So there we are in 93 or 94, the 386 just taking off, OS/2 and Windows are still pretty much children's toys compared to UNIX and mainframe OSes, the only commercial Intel UNIX is $1200 for the base OS and the fuckers want another $1200 for a C compiler, you can take your chances with a bunch of BSD tapes and I'd just heard about this nifty new Linux thing coming on the scene.
At that time there was 386BSD but they were tearing themselves apart for some reason which I never bothered to get to the bottom of (I think the corpse of that became FreeBSD, but I could be wrong). Linux was not as polished at all, but did a few things reasonably. In particular, it had shared libraries, greatly reducing the memory requirements at a time when memory was expensive, and it had built in floating-point coprocessor emulation. (This was back when programming on DOS/Windows still meant using a segmented memory model or futzing around with a DOSExtender. Linux's flat model — heck, all Unixes' flat model — was much nicer, with far fewer contortions in the code to deal with squeezing things into 64kB blocks.)
That very first slakware distribution that I downloaded onto 26 floppies was better than anything they'd ever done.
It should be a settlement between the major carriers, Comcast, Shaw, Verizon, Google fibre (Google as an ISP, not Google as SaaS provider)
Those are only mid-tier carriers really. The major carriers are the people who build national fibre backbones, trans-oceanic links, etc. The end-customer doesn't normally see them (unless they use traceroute) but they're there and they're important.
Owning a sports franchise is basically a vanity project. Hire a GM to handle the drafts, trades, and contracts, other folks to handle the marketing, then you basically get to be a super fan who has a legit stake in the team. You don't need to evaluate whether your basketball team should open up a hockey team as well, or if you should only start four players to save on costs. You don't even really need to make money because you're a fan and doing it for fun.
You need to think more in terms of how to monetize! Media rights. Merchandise. Special access opportunities for other super-fans. Franchise-themed credit card. If being a super-fan is the only thing you can think of, you're wasting that asset...
All causes have some idiot followers who jump on the bandwagon without any intellectual thought.
Really? I think I'll define "give dkf lots of money for doing nothing much, so he can spend it on beer and pizza and the other good things in life" as a cause and see how effective that is! Contact me for detailed instructions on how to remit payments.
(I know, it probably won't bring in much, but it also takes so little effort I might as well try.)
Indeed, there are plenty of lousy companies that are badly managed, have bad employees, and make bad products. But they don't last because their customers go elsewhere.
And lots of good companies also don't last. Their products might be good, but their upstream suppliers too often stiff them and their downstream customers fail to pay promptly, causing a critical cashflow problem and making them go bankrupt despite being theoretically just fine. "Theoretically just fine" doesn't count for much in reality.
The flip side is with large companies that do a few things well enough to generate a large stream of money, but which are otherwise massively inefficient. The parts which generate a lot of money support the rest (and at least some of that rest is actually necessary for making the profitable parts work, so simply divesting everything that doesn't turn an instant profit is a surefire way to kill the company). Plus there's no guarantee that a company will be run solely to maximise the amount of profit produced each quarter; that's formally a matter for the board and the shareholders, and nobody else.
Large companies tolerate quite a bit of inefficiency, but are capable of doing things that small companies cannot do because of a key fact: they can borrow much more cheaply and in much larger amounts. That's the part that really runs counter to your preferred story about nimble small firms beating lumbering large ones; the reality is that small firms are much riskier investments than large ones, so most people are much more reluctant to lend them anything.
It's good for Universities that want to teach Cloud computing
No, it isn't. A bunch of incompetently integrated systems that require lots of effort to put into a state suitable for students and to keep in that state? Speaking as someone who has actually written a course on cloud computing, no thanks. The students can get free time on one of the big providers instead and learn everything they need, and those providers actually try really hard to make things work. (The free allocations tend to be fairly small, but they're enough for learning basic principles.)
I've also seen what tends to happen when someone tries to operate a cloud without sufficient spend on QoS or integration: paying for AWS or Azure is an easy decision by comparison. (Losing access for a week because someone pushed a wrong configuration to a router and then went on holiday? Of course nobody else on the cloud operations side could fix it either. Aaargh...)
Contrary to what most people learn in middle school science classes, temperature does affect slightly the volume of liquids
Well duh! How do you think normal domestic and lab thermometers work? They've got a liquid in them that expands as temperature rises, and that's been calibrated. Yes, they usually use alcohol or mercury (depending on the intended temperature range) but water's not really that much different. (Except between 0C and about 4C, when it is weird!)
OK, so there's other ways that are used too, but liquid-based temperature measurements are still very common.
It's even worse than that. The article gives the example of a company, KlearGear, trying to charge a couple because they left a negative review of the company. The wrinkle in this case: The negative review was posted three years before the lawsuit and before the "you can't criticize us online" text entered into the EULA. So the companies don't just want you to agree to whatever is in their EULA, they think you accepting the EULA means you also accept any future version of the EULA no matter what restrictions get added on.
How would a court even begin to believe that sort of thing might be conscionable?
The bureaucrats involved have already proven their one skill: having a chair when the music stops.
As long as all the chairs are underneath the eroding tank of toxic radioactive sludge, we'll be OK anyway. Or we'll have a legion of mutant superpowered bureaucrats poised to take over the world...
Of course, But the insane-foaming-at-the-mouth anti-EU types are not stopped by facts. They just really hate the fact that society is turning liberal and that despising people because of their colour of sexual preferences is frown upon.
Their leaders also hate that most of the people taking the decisions on these things didn't go to the same school and aren't members of the same clubs, so that it's rather more difficult for them to influence what happens by a quiet word outside of view of any public scrutiny. (Unfortunately the British press are singularly useless at actually correctly reporting what happens at European level, but the decision-making there a heck of a lot more open to actual scrutiny than at national level...)
Sorry, but devs absolutely need to be on a limited system!
The problem with that approach is that you end up with devs being told to produce iPhone apps using just Microsoft Word "because that's what the company provides for all their employees; no program may be present that has not been vetted by central operations". It's going from one extreme to the other...
Yes, but the "hard" bugs are the ones that happen at run-time. Those depends on the context such as Networking, Rendering, and AI bugs that can be a real PITA to track down.
Most of those are actually due to constraint violations. Too many people in this industry think that they can implement half an interface and ignore the difficult bits. I've even had someone seriously tell me that doing the whole semantics would break things. That facepalm hurt my nose.
Race Conditions, and Deadlock are hairiest ones.
There are worse. Security problems with multiple components all in different security contexts on different hosts... that's hard (no debuggers, no unified logging, lovely...) However, in general there are always deeper problems possible; the ultimate problems tend to relate helping the customer understand what the program can and should do in the first place.
I've seen the existing functionality of an IDE's automatic (or semi-automatic) compile, run and debug loop sabotaged by some (sometimes mandated) third party plugin which is supposed to make things "easier." I've watched as people poorly integrate Java Spring into a project and render it impossible to use Eclipse's debug button because of badly constructed project dependencies. I've seen people integrate Maven into a build process in ways which guarantee the project will stop compiling at some unspecified time in the future by improperly scoping the range of libraries that will be accepted.
I've seen refactoring which adds code bloat (rather than simplifies the code). I've seen home-rolled configuration files which make code discovery functions break code discovery functions in Eclipse useless. I've seen plenty of 'voodoo stick waving' standing in for good coding practices. I've seen the lava flow anti-pattern obscure a simple Java RTL call in 20 discrete layers of classes, each added on by another refactoring that did nothing but make things more obscure.
I've seen weird blends of ant and makefile build processes which took a product that should have taken perhaps 5 minutes to build take over an hour, and build processes so broken that it was impossible to shoe-horn into an IDE without rewriting the entire project.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
A 27 year old Swede can look forward to 40% of the salary as a pension. A Greek 120%.
You are aware that that is one of the main reasons that Greece was so thoroughly fucked by the financial crisis? One of the main reasons why such a large proportion of Greeks had no jobs at all for years? 40% feels low, sure, but 120% is absurdly high. (The only way 120% could work is by artificially depressing salaries across the whole population and getting the taxes in from entirely different mechanisms. You'd get 120%, but it would be 120% of much less...)
So if they can't enforce a fine, then what happens if you don't pay the straffavgift?
The most likely option would be for the transit authority to take the person to civil court, seeking to get a debt paid. While the Swedish legal system is not the same as a common law one, there are still courts that deal with private disputes where this sort of thing could be resolved. (I don't know whether it would count as a contract dispute or something else; IANASwedishL.)
Ugh. Why do people talk about those when they don't really exist for real, at least in terms of meaningful chemistry? A real raw H+ would be just a proton, and those are really quite rare. What you actually get are hydroxonium ions (in simplest form, H3O+, though H5O2+ and higher forms also occur).
Raw protons are a meaningful thing in high-energy physics, of course. They just never occur in any quantity in solutions...
All the Starbucks around here have phone scanners on the counter, and the exchange is at least a few seconds quicker than handing over a credit card or dealing with cash (and change).
It's not significantly faster than paying by exact cash. In most parts of the world it's possible to know ahead of time how much you're going to have to pay when it comes to making such a small purchase as a cup of coffee.
Cards are indeed slower; their strength is with larger transactions like a week's groceries.
They aren't required to be licensed, they don't have plates to identify the bicycle that blew through the light and cut off the 18-wheeler, so unless there's a cop right there, nothing happens.
Perhaps that should change. Require licensing of cyclists (so that there's some chance they'll actually know what the law relating to them is) and plates for their vehicles.
[Ships] more or less go as fast as their engines are practically capable of, because that's what the customers are paying for - speed of delivery.
No, they go at a speed that maximises profit; ship owners are very keen on optimising for that parameter. As the price of oil goes up, the speed of ships decreases (because the losses due to friction/turbulence are related non-linearly to speed — a quick search indicates maybe it's quadratic, but I'm not sure) because the increase in income due to arriving earlier wouldn't pay for the increase in fuel costs required to get the ship there sooner.
Slashdot Mirror
So there we are in 93 or 94, the 386 just taking off, OS/2 and Windows are still pretty much children's toys compared to UNIX and mainframe OSes, the only commercial Intel UNIX is $1200 for the base OS and the fuckers want another $1200 for a C compiler, you can take your chances with a bunch of BSD tapes and I'd just heard about this nifty new Linux thing coming on the scene.
At that time there was 386BSD but they were tearing themselves apart for some reason which I never bothered to get to the bottom of (I think the corpse of that became FreeBSD, but I could be wrong). Linux was not as polished at all, but did a few things reasonably. In particular, it had shared libraries, greatly reducing the memory requirements at a time when memory was expensive, and it had built in floating-point coprocessor emulation. (This was back when programming on DOS/Windows still meant using a segmented memory model or futzing around with a DOSExtender. Linux's flat model — heck, all Unixes' flat model — was much nicer, with far fewer contortions in the code to deal with squeezing things into 64kB blocks.)
That very first slakware distribution that I downloaded onto 26 floppies was better than anything they'd ever done.
Good memories...
It should be a settlement between the major carriers, Comcast, Shaw, Verizon, Google fibre (Google as an ISP, not Google as SaaS provider)
Those are only mid-tier carriers really. The major carriers are the people who build national fibre backbones, trans-oceanic links, etc. The end-customer doesn't normally see them (unless they use traceroute) but they're there and they're important.
Owning a sports franchise is basically a vanity project. Hire a GM to handle the drafts, trades, and contracts, other folks to handle the marketing, then you basically get to be a super fan who has a legit stake in the team. You don't need to evaluate whether your basketball team should open up a hockey team as well, or if you should only start four players to save on costs. You don't even really need to make money because you're a fan and doing it for fun.
You need to think more in terms of how to monetize! Media rights. Merchandise. Special access opportunities for other super-fans. Franchise-themed credit card. If being a super-fan is the only thing you can think of, you're wasting that asset...
even if the user uses goof practices.
I think that's going to be close to 100% of all users...
All causes have some idiot followers who jump on the bandwagon without any intellectual thought.
Really? I think I'll define "give dkf lots of money for doing nothing much, so he can spend it on beer and pizza and the other good things in life" as a cause and see how effective that is! Contact me for detailed instructions on how to remit payments.
(I know, it probably won't bring in much, but it also takes so little effort I might as well try.)
Move the conference to Europe, which already has many similar ones.
But then most of the employees and contractors of the NSA won't be able to attend!!!
That's not a bug in your plan, of course...
Indeed, there are plenty of lousy companies that are badly managed, have bad employees, and make bad products. But they don't last because their customers go elsewhere.
And lots of good companies also don't last. Their products might be good, but their upstream suppliers too often stiff them and their downstream customers fail to pay promptly, causing a critical cashflow problem and making them go bankrupt despite being theoretically just fine. "Theoretically just fine" doesn't count for much in reality.
The flip side is with large companies that do a few things well enough to generate a large stream of money, but which are otherwise massively inefficient. The parts which generate a lot of money support the rest (and at least some of that rest is actually necessary for making the profitable parts work, so simply divesting everything that doesn't turn an instant profit is a surefire way to kill the company). Plus there's no guarantee that a company will be run solely to maximise the amount of profit produced each quarter; that's formally a matter for the board and the shareholders, and nobody else.
Large companies tolerate quite a bit of inefficiency, but are capable of doing things that small companies cannot do because of a key fact: they can borrow much more cheaply and in much larger amounts. That's the part that really runs counter to your preferred story about nimble small firms beating lumbering large ones; the reality is that small firms are much riskier investments than large ones, so most people are much more reluctant to lend them anything.
It's good for Universities that want to teach Cloud computing
No, it isn't. A bunch of incompetently integrated systems that require lots of effort to put into a state suitable for students and to keep in that state? Speaking as someone who has actually written a course on cloud computing, no thanks. The students can get free time on one of the big providers instead and learn everything they need, and those providers actually try really hard to make things work. (The free allocations tend to be fairly small, but they're enough for learning basic principles.)
I've also seen what tends to happen when someone tries to operate a cloud without sufficient spend on QoS or integration: paying for AWS or Azure is an easy decision by comparison. (Losing access for a week because someone pushed a wrong configuration to a router and then went on holiday? Of course nobody else on the cloud operations side could fix it either. Aaargh...)
Contrary to what most people learn in middle school science classes, temperature does affect slightly the volume of liquids
Well duh! How do you think normal domestic and lab thermometers work? They've got a liquid in them that expands as temperature rises, and that's been calibrated. Yes, they usually use alcohol or mercury (depending on the intended temperature range) but water's not really that much different. (Except between 0C and about 4C, when it is weird!)
OK, so there's other ways that are used too, but liquid-based temperature measurements are still very common.
It's even worse than that. The article gives the example of a company, KlearGear, trying to charge a couple because they left a negative review of the company. The wrinkle in this case: The negative review was posted three years before the lawsuit and before the "you can't criticize us online" text entered into the EULA. So the companies don't just want you to agree to whatever is in their EULA, they think you accepting the EULA means you also accept any future version of the EULA no matter what restrictions get added on.
How would a court even begin to believe that sort of thing might be conscionable?
The bureaucrats involved have already proven their one skill: having a chair when the music stops.
As long as all the chairs are underneath the eroding tank of toxic radioactive sludge, we'll be OK anyway. Or we'll have a legion of mutant superpowered bureaucrats poised to take over the world...
Hmm, maybe I need to think about this a bit more.
Of course, But the insane-foaming-at-the-mouth anti-EU types are not stopped by facts. They just really hate the fact that society is turning liberal and that despising people because of their colour of sexual preferences is frown upon.
Their leaders also hate that most of the people taking the decisions on these things didn't go to the same school and aren't members of the same clubs, so that it's rather more difficult for them to influence what happens by a quiet word outside of view of any public scrutiny. (Unfortunately the British press are singularly useless at actually correctly reporting what happens at European level, but the decision-making there a heck of a lot more open to actual scrutiny than at national level...)
Sorry, but devs absolutely need to be on a limited system!
The problem with that approach is that you end up with devs being told to produce iPhone apps using just Microsoft Word "because that's what the company provides for all their employees; no program may be present that has not been vetted by central operations". It's going from one extreme to the other...
Yes, but the "hard" bugs are the ones that happen at run-time. Those depends on the context such as Networking, Rendering, and AI bugs that can be a real PITA to track down.
Most of those are actually due to constraint violations. Too many people in this industry think that they can implement half an interface and ignore the difficult bits. I've even had someone seriously tell me that doing the whole semantics would break things. That facepalm hurt my nose.
Race Conditions, and Deadlock are hairiest ones.
There are worse. Security problems with multiple components all in different security contexts on different hosts... that's hard (no debuggers, no unified logging, lovely...) However, in general there are always deeper problems possible; the ultimate problems tend to relate helping the customer understand what the program can and should do in the first place.
I've seen the existing functionality of an IDE's automatic (or semi-automatic) compile, run and debug loop sabotaged by some (sometimes mandated) third party plugin which is supposed to make things "easier." I've watched as people poorly integrate Java Spring into a project and render it impossible to use Eclipse's debug button because of badly constructed project dependencies. I've seen people integrate Maven into a build process in ways which guarantee the project will stop compiling at some unspecified time in the future by improperly scoping the range of libraries that will be accepted.
I've seen refactoring which adds code bloat (rather than simplifies the code). I've seen home-rolled configuration files which make code discovery functions break code discovery functions in Eclipse useless. I've seen plenty of 'voodoo stick waving' standing in for good coding practices. I've seen the lava flow anti-pattern obscure a simple Java RTL call in 20 discrete layers of classes, each added on by another refactoring that did nothing but make things more obscure.
I've seen weird blends of ant and makefile build processes which took a product that should have taken perhaps 5 minutes to build take over an hour, and build processes so broken that it was impossible to shoe-horn into an IDE without rewriting the entire project.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
maybe JavaScript is the best we could hope for at this point
What? We're doomed. Doomed!
A 27 year old Swede can look forward to 40% of the salary as a pension. A Greek 120%.
You are aware that that is one of the main reasons that Greece was so thoroughly fucked by the financial crisis? One of the main reasons why such a large proportion of Greeks had no jobs at all for years? 40% feels low, sure, but 120% is absurdly high. (The only way 120% could work is by artificially depressing salaries across the whole population and getting the taxes in from entirely different mechanisms. You'd get 120%, but it would be 120% of much less...)
So if they can't enforce a fine, then what happens if you don't pay the straffavgift?
The most likely option would be for the transit authority to take the person to civil court, seeking to get a debt paid. While the Swedish legal system is not the same as a common law one, there are still courts that deal with private disputes where this sort of thing could be resolved. (I don't know whether it would count as a contract dispute or something else; IANASwedishL.)
H+
Ugh. Why do people talk about those when they don't really exist for real, at least in terms of meaningful chemistry? A real raw H+ would be just a proton, and those are really quite rare. What you actually get are hydroxonium ions (in simplest form, H3O+, though H5O2+ and higher forms also occur).
Raw protons are a meaningful thing in high-energy physics, of course. They just never occur in any quantity in solutions...
All the Starbucks around here have phone scanners on the counter, and the exchange is at least a few seconds quicker than handing over a credit card or dealing with cash (and change).
It's not significantly faster than paying by exact cash. In most parts of the world it's possible to know ahead of time how much you're going to have to pay when it comes to making such a small purchase as a cup of coffee.
Cards are indeed slower; their strength is with larger transactions like a week's groceries.
...should a lawyer get to determine the science curriculum?
Perhaps we should get a musician to determine the law curriculum and a scientist to determine the arts curriculum. It makes just as much sense.
They aren't required to be licensed, they don't have plates to identify the bicycle that blew through the light and cut off the 18-wheeler, so unless there's a cop right there, nothing happens.
Perhaps that should change. Require licensing of cyclists (so that there's some chance they'll actually know what the law relating to them is) and plates for their vehicles.
[Ships] more or less go as fast as their engines are practically capable of, because that's what the customers are paying for - speed of delivery.
No, they go at a speed that maximises profit; ship owners are very keen on optimising for that parameter. As the price of oil goes up, the speed of ships decreases (because the losses due to friction/turbulence are related non-linearly to speed — a quick search indicates maybe it's quadratic, but I'm not sure) because the increase in income due to arriving earlier wouldn't pay for the increase in fuel costs required to get the ship there sooner.
Some sources claim that he irreversibly destroyed them when making the special editions. We don't know for sure whether that's the case or not.
Some sources claim that everything was irreversibly destroyed with the creation of Jar Jar...
it would be better to design an exoskeletal wearable device that is controlled through a ecg
You want to control some kind of exoskeleton via your heartbeat? That seems... excessively tricky to use.