limitations, with a very large dose of politiking and in-fighting thrown in for good measure.
I know I ought to leave this one alone.. I mean the clue is in the misspelling of the One True Religion...er....language name.
But it does allow one to re-iterate the point of the language:
Perl - The Swiss Army Chainsaw of Languages
If you want "clean", "pure" or "compact", move along there's nothing to see here. If, however you're a bit of a divv, programming wise (I'd certainly own up to this one), and/or you don't get the time you might like to code those C/C++ monster environments, and/or you have a job to do *now*, then the extreme feature-itis of Perl may well be for you...
Perl is *definitely* from the same stable of thought that brought you the UNIX environment - give 'em a toolkit and let 'em write their own apps... Except this time the toolkit is embedded within a language, which makes it usable on many platforms.. I've written scripts on AIX which I was able to successfully port to Linux, NT and even OS/2 using a simple "translation" tool - FTP. No source code editing for me, oh no.
And now if you excuse me I note that since I can now run Perl on my Psion, I feel the need for some serious mobile scripting coming on.
With apologies to the rest of the/. crowd for feeding the troll....
Disagree with conclusions & reasoning re: use of StrongARM or indeed any non-FPU'd processor on laptops.
Look around you. Who buys laptops or PDAs?:
Joe Sixpack with Quake in one hand and a NiMH/LiIon battery pack in the other
Chris Corporate with his suit, briefcase, and hard disk full of word documents, emails, and presentations
I'd suggest that most portable computer devices are bought for "corporate" usage. People buying sub-laptop devices (from WinCE boxen thru Palm and onwards (Psion! Psion! Psion!)) are buying them for applications not games. People buying Laptops are more likely to be corporate purchasers than individuals. Believe me, corporations don't care phht! for quake3 FPS rates.
So, I'd argue that the market for low-wattage processors (and disks, and displays etc) for the mobile market is FAR greater than the market for high-MFLOPs mobile processors. Personally speaking I'd trade my (company supplied, very flash but HEAVY) Stinkpad for a Crusoe win-Alike or even Psion S7 sized box - as long as it runs my applications. Whether they play games or not is absolutely irrelevent to my or my employer. They're lighter, and they run longer... just the attributes you want in a portable device.
So this whole water-cooled laptops to me is just plain WRONG. My Laptop is heavy enough and fragile enough as it stands - adding sloshing fluids and fragile radiators to the mass of glass, spinning disks and fans is *not* progress, people.
A fan. In a laptop. Get this: my battery-powered computer wastes it's power running a fan to stop itself from overheating because of it's power-hungry CPU - what could be more ridiculous? I get 1.5 - 2 hours battery life out of it, and think I've got a winner. It weighs ~3KG.
Meanwhile, my *personal* PDA, a Psion 5MX, weighs ~0.5KG, runs off 2 x AA batteries for 25 hours, and *still* lets me surf the net, send/receive emails, write word documents, run spreadsheets, organise my life, balance my checkbook etc etc etc.... Guess which one of the above I'd ditch?
Oh yeah, and a footnote: an FPU is (generally) only useful for 3D games anyway. Strategy, platform, adventure games etc etc etc don't make heavy use of the FPU. I can quite happily play "Monopoly", "The Sims", most of the real-time strategy etc games on my hypothetical non-FPU'd laptop with little to no performance loss compared to a traditional beast. Except of course that my more-modern CPU design will be happily sleeping between turns, and generally saving my batteries for when I really need them.
Sorry, this has become very long and unstructured. Mark this one up to "passionate response" and move on. Nothing to see here.
There seems to be an implicit assumption here about the homogenic nature of large boxen. Specifically, that all machines with >1 processor work in fundamentally the same way.
This turns out not to be the case. The "poor man's multiprocessing" that most young'uns are familiar with - Symetric MultiProcessing (SMP) has as key features a single system image scheduling tasks across multiple processors. Performance characteristics can be summarised with the following how-to-fix-it rules of thumb:
What's the performance problem? MORE MEMORY NEEDED
More Memory hasn't fixed my performance problem? GET A FASTER MEMORY BUS
Contention for main memory is just about always the problem with SMP systems.
However, those wise old sages in the Big Iron world were never going to be satisfied with this approach. There are any number of ways of putting >1 processor in a machine, SMP is mearly the "cheapest" (and possibly the easiest too). Specifically, S/390 systems tend to use clustering techniques which effectively involves n independent machines sharing hardware resources - such as network connections, memory & disk. These are coordinated by a single Hypervisor "master" image (usually VM) which is capable of spawning any number of (potentially different) "slave" operating system images - including, of course, itself. Note also that for any given machine, there is absolutely no guarantee that (number of OS images concurrently active) = (number of processors in machine); usually the "=" is replaced by a ">>" sign (hence the 41,000 Linux tasks metric!).
Since the key operating characteristic of this approach to multiprocessing is many heterogeneous systems performing different tasks, it's not as simple to identify the performance bottlenecks:-). However, canny readers will note that since IBM mainframe hardware development has spent the last 30 years focussing on I/O and consequently throughput, rather than getting into arms races over CPU MHz, fundamentally the solution to performance problems remains the same. High IO rates (and not especially superbly quick CPUs)coupled with relatively cheap OS image creation, changes the approach to dealing with single-task performance problems - wheras a *IX or NT O/S is limited to spawning another process (and hoping it'll be able to exploit any spare SMP processors lying around without competing for precious IO resource), S/390 systems can spawn another process (which may make sense if the system is configured to allow OS images to spread across multiple processors), or spawn an entire new OS image and *guarantee* no IO contention (OK, OK, - vast oversimplification). Once a system consists of >8ish processors, this tends to prove overwhelmingly more effective for achieving whole-system throughput improvements, compared to an SMP arrangement (which would at this point be spending a huge proportion of it's time contending for IO resource or waiting for the OS image to resolve IPC and memory contention issues).
It's true that the most effective way of doing SMP multiprocessing on Intel hardware is to use NT (for the moment...). However, don't make the mistake of generalising that rule-of-thumb outside the problem domain: intel-based SMP multiprocessing. This does *not* equate to the wider class of computing solutions based around multiprocessing.
Here Endeth The Lesson.
PS: Crays, Connection Machines and Transputer systems operating in other, fundamentally different ways too...
Well, my take from the site that what they're actually saying is "Look at our lovely indexing cluster. It can index 1 billion web thingies! Shouldn't you be buying an search engine product that powerfull?
Or, in other words, it's another example of meaningless statistics spewed in the name of marketing, vaguely covered-up as serious research.
References: Car MPG & top speed figures vs actual usage, Processor MHz as function of system throughput, quoted battery life as function of laptop utilisation, quaketest FPS compared to average internet multiplayer experience etc etc etc...
D) is true, except for the fact that the 3rd party SNA stack my Windows stinkpad is currently running is from... IBM. Developers, maintainers and specifiers of the SNA protocol. And, incidently, developers & maintainers of the SNA stack on the S/390 systems to which I'm talking.
So, yes it's 3rd party with respect to the O/S manufacturer, but then SNA is a 3rd party protocol to my O/S manufacturer. And I've already seen how good they are at implementing other not-invented-here protocol stacks. Like TCP/IP.....
Aside from the above commentry, your implied conclusion - SNA stacks on desktop machines aren't stress-tested - is irrelevant to their intended function. If it connects to a Mainframe, it's performing probably 100% of it's intended function(*). If it does so reliably, under variable simulated or tested networking conditions, then it is Fit For the Purpose It Was Bought For. Comparisons to the tests vis-a-vis IP stacks and relative number of users don't factor in.
(*) = unless you're running one of IBM's early-to-mid '90s desktop-OS APPC applications like NVDM/2 or DB2/2 that is. In which case, getting a 3270 connection to the S/390 is just the *start* of your trouble, and it's time to now start editing, then compiling, then activating, then testing innumerable options in a text APPC configuration file, begging your SNA networking guys for the appropriate magic numbers, and generally cursing your miserable existance on the planet. Not that I have personal experience of this of course.....
Slim: the situation you describe wasn't quite Open Source... Source code was never "freely given" to customers, although it was a core part of the deliverables that customers received when they licenced software.
The uproar caused in the User Groups when IBM finally switched to binary-only licences in the early '70s was an unpleasant sight to behold, apparently....
I really couldn't hazard a guess at how the IBM management view the Open Source movement. Call me an old septic but I rather suspect they're motivated more by visions of breaking OS strangleholds and increasing marketshare and lucrative services opportunities than they are by any ideological considerations...
Re:But where's the Lotus Notes Client on Linux?
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IBM banks on Linux
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· Score: 2
Well, I can't be authoratitive on this, but I know that at some point in recent history, Lotus' own strategy was that the Notes client would disappear to be replaced with a Web interface to all Notes functions. Indeed, you CAN get your email, and browse databases etc, across the web - if the server is enabled for such. You can also get POP3 access to your mail if enabled. You may want to check with whoever runs your servers to see if that's enabled.
Mind you, then Lotus spoilt it all by saying "Web access everywhere. But, er.. Well, we'll do a Windows client for Notes 5". Since that covers probably 99% of the target client audience, y'all out there running "non standard platforms" on internal systems with the web access goodies turned off are all a bit stuck...
Ah, OK I think I mis-understood where you were coming from then. I apologise.
Supplementary question for you though: You're big on moving to IP to fix networking problems. Is this because:
A) TCP/IP is inherently more stable, scalable and better at traffic management than SNA(*)
B) TCP/IP networks are "cooler", and much more importantly more widespread, than SNA networks and therefore the thrust of both market place development AND corporate IT strategy is heavily favoured towards IP instead of SNA?
Obviously the implications are the same in either case - move to IP - but I am genuinely interested in getting an answer to this question from someone who really understands both sides.
(*) = My understanding based on what I've heard is that SNA is much better at traffic control and prioritisation than vanilla TCP/IP.
OS/390 aka MVS has had a full POSIX personality for..err. another long time (don't know how long). This was specifically put in to enable "ease of migration". When you see an Apache Web Server running on S/390, it's using the POSIX environment. You'll note that all of IBM's middleware (the DB2 and MQSeries-es of this world) have also been TCP/IP enabled since Pontious was a Pilot.
So from a "killer app" for migration SNA -> IP, all the components have been in place for a number of years. That there hasn't been a mass exodus from SNA-based applications indicates to me that one or more of the following conditions therefore apply:
There's no money for migrating legacy applications to IP
There's no point migrating perfectly acceptable and working SNA apps to IP
SNA works well in it's environment and either has no significant deficits to or indeed possesses positive advantages over IP when dealing with Mainframe applications.
With regards to "skills gap", I'll probably cause a flame war here by calling you an upstart UNIX weenie here.. Remember that S/390 has been "out in the wild" running large-scale commercial installations for 30 odd years. There's a *lot* of skilled people out there who can do COBOL, who can administer IBM mainframes, and who get paid good money for putting in and maintaining SNA networks.
Just remember - as far as the Dinosaur Folks are concerned, they've been around forever and it's up to us *IX types to work with them. Not the other way around. In that light, it's absolutely fascinating that the Dinosaur Maker itself has put such a wide-spread stamp of approval over Linux...
Ummm.... OS/390 and OS/400 have had TCP/IP for a *long* time.... I was using a VM system in 1993 that had IP.
Perhaps you mean "why can't people re-write their legacy apps to use TCP/IP instead of SNA?". Which expands the scope of your complaint to encompass more than just IBM I think...
Well, I'm not as price sensitive as you - for the right device. And I guess all I'm going to do here is reaffirm that you can't please everyone at once.
What I'm looking for is a CD-walkman sized or (preferably smaller) device, capable of holding a sizeable fraction of my CD collection (say, 70-80 hours worth), with enough connections to be usable at home, in the car or standalone. Something with enough (rechargeable) battery life to stand me a transatlantic flight (say 10 hours to be on the safe side).
I *know* I've seen (probably on slashdot) a device based on Compaq OEM gear "coming soon" that matches the above. And I've lost the URL!
I don't know if they left off the internal amp so much as to save money or to be more like a competition deck with 2 sets of RCA outs.
From what I recall reading on www.empeg.com and from viewing the pictures, the real reason is simply that they ran out of room in the case.
Certainly from the pictures they ha[ve|d] on the site, it's easy to see how a power amp & heatsink can't sit in close proximity to the m/board & hard drive.
At the price point they're marketing at, I certainly believe that retaining the standard head-unit form factor & making it removable was a better decision than compromising on form factor to fit in an amp.
But most students are going to be using computers as tools, sealed boxes, and they need to learn different lessons. Like don't forward the hoax virus warnings you get in your email. Don't run cute executables from people you don't know. And don't believe everything you read on Slashdot, even if it is from a karma whore with a +1 bonus.
These are all great things to learn, sure. Especially the last one. But do they count as computer science education?
I just wonder where in a child's education the above fall. "Communication Skills" springs to mind to describe the topics, rather than computer science, and I dunno about the rest of the planet but here in the UK that's not a formal topic for education until you get to at least tertiary level (but, hey, my company *does* send me on tree-hugging courses in this so you can get some of that stuff).
I think Woz was addressing the "this is a computer, this is what it does, this is how it works" side of things, rather than "this is a computer, this is how you use it". Choice of OS, regardless of merit, is irrelevant.
From my own experience, and with regards to CompSci itself rather than the usage-and-social-rules side, I learnt just as much - if not more - from writing asm card-reading sw on bare metal microcontrollers as I did from playing with SPARC systems & VAXen.
Indeed, from the ground-up perspective, one of the best learning tools I've seen has to be a lego-like construction kit which snaps together. Each component is a logic gate or similar - you build up your own circuits (up to adder / counter level, for instance). Big, chunky components, just about idiot (if not child) proof, colourful, das blinkenlicht... if something like that can't get a kid interested, I can't see what they'd learn from sitting down in front of a VDU with a penguin on it (or flying window).
Interesting. Like most readers, I am suspicous of the motives, modus operandi and general existence of the NSA.
To hear any words coming out about them suffering teacup-in-front-of-a-Firehose syndrome is interesting, if not immediately trustworthy.
However, given that data gathering and the associated data management is their entire raison d'etre, I've always thought the best way the NSA could serve their country would be to be a bit more open about the tools, techniques and processes they use for this.
Think about it. We now live in a wired world. I have terrabytes of data at my fingertips - some local, most remote. Managing access to that is a nightmare, and there are no effective tools.
Why aren't the NSA making their work public on this? Don't you 'merkins, as tax payers, have a right to that information? Wouldn't that make you undisputed world-leaders in information management if you did?
Sod privacy, ignore conspiracy.. Fight for your rights to dominate the IT field. Get commercial interests involved (hey, if they don't buckle under to the almightly dollar, why would they stick to the law?).
henley, who is in a get-em-any-way-you-can mood today.
While you're at it why not require everyone who is in public to submit for mantatory DNA and semen samples. If you're not going to rape or murder anyone what are you worried about? I suppose it has to do with the fact that I'm an American, but I have a BIG problem with any group, government or private having too much power.
If people are willing to submit samples of DNA or other Vital Bodily Fluids, then by all means let them. You may be aware that this wide-area screening DOES already happen - with the consent of all concerned - throughout Europe, on a case-by-case basis within law enforcement. The debate now is whether those samples can be kept after the case is closed to prevent the need to re-test in the future.
I'm glad you're so proud of your freedom and privacy. You do know that while your government may not be collecting data on you, just about every commercial organisation in your country is tracking your credit purchases, your on-line habits, movement patterns etc and tieing it into a handy, Government-provided unique identifier (your SSN), don't you?
You can NEVER allow a group of people to set the bounds of their own powers. The government does just this. In the US all it would take is an act of Congress, and in the UK (I don't know their legal procedures) I assume that it would merely take an act of Parliment, to redefine and expand the powers of the government.
Hmm. Heard of something called "representation of the people, by the people, on behalf of the people"? You may not believe it, but we DO get to vote over here as well. Our Beloved Prime Minister even wants us to be able to do so securely via this Internet thing he's heard about (I think he thinks he can get online geeks to come on-message this way).
More seriously, you're absolutely right to suggest that Parliament can vote itself more powers. The House of Lords is our constitutional body designed to act as a check and balance against this. Note that I have never suggested our system is in any way perfect, or better than anyone elses. I'm just pointing out that we have a "theoretically sufficient" (modulo human ambition and other failings) system here.
In what universe do you reside? How can it be consensual to be recorded everytime you go out of your house? How can you avoid this? Stay inside forever? Give me a break. Privacy and freedom are two of my BIGGEST concerns, at least here in the US we have a bill of rights to use as a shield from government abuses (even though they seem touse bigger and bigger clubs to try to beat it out of us).
I live in the "Euroland" Universe. It inhabits the geographical area to the right of your own, seperated by a large body of water. It's roughly the same size as yours, so please try not to be too disparaging. I could get really petty here by pointing out that it's been around a lot longer, had more ups and downs as a continent and had plenty of opportunity to learn from it's mistakes, unlike your own, however that wouldn't add to the debate so I won't.
I did indeed mention several ways to avoid CCTV. The most effective is to simply be elsewhere. The countryside has no CCTV, and all the amenities you could desire. Over here we have many many nice villages providing excellent facilities (pubs!), and with the availability of internet shopping there's really no reason to have to go into towns any more. Oh, but your online purchases will still be tracked of course. And every time you use an ATM to withdraw cash instead, that gets logged.. Damn, better head for those Montana hills with your supplies of beans and ammunition.
Your government is at least as incompetent as mine. The Bill of Rights hasn't prevented your privacy being lost. As Scott Neally(sp) said: "The fight for privacy is over. You lost. Get over it". My point is simply that there's no reason to fight so-called privacy infringements that serve reasonable purpose. Spend your energy fighting those that clearly do you no good.
As I posted last night, I thought of a much better way to phrase the entire argument. Think of it as a cost benefit analysis to the consumer:
Public Police surveillance Cost: Many Beans of Tax money. Named, legally restricted organisation has access to information on your whereabouts when you're within range. Potential exists for abuse of this system (actually I can't think how, but I'll concede the possibility) Benefits: City streets safer to walk around at all times. Quicker detection and prosecution of personal crimes. Visible deterrent to future crime. Reduced public perception of danger level and therefore personal protective measures required.
Personal Computer CPUID feature Cost: Unsupervised, uncontrolled, unrestricted propagation of personal identification information (Hey! Sounds like the SSN to me!), without the individuals consent, control or knowledge. Allows organisations to correlate unrelated data on you, and thus to build extensive knowledge of all computing activities. Worse, since the feature isn't even secure in the normal sense, there's no way of guaranteeing the accuracy of that information and it is certainly amenable to spoofing or fraudulent misrepresentation. The organisations gathering that information have no interest in it's accuracy since it's bound to be better than what they've currently got. So luckily, only you as a consumer will suffer. Benefit: Well, apparently it'll reduce chip fraud. So Intel will be able to sell them cheaper because their margins will be increased. If they choose to do so, of course.
Because some people don't know how or are too laze to do so isn't my problem. We shouldn't have to face restrictions because of the stupid people in our midst.
Well, that's very tolerant of you I must say. I suppose you feel no obligation to educate or act on behalf of those who do not, or cannot understand these things?
Extending your argument, I presume you'd be happy to ride on an aircraft with a known safety flaw, as long as the aerospace engineers had discussed it at length and decided they wouldn't fly on them themselves, but that the great unwashed masses are free to act like sheep when led without interference.
The EU is just offended that the FBI and NSA could be involved in stepping on their toes. The EU should be the only ones able to spy on residents of Europe. If you were to walk/drive/bike around London you could be tracked by video surveillance equipment every step of the way.
I tried not to respond to this news item, since it's obviously got wrapped up into a privacy debate. And I believe that we're in a relative values game here with no underlying Big Truth. The statement above by Lord Kano really captures the essence of my problem. It's absolutely right and correct to accuse the EU of hypocrisy. This is 1999; everyone is guilty of it in some way. But I feel the honourable poster, along with others, is confusing the difference between the inalienable right to personal privacy, and the need for public protection.
Let me put it this way: When you walk London's streets, or any other British Town's streets for that matter (we have the highest number of CCTV cameras per-capita in the world. Not something to boast about, I know), you're taking action in public. If you weren't being tracked by a camera, there is nothing to stop anyone following, or tagging you for whatever reason (legal, or illegal). Furthermore, no-one is forcing you to walk the streets. Want anonimity? take a taxi, or a bus, or a car. Or don't go there at all (you're a geek. Get what you want from the Net. Including groceries). And I'd come back to your reasons for not being filmed. Those cameras are there for only one reason: crime detection and prevention. They're actually fairly good at it, too, based on the number of high-profile convictions which get shown on UK TV featuring CCTV footage. You're not committing a crime, are you? Why are you worried then?
Now, in the case of a CPUID (Yes, the EU should place similar restrictions on IPv6 (if there is a real risk there of course), MAC addresses and the numerous other non-Intel CPUIDs, but be generous here and consider this a case of setting precedent rather than outright skullduggery), you're "being filmed" without your knowledge, and without your consent, and without a clear purpose. You have no idea what that information is being used for, who is using it, and what rights you yourself have over that information (note to self: Does the UK Data Protection Act apply here I wonder? What impact would THAT have on CPUID tracking if it is applicable?).
Contrast this with CCTV: technology in the hands of a single specified organisation with legal limits to their abilities, and oversight (not perfect, but there), used for a named, restricted purpose.
To me, this is a clear qualitative difference between the two cases. One is controlled, consensual and regulated. The other isn't any of those.
Would I be in favour of CPUID if a clear benefit could be shown from it (fraud prevention is the putative reason), that use would be regulated and legally restricted? Yes. As it is, no no NO.
I second the above, but I feel the need to open it out a bit.
The absolute best present anyone bought me for Christmas was my wife, last year, buying me a subscription to "New Scientist". The gift that keeps on giving, throughout the year(*)....
Now, I'm very much hoping Santa has seen how much enjoyment I've got from my weekly dose of science news, views and in-depth features, just how much I've learnt and how much MORE of an annoying knowitall geek I've become, and will have the appropriate surprise waiting in the stocking for me again.
Obviously NS isn't to everyone's taste, but I'm sure that most geeks can be prodded to find the one periodical - Linux Journal, PC Magazine (? Sick, dude), Goat lovers monthly, whatever - that they just *haven't* got time to read and so miss out on buying.... The one thing they *would* read if only they didn't have to go and buy it themselves. If, say, it was delivered to their door.
henley
(*) = And I only had to ask her once or twice. And point her at the subscriptions phone number. It was such a nice surprise...
Nothing totally disastrous, just very annoying and inconvenient. (If you have money in any off-shore banks you might want to think about moving it.)
Umm.
Perhaps I'm being dense but I don't see cause and effect in your post. If things aren't going to be disasterous, mearly annoying, then why do you recommend moving money back on-shore ?
Others have commented on the social effects of Y2K being much greater than the technological effects - and I'd tend to agree with that. In that light, surely your advice is counter-productive?
If you don't like that argument (your call), I can offer another one. Firstly, if you're putting money offshore, it's generally a mid- to long-term investment strategy. Secondly, I think most people accept that of all the institutions around, Financial institutes have the most experience with the post-2000 situation (given that most have dealt with long-term loans, accounts or contracts etc).
Assumption one, therefore, is that wherever your money is, it's likely fairly safe from corruption due to Y2K. Whether it's accessible short-term is by all means in dispute (just because the bank's safe doesn't mean that the infrastructure you need to get to it - telephone, FAX, mail, e-mail etc - is going to work).
Assumption number two is that you really ARE a mid- long- term offshore saver.
Deduction is therefore that even though you can't get to it, it's fairly safe. And since you don't actually need it for a while, why bother fretting about this?
I was under the impression this is difficult if not impossible to do with Windows NT (and presumably the forthcoming Win2K) ?
Regardless, therefore of the theoretical definition, I cannot help feeling that a practical definition would therefore have to include NT/2K's GUI as part of the OS.
A little expansion: IBM & MS teamed up in 1986ish to write a replacement for [PC|MS]-DOS - OS/2. MS negotiated on the same basis as for DOS - i.e. it was written to (mainly) IBM specifications for IBM computers (actually, the PS/2 range), but MS kept the right to sell it's own version for OEM machines.
IBM insisted on support for 286 processors, hence the abortion that was OS/2 V1.X with it's appalling DOS legacy support. This, together with vast resource requirements for the time period (4MB RAM bare minimum, 30MB Disk for the OS alone) prevented widespread uptake and directly led to MS-DOS's survival and even thriving for another 7 years.
Here's where things start to get sticky. Around about 1989, IBM finally agreed that 286 support could be dropped (MS never wanted to support this processor in the first place). This directly led to OS/2 V2.0 which because of the 386's Virtual x86 modes & MMU meant that at last OS/2 could support existing DOS applications. IBM originally wanted to basically graft this support onto OS/2 V1.x, retaining most original features such as the existing Presentation Manager (amongst other effects this would mean that OS/2 was still tied to Intel hardware), wheras MS was more interested in making OS/2 more portable.
For a time, IBM and MS had an agreement: OS/2 V2 would be a 386-only version built on the existing codebase, development of which was led by IBM, wheras MS would start work on OS/2 V3 which would be focused on multi-platform support. The MS project was codenamed New Technology (NT).
Quite quickly, MS decided that their work would benefit from a clean-sheet, rather than picking up OS/2's baggage. Additionally, they had found that a cut-down version of the OS/2 Presentation Manager API could be sold as a DOS extender / GUI in it's own right, and would have fewer resource requirements than a full-blown from-the-ground up multitasking OS like OS/2.
The result - broadly speaking Windows 2.x 386-mode, Windows NT, and IBM's decision to persevere with OS/2 thus OS/2 2.x - is history.
The last version of OS/2 written by MS was V1.2 which added REXX support, a "cleaner" GUI which looks & functions mostly like Windows 3.X, and major enhancements to the OS "integrated" applications Communications Manager, Database Manager, and LAN Manager. IBM then took this, cleaned it up significantly with the goal of reducing resource requirements (MS Bloat even then!), added some additional functionality like Dual Boot to DOS (think minimalist LILO here) and released OS/2 V1.3 which to your humble author was the fasted, most reliable, cleanest OS/2 ever - as long as you wanted to run only OS/2 16-bit applications, of course.
The on-topic bit: Where Microsoft really shafted IBM was in the handover of MS-generated technology for OS/2 V2.x (remember, although an IBM-led effort, base OS coding was still MS's responsibility). I have heard tales of promised kernel functionality and documentation being delivered in the form of "stub" header files containing nothing more than function names & parameters - no documentation, no code, just promises. Delivered late, of course.
As an aside, I actually used a beta version of V2.0, before IBM integrated it's new Workplace Shell interface on top of the existing Presentation Manager. It was the perfect OS for me: quick (the PM was from OS/2 v1.3, the kernel was 32-bit clean), DOS window support (running a slightly modified PC-DOS v5.0 in a window, playing Microprose "Grand Prix" in 1992 was Waaaaaay cool), and relatively lightweight. WPS took a lot longer to settle down....
I'm confused. I read the article, and they want you to PAY to allow people to get at your MS-hosted web server?
I presume "authorised access" means some sort of authentication. Like you'd do if you had e-commerce data (shipping addresses, orders, card details etc) stored there.
Are MS really trying to give up the e-commerce server market? What incentive is there now to use a Win2K Web Server, instead of a Freeware/payware UNIX based server? What about if you use a non-Win2K authenticating web server on your Win2K box (e.g. Apache)? Do I have to pay MS under those circumstances?
I don't understand. I must have misread the article.
Oh come on. Do we really need a standard for everything under the sun? Cant we relish in the sense of individuality our custom sized paper brings us? Do we have to conform with the rest of the world on the "proper" size of paper when we can't even get our measurements figured out? Sheesh...
< RANT > Yes we bloody well DO need standards for paper sizes. I work in the UK for a large American corporation. Not only do they set standards for everything from Paper size to word-processing software to use, they then ignore their own standards and use whatever's most convenient for y'all. Which never - I repeat never works here in sunny Euro-land(*). </RANT >
Slightly more on-topic, however, is that this s why TeX, HTML, SGML, Script, Bookmaster (ooh what a giveaway) rule, and WYSIWYG sucks. Send me your TeX and I'll format it for whatever paper I happen to have loaded. Send me your Word document and I'll not only have to translate it into something horrible looking in Lotus Wordpro, but I'll also completely cock-up your references, tables-of-contents and indexes when I change paper sizes on you.
(*) - Yes, the UK is part of the EU. Most of the time. Ignoring political or nationalistic arguments to the contrary, it's single greatest feat - to me - is forcing this 1000-year-old nation state to drag itself kicking and screaming into the 20th century and start adopting some sane standards.
I very much doubt it'll ship with Linux. Read the article: they're targetting the WinTV crowd with this. Can you see them getting used to logging in / out of Linux? Shutting down instead of hitting the power button? Dealing with fsck() ?
This isn't about PC Manufacturers being Hardware people again. This is about PC Manufacturers jumping onto the cheap internet computing bandwagon. They announce cheap, "disposable", non-MS PCs within 24 hours of Sun re-launching their NCs? Guess what they're trying to protect, folks!
The article isn't an anti-MS, or anti-Windows article. It's a pro-cheap-network-computing article.
Discussion of OS for these puppies - or rather the OS that will be delivered with them from the factory - is nearly irrelevent, except for the fact that they're not automatically going for MS's OS-du-jour (Hmm.. targetted for early next year... Win2000 comes out Feb 17.. Coincidence?).
henley, who has been watching too much X-files and sees conspiracies everywhere today.
Slashdot Mirror
...Err, no. Not really anyway.
USAF's manned space program was killed by USAF's unmanned space program.
Basically, they proved that spy satellites and ASATs could do just as good a job (if not better) than a man on-location (as opposed to a man in a bunker pushing remote control buttons) could do, cheaper and safer.
This is a vast over-simplification of the history involved, but it's essentially accurate. The entire story is a triumph of technology over human limitations, with a very large dose of politiking and in-fighting thrown in for good measure.
I know I ought to leave this one alone.. I mean the clue is in the misspelling of the One True Religion...er....language name.
But it does allow one to re-iterate the point of the language:
Perl - The Swiss Army Chainsaw of Languages
If you want "clean", "pure" or "compact", move along there's nothing to see here. If, however you're a bit of a divv, programming wise (I'd certainly own up to this one), and/or you don't get the time you might like to code those C/C++ monster environments, and/or you have a job to do *now*, then the extreme feature-itis of Perl may well be for you...
Perl is *definitely* from the same stable of thought that brought you the UNIX environment - give 'em a toolkit and let 'em write their own apps... Except this time the toolkit is embedded within a language, which makes it usable on many platforms.. I've written scripts on AIX which I was able to successfully port to Linux, NT and even OS/2 using a simple "translation" tool - FTP. No source code editing for me, oh no.
And now if you excuse me I note that since I can now run Perl on my Psion, I feel the need for some serious mobile scripting coming on.
With apologies to the rest of the /. crowd for feeding the troll....
Disagree with conclusions & reasoning re: use of StrongARM or indeed any non-FPU'd processor on laptops.
Look around you. Who buys laptops or PDAs?:
I'd suggest that most portable computer devices are bought for "corporate" usage. People buying sub-laptop devices (from WinCE boxen thru Palm and onwards (Psion! Psion! Psion!)) are buying them for applications not games. People buying Laptops are more likely to be corporate purchasers than individuals. Believe me, corporations don't care phht! for quake3 FPS rates.
So, I'd argue that the market for low-wattage processors (and disks, and displays etc) for the mobile market is FAR greater than the market for high-MFLOPs mobile processors. Personally speaking I'd trade my (company supplied, very flash but HEAVY) Stinkpad for a Crusoe win-Alike or even Psion S7 sized box - as long as it runs my applications. Whether they play games or not is absolutely irrelevent to my or my employer. They're lighter, and they run longer... just the attributes you want in a portable device.
So this whole water-cooled laptops to me is just plain WRONG. My Laptop is heavy enough and fragile enough as it stands - adding sloshing fluids and fragile radiators to the mass of glass, spinning disks and fans is *not* progress, people.
A fan. In a laptop. Get this: my battery-powered computer wastes it's power running a fan to stop itself from overheating because of it's power-hungry CPU - what could be more ridiculous? I get 1.5 - 2 hours battery life out of it, and think I've got a winner. It weighs ~3KG.
Meanwhile, my *personal* PDA, a Psion 5MX, weighs ~0.5KG, runs off 2 x AA batteries for 25 hours, and *still* lets me surf the net, send/receive emails, write word documents, run spreadsheets, organise my life, balance my checkbook etc etc etc.... Guess which one of the above I'd ditch?
Oh yeah, and a footnote: an FPU is (generally) only useful for 3D games anyway. Strategy, platform, adventure games etc etc etc don't make heavy use of the FPU. I can quite happily play "Monopoly", "The Sims", most of the real-time strategy etc games on my hypothetical non-FPU'd laptop with little to no performance loss compared to a traditional beast. Except of course that my more-modern CPU design will be happily sleeping between turns, and generally saving my batteries for when I really need them.
Sorry, this has become very long and unstructured. Mark this one up to "passionate response" and move on. Nothing to see here.
There seems to be an implicit assumption here about the homogenic nature of large boxen. Specifically, that all machines with >1 processor work in fundamentally the same way.
This turns out not to be the case. The "poor man's multiprocessing" that most young'uns are familiar with - Symetric MultiProcessing (SMP) has as key features a single system image scheduling tasks across multiple processors. Performance characteristics can be summarised with the following how-to-fix-it rules of thumb:
Contention for main memory is just about always the problem with SMP systems.
However, those wise old sages in the Big Iron world were never going to be satisfied with this approach. There are any number of ways of putting >1 processor in a machine, SMP is mearly the "cheapest" (and possibly the easiest too). Specifically, S/390 systems tend to use clustering techniques which effectively involves n independent machines sharing hardware resources - such as network connections, memory & disk. These are coordinated by a single Hypervisor "master" image (usually VM) which is capable of spawning any number of (potentially different) "slave" operating system images - including, of course, itself. Note also that for any given machine, there is absolutely no guarantee that (number of OS images concurrently active) = (number of processors in machine); usually the "=" is replaced by a ">>" sign (hence the 41,000 Linux tasks metric!).
Since the key operating characteristic of this approach to multiprocessing is many heterogeneous systems performing different tasks, it's not as simple to identify the performance bottlenecks :-). However, canny readers will note that since IBM mainframe hardware development has spent the last 30 years focussing on I/O and consequently throughput, rather than getting into arms races over CPU MHz, fundamentally the solution to performance problems remains the same. High IO rates (and not especially superbly quick CPUs)coupled with relatively cheap OS image creation, changes the approach to dealing with single-task performance problems - wheras a *IX or NT O/S is limited to spawning another process (and hoping it'll be able to exploit any spare SMP processors lying around without competing for precious IO resource), S/390 systems can spawn another process (which may make sense if the system is configured to allow OS images to spread across multiple processors), or spawn an entire new OS image and *guarantee* no IO contention (OK, OK, - vast oversimplification). Once a system consists of >8ish processors, this tends to prove overwhelmingly more effective for achieving whole-system throughput improvements, compared to an SMP arrangement (which would at this point be spending a huge proportion of it's time contending for IO resource or waiting for the OS image to resolve IPC and memory contention issues).
It's true that the most effective way of doing SMP multiprocessing on Intel hardware is to use NT (for the moment...). However, don't make the mistake of generalising that rule-of-thumb outside the problem domain: intel-based SMP multiprocessing. This does *not* equate to the wider class of computing solutions based around multiprocessing.
Here Endeth The Lesson.
PS: Crays, Connection Machines and Transputer systems operating in other, fundamentally different ways too...
Well, my take from the site that what they're actually saying is "Look at our lovely indexing cluster. It can index 1 billion web thingies! Shouldn't you be buying an search engine product that powerfull?
Or, in other words, it's another example of meaningless statistics spewed in the name of marketing, vaguely covered-up as serious research.
References: Car MPG & top speed figures vs actual usage, Processor MHz as function of system throughput, quoted battery life as function of laptop utilisation, quaketest FPS compared to average internet multiplayer experience etc etc etc...
D) is true, except for the fact that the 3rd party SNA stack my Windows stinkpad is currently running is from... IBM. Developers, maintainers and specifiers of the SNA protocol. And, incidently, developers & maintainers of the SNA stack on the S/390 systems to which I'm talking.
So, yes it's 3rd party with respect to the O/S manufacturer, but then SNA is a 3rd party protocol to my O/S manufacturer. And I've already seen how good they are at implementing other not-invented-here protocol stacks. Like TCP/IP.....
Aside from the above commentry, your implied conclusion - SNA stacks on desktop machines aren't stress-tested - is irrelevant to their intended function. If it connects to a Mainframe, it's performing probably 100% of it's intended function(*). If it does so reliably, under variable simulated or tested networking conditions, then it is Fit For the Purpose It Was Bought For. Comparisons to the tests vis-a-vis IP stacks and relative number of users don't factor in.
(*) = unless you're running one of IBM's early-to-mid '90s desktop-OS APPC applications like NVDM/2 or DB2/2 that is. In which case, getting a 3270 connection to the S/390 is just the *start* of your trouble, and it's time to now start editing, then compiling, then activating, then testing innumerable options in a text APPC configuration file, begging your SNA networking guys for the appropriate magic numbers, and generally cursing your miserable existance on the planet. Not that I have personal experience of this of course.....
Slim: the situation you describe wasn't quite Open Source... Source code was never "freely given" to customers, although it was a core part of the deliverables that customers received when they licenced software.
The uproar caused in the User Groups when IBM finally switched to binary-only licences in the early '70s was an unpleasant sight to behold, apparently....
I really couldn't hazard a guess at how the IBM management view the Open Source movement. Call me an old septic but I rather suspect they're motivated more by visions of breaking OS strangleholds and increasing marketshare and lucrative services opportunities than they are by any ideological considerations...
Well, I can't be authoratitive on this, but I know that at some point in recent history, Lotus' own strategy was that the Notes client would disappear to be replaced with a Web interface to all Notes functions. Indeed, you CAN get your email, and browse databases etc, across the web - if the server is enabled for such. You can also get POP3 access to your mail if enabled. You may want to check with whoever runs your servers to see if that's enabled.
Mind you, then Lotus spoilt it all by saying "Web access everywhere. But, er.. Well, we'll do a Windows client for Notes 5". Since that covers probably 99% of the target client audience, y'all out there running "non standard platforms" on internal systems with the web access goodies turned off are all a bit stuck...
Ah, OK I think I mis-understood where you were coming from then. I apologise.
Supplementary question for you though: You're big on moving to IP to fix networking problems. Is this because:
A) TCP/IP is inherently more stable, scalable and better at traffic management than SNA(*)
B) TCP/IP networks are "cooler", and much more importantly more widespread, than SNA networks and therefore the thrust of both market place development AND corporate IT strategy is heavily favoured towards IP instead of SNA?
Obviously the implications are the same in either case - move to IP - but I am genuinely interested in getting an answer to this question from someone who really understands both sides.
(*) = My understanding based on what I've heard is that SNA is much better at traffic control and prioritisation than vanilla TCP/IP.
OS/390 aka MVS has had a full POSIX personality for ..err. another long time (don't know how long). This was specifically put in to enable "ease of migration". When you see an Apache Web Server running on S/390, it's using the POSIX environment. You'll note that all of IBM's middleware (the DB2 and MQSeries-es of this world) have also been TCP/IP enabled since Pontious was a Pilot.
So from a "killer app" for migration SNA -> IP, all the components have been in place for a number of years. That there hasn't been a mass exodus from SNA-based applications indicates to me that one or more of the following conditions therefore apply:
With regards to "skills gap", I'll probably cause a flame war here by calling you an upstart UNIX weenie here.. Remember that S/390 has been "out in the wild" running large-scale commercial installations for 30 odd years. There's a *lot* of skilled people out there who can do COBOL, who can administer IBM mainframes, and who get paid good money for putting in and maintaining SNA networks.
Just remember - as far as the Dinosaur Folks are concerned, they've been around forever and it's up to us *IX types to work with them. Not the other way around. In that light, it's absolutely fascinating that the Dinosaur Maker itself has put such a wide-spread stamp of approval over Linux...
Ummm.... OS/390 and OS/400 have had TCP/IP for a *long* time.... I was using a VM system in 1993 that had IP.
Perhaps you mean "why can't people re-write their legacy apps to use TCP/IP instead of SNA?". Which expands the scope of your complaint to encompass more than just IBM I think...
Well, I'm not as price sensitive as you - for the right device. And I guess all I'm going to do here is reaffirm that you can't please everyone at once.
What I'm looking for is a CD-walkman sized or (preferably smaller) device, capable of holding a sizeable fraction of my CD collection (say, 70-80 hours worth), with enough connections to be usable at home, in the car or standalone. Something with enough (rechargeable) battery life to stand me a transatlantic flight (say 10 hours to be on the safe side).
I *know* I've seen (probably on slashdot) a device based on Compaq OEM gear "coming soon" that matches the above. And I've lost the URL!
I don't know if they left off the internal amp so much as to save money or to be more like a competition deck with 2 sets of RCA outs.
From what I recall reading on www.empeg.com and from viewing the pictures, the real reason is simply that they ran out of room in the case.
Certainly from the pictures they ha[ve|d] on the site, it's easy to see how a power amp & heatsink can't sit in close proximity to the m/board & hard drive.
At the price point they're marketing at, I certainly believe that retaining the standard head-unit form factor & making it removable was a better decision than compromising on form factor to fit in an amp.
But most students are going to be using computers as tools, sealed boxes, and they need to learn different lessons. Like don't forward the hoax virus warnings you get in your email. Don't run cute executables from people you don't know. And don't believe everything you read on Slashdot, even if it is from a karma whore with a +1 bonus.
These are all great things to learn, sure. Especially the last one. But do they count as computer science education?
I just wonder where in a child's education the above fall. "Communication Skills" springs to mind to describe the topics, rather than computer science, and I dunno about the rest of the planet but here in the UK that's not a formal topic for education until you get to at least tertiary level (but, hey, my company *does* send me on tree-hugging courses in this so you can get some of that stuff).
I think Woz was addressing the "this is a computer, this is what it does, this is how it works" side of things, rather than "this is a computer, this is how you use it". Choice of OS, regardless of merit, is irrelevant.
From my own experience, and with regards to CompSci itself rather than the usage-and-social-rules side, I learnt just as much - if not more - from writing asm card-reading sw on bare metal microcontrollers as I did from playing with SPARC systems & VAXen.
Indeed, from the ground-up perspective, one of the best learning tools I've seen has to be a lego-like construction kit which snaps together. Each component is a logic gate or similar - you build up your own circuits (up to adder / counter level, for instance). Big, chunky components, just about idiot (if not child) proof, colourful, das blinkenlicht... if something like that can't get a kid interested, I can't see what they'd learn from sitting down in front of a VDU with a penguin on it (or flying window).
Freshmeat Editorial, 25 Dec 1999:
Coding Standards - Good Idea or Subtle Evil?
I'd agree with Theorem 2 posited therein.
Interesting. Like most readers, I am suspicous of the motives, modus operandi and general existence of the NSA.
To hear any words coming out about them suffering teacup-in-front-of-a-Firehose syndrome is interesting, if not immediately trustworthy.
However, given that data gathering and the associated data management is their entire raison d'etre, I've always thought the best way the NSA could serve their country would be to be a bit more open about the tools, techniques and processes they use for this.
Think about it. We now live in a wired world. I have terrabytes of data at my fingertips - some local, most remote. Managing access to that is a nightmare, and there are no effective tools.
Why aren't the NSA making their work public on this? Don't you 'merkins, as tax payers, have a right to that information? Wouldn't that make you undisputed world-leaders in information management if you did?
Sod privacy, ignore conspiracy.. Fight for your rights to dominate the IT field. Get commercial interests involved (hey, if they don't buckle under to the almightly dollar, why would they stick to the law?).
henley, who is in a get-em-any-way-you-can mood today.
If people are willing to submit samples of DNA or other Vital Bodily Fluids, then by all means let them. You may be aware that this wide-area screening DOES already happen - with the consent of all concerned - throughout Europe, on a case-by-case basis within law enforcement. The debate now is whether those samples can be kept after the case is closed to prevent the need to re-test in the future.
I'm glad you're so proud of your freedom and privacy. You do know that while your government may not be collecting data on you, just about every commercial organisation in your country is tracking your credit purchases, your on-line habits, movement patterns etc and tieing it into a handy, Government-provided unique identifier (your SSN), don't you?
Hmm. Heard of something called "representation of the people, by the people, on behalf of the people"? You may not believe it, but we DO get to vote over here as well. Our Beloved Prime Minister even wants us to be able to do so securely via this Internet thing he's heard about (I think he thinks he can get online geeks to come on-message this way).
More seriously, you're absolutely right to suggest that Parliament can vote itself more powers. The House of Lords is our constitutional body designed to act as a check and balance against this. Note that I have never suggested our system is in any way perfect, or better than anyone elses. I'm just pointing out that we have a "theoretically sufficient" (modulo human ambition and other failings) system here.
I live in the "Euroland" Universe. It inhabits the geographical area to the right of your own, seperated by a large body of water. It's roughly the same size as yours, so please try not to be too disparaging. I could get really petty here by pointing out that it's been around a lot longer, had more ups and downs as a continent and had plenty of opportunity to learn from it's mistakes, unlike your own, however that wouldn't add to the debate so I won't.
I did indeed mention several ways to avoid CCTV. The most effective is to simply be elsewhere. The countryside has no CCTV, and all the amenities you could desire. Over here we have many many nice villages providing excellent facilities (pubs!), and with the availability of internet shopping there's really no reason to have to go into towns any more. Oh, but your online purchases will still be tracked of course. And every time you use an ATM to withdraw cash instead, that gets logged.. Damn, better head for those Montana hills with your supplies of beans and ammunition.
Your government is at least as incompetent as mine. The Bill of Rights hasn't prevented your privacy being lost. As Scott Neally(sp) said: "The fight for privacy is over. You lost. Get over it". My point is simply that there's no reason to fight so-called privacy infringements that serve reasonable purpose. Spend your energy fighting those that clearly do you no good.
As I posted last night, I thought of a much better way to phrase the entire argument. Think of it as a cost benefit analysis to the consumer:
Public Police surveillance
Cost: Many Beans of Tax money. Named, legally restricted organisation has access to information on your whereabouts when you're within range. Potential exists for abuse of this system (actually I can't think how, but I'll concede the possibility)
Benefits: City streets safer to walk around at all times. Quicker detection and prosecution of personal crimes. Visible deterrent to future crime. Reduced public perception of danger level and therefore personal protective measures required.
Personal Computer CPUID feature
Cost: Unsupervised, uncontrolled, unrestricted propagation of personal identification information (Hey! Sounds like the SSN to me!), without the individuals consent, control or knowledge. Allows organisations to correlate unrelated data on you, and thus to build extensive knowledge of all computing activities. Worse, since the feature isn't even secure in the normal sense, there's no way of guaranteeing the accuracy of that information and it is certainly amenable to spoofing or fraudulent misrepresentation. The organisations gathering that information have no interest in it's accuracy since it's bound to be better than what they've currently got. So luckily, only you as a consumer will suffer.
Benefit: Well, apparently it'll reduce chip fraud. So Intel will be able to sell them cheaper because their margins will be increased. If they choose to do so, of course.
Well, that's very tolerant of you I must say. I suppose you feel no obligation to educate or act on behalf of those who do not, or cannot understand these things?
Extending your argument, I presume you'd be happy to ride on an aircraft with a known safety flaw, as long as the aerospace engineers had discussed it at length and decided they wouldn't fly on them themselves, but that the great unwashed masses are free to act like sheep when led without interference.
henley, who ought to know better than to bite.
I tried not to respond to this news item, since it's obviously got wrapped up into a privacy debate. And I believe that we're in a relative values game here with no underlying Big Truth. The statement above by Lord Kano really captures the essence of my problem. It's absolutely right and correct to accuse the EU of hypocrisy. This is 1999; everyone is guilty of it in some way. But I feel the honourable poster, along with others, is confusing the difference between the inalienable right to personal privacy, and the need for public protection.
Let me put it this way: When you walk London's streets, or any other British Town's streets for that matter (we have the highest number of CCTV cameras per-capita in the world. Not something to boast about, I know), you're taking action in public. If you weren't being tracked by a camera, there is nothing to stop anyone following, or tagging you for whatever reason (legal, or illegal). Furthermore, no-one is forcing you to walk the streets. Want anonimity? take a taxi, or a bus, or a car. Or don't go there at all (you're a geek. Get what you want from the Net. Including groceries). And I'd come back to your reasons for not being filmed. Those cameras are there for only one reason: crime detection and prevention. They're actually fairly good at it, too, based on the number of high-profile convictions which get shown on UK TV featuring CCTV footage. You're not committing a crime, are you? Why are you worried then?
Now, in the case of a CPUID (Yes, the EU should place similar restrictions on IPv6 (if there is a real risk there of course), MAC addresses and the numerous other non-Intel CPUIDs, but be generous here and consider this a case of setting precedent rather than outright skullduggery), you're "being filmed" without your knowledge, and without your consent, and without a clear purpose. You have no idea what that information is being used for, who is using it, and what rights you yourself have over that information (note to self: Does the UK Data Protection Act apply here I wonder? What impact would THAT have on CPUID tracking if it is applicable?).
Contrast this with CCTV: technology in the hands of a single specified organisation with legal limits to their abilities, and oversight (not perfect, but there), used for a named, restricted purpose.
To me, this is a clear qualitative difference between the two cases. One is controlled, consensual and regulated. The other isn't any of those.
Would I be in favour of CPUID if a clear benefit could be shown from it (fraud prevention is the putative reason), that use would be regulated and legally restricted? Yes. As it is, no no NO.
henley
I second the above, but I feel the need to open it out a bit.
The absolute best present anyone bought me for Christmas was my wife, last year, buying me a subscription to "New Scientist". The gift that keeps on giving, throughout the year(*)....
Now, I'm very much hoping Santa has seen how much enjoyment I've got from my weekly dose of science news, views and in-depth features, just how much I've learnt and how much MORE of an annoying knowitall geek I've become, and will have the appropriate surprise waiting in the stocking for me again.
Obviously NS isn't to everyone's taste, but I'm sure that most geeks can be prodded to find the one periodical - Linux Journal, PC Magazine (? Sick, dude), Goat lovers monthly, whatever - that they just *haven't* got time to read and so miss out on buying.... The one thing they *would* read if only they didn't have to go and buy it themselves. If, say, it was delivered to their door.
henley
(*) = And I only had to ask her once or twice. And point her at the subscriptions phone number. It was such a nice surprise...
Umm.
Perhaps I'm being dense but I don't see cause and effect in your post. If things aren't going to be disasterous, mearly annoying, then why do you recommend moving money back on-shore ?
Others have commented on the social effects of Y2K being much greater than the technological effects - and I'd tend to agree with that. In that light, surely your advice is counter-productive?
If you don't like that argument (your call), I can offer another one. Firstly, if you're putting money offshore, it's generally a mid- to long-term investment strategy. Secondly, I think most people accept that of all the institutions around, Financial institutes have the most experience with the post-2000 situation (given that most have dealt with long-term loans, accounts or contracts etc).
Assumption one, therefore, is that wherever your money is, it's likely fairly safe from corruption due to Y2K. Whether it's accessible short-term is by all means in dispute (just because the bank's safe doesn't mean that the infrastructure you need to get to it - telephone, FAX, mail, e-mail etc - is going to work).
Assumption number two is that you really ARE a mid- long- term offshore saver.
Deduction is therefore that even though you can't get to it, it's fairly safe. And since you don't actually need it for a while, why bother fretting about this?
Contrived, I know.
henley
I was under the impression this is difficult if not impossible to do with Windows NT (and presumably the forthcoming Win2K) ?
Regardless, therefore of the theoretical definition, I cannot help feeling that a practical definition would therefore have to include NT/2K's GUI as part of the OS.
A little expansion: IBM & MS teamed up in 1986ish to write a replacement for [PC|MS]-DOS - OS/2. MS negotiated on the same basis as for DOS - i.e. it was written to (mainly) IBM specifications for IBM computers (actually, the PS/2 range), but MS kept the right to sell it's own version for OEM machines.
IBM insisted on support for 286 processors, hence the abortion that was OS/2 V1.X with it's appalling DOS legacy support. This, together with vast resource requirements for the time period (4MB RAM bare minimum, 30MB Disk for the OS alone) prevented widespread uptake and directly led to MS-DOS's survival and even thriving for another 7 years.
Here's where things start to get sticky. Around about 1989, IBM finally agreed that 286 support could be dropped (MS never wanted to support this processor in the first place). This directly led to OS/2 V2.0 which because of the 386's Virtual x86 modes & MMU meant that at last OS/2 could support existing DOS applications. IBM originally wanted to basically graft this support onto OS/2 V1.x, retaining most original features such as the existing Presentation Manager (amongst other effects this would mean that OS/2 was still tied to Intel hardware), wheras MS was more interested in making OS/2 more portable.
For a time, IBM and MS had an agreement: OS/2 V2 would be a 386-only version built on the existing codebase, development of which was led by IBM, wheras MS would start work on OS/2 V3 which would be focused on multi-platform support. The MS project was codenamed New Technology (NT).
Quite quickly, MS decided that their work would benefit from a clean-sheet, rather than picking up OS/2's baggage. Additionally, they had found that a cut-down version of the OS/2 Presentation Manager API could be sold as a DOS extender / GUI in it's own right, and would have fewer resource requirements than a full-blown from-the-ground up multitasking OS like OS/2.
The result - broadly speaking Windows 2.x 386-mode, Windows NT, and IBM's decision to persevere with OS/2 thus OS/2 2.x - is history.
The last version of OS/2 written by MS was V1.2 which added REXX support, a "cleaner" GUI which looks & functions mostly like Windows 3.X, and major enhancements to the OS "integrated" applications Communications Manager, Database Manager, and LAN Manager. IBM then took this, cleaned it up significantly with the goal of reducing resource requirements (MS Bloat even then!), added some additional functionality like Dual Boot to DOS (think minimalist LILO here) and released OS/2 V1.3 which to your humble author was the fasted, most reliable, cleanest OS/2 ever - as long as you wanted to run only OS/2 16-bit applications, of course.
The on-topic bit: Where Microsoft really shafted IBM was in the handover of MS-generated technology for OS/2 V2.x (remember, although an IBM-led effort, base OS coding was still MS's responsibility). I have heard tales of promised kernel functionality and documentation being delivered in the form of "stub" header files containing nothing more than function names & parameters - no documentation, no code, just promises. Delivered late, of course.
As an aside, I actually used a beta version of V2.0, before IBM integrated it's new Workplace Shell interface on top of the existing Presentation Manager. It was the perfect OS for me: quick (the PM was from OS/2 v1.3, the kernel was 32-bit clean), DOS window support (running a slightly modified PC-DOS v5.0 in a window, playing Microprose "Grand Prix" in 1992 was Waaaaaay cool), and relatively lightweight. WPS took a lot longer to settle down....
I'm confused. I read the article, and they want you to PAY to allow people to get at your MS-hosted web server?
I presume "authorised access" means some sort of authentication. Like you'd do if you had e-commerce data (shipping addresses, orders, card details etc) stored there.
Are MS really trying to give up the e-commerce server market? What incentive is there now to use a Win2K Web Server, instead of a Freeware/payware UNIX based server? What about if you use a non-Win2K authenticating web server on your Win2K box (e.g. Apache)? Do I have to pay MS under those circumstances?
I don't understand. I must have misread the article.
< RANT > /RANT >
Yes we bloody well DO need standards for paper sizes. I work in the UK for a large American corporation. Not only do they set standards for everything from Paper size to word-processing software to use, they then ignore their own standards and use whatever's most convenient for y'all. Which never - I repeat never works here in sunny Euro-land(*).
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Slightly more on-topic, however, is that this s why TeX, HTML, SGML, Script, Bookmaster (ooh what a giveaway) rule, and WYSIWYG sucks. Send me your TeX and I'll format it for whatever paper I happen to have loaded. Send me your Word document and I'll not only have to translate it into something horrible looking in Lotus Wordpro, but I'll also completely cock-up your references, tables-of-contents and indexes when I change paper sizes on you.
(*) - Yes, the UK is part of the EU. Most of the time. Ignoring political or nationalistic arguments to the contrary, it's single greatest feat - to me - is forcing this 1000-year-old nation state to drag itself kicking and screaming into the 20th century and start adopting some sane standards.
I very much doubt it'll ship with Linux. Read the article: they're targetting the WinTV crowd with this. Can you see them getting used to logging in / out of Linux? Shutting down instead of hitting the power button? Dealing with fsck() ?
This isn't about PC Manufacturers being Hardware people again. This is about PC Manufacturers jumping onto the cheap internet computing bandwagon. They announce cheap, "disposable", non-MS PCs within 24 hours of Sun re-launching their NCs? Guess what they're trying to protect, folks!
The article isn't an anti-MS, or anti-Windows article. It's a pro-cheap-network-computing article.
Discussion of OS for these puppies - or rather the OS that will be delivered with them from the factory - is nearly irrelevent, except for the fact that they're not automatically going for MS's OS-du-jour (Hmm.. targetted for early next year... Win2000 comes out Feb 17.. Coincidence?).
henley, who has been watching too much X-files and sees conspiracies everywhere today.