You have a budget of $1 million?
You are hosting this on a 56K dial-up in your root cellar?
Your apps need to run on Microsoft Windows or HP-UX or...?
You've got a SAN or local disk or...?
You're using home-built white-box x86s or Sun E15000s or...?
You have sysadmin talent on hand? You're outsourced to IBM global services?
Who vets these silly questions? Oh, I forgot - the "Editors".
The article mentions ABBA, the Bee Gees and Engelbert Humperdinck. These are not 80s bands. "Macblaster" and the alleged editor Zonk need to listen to something other than their Fisher-Price My First iPod and get a clue.
80s band names would be cool. Baby Boomer twaddle is not.
If you aren't an Evercrack addict or a World of Warcraft fanatic then chances are you may just be interested in some of these updates for non-mainstream MMORPGs
Because of course, everyone must be interested in some kind of MMORPG.
abiword and the like do not support some great functions for editing text:
regular expressions
piping to awk, sort, et al.
Additionally, using abiword means using a mouse for editing text. Mice are slow. I'm not anti-mouse, but I bet I can edit a text file in vi a lot faster than anyone can type them in abiword. With vi, you don't need to take your hands off the keyboard to do editing functions, the commands are built for speed on a QWERTY keyboard, etc. And the same is true for emacs (which you can always run in vi compatibility mode;)
In his world, he probably did win the server. If you think of the server as "the departmental O/S for serving files and sharing printers" then he won...I mean, when was the last time you saw Lantastic in an office?
Microsoft has only recently had a real enterprise mindframe. They still think from the PC up, rather than from the ERP system down.
GE's business is breeding and deploying great managers. Seriously. If you ask "what is GE good at?" then that's the answer. They devote enormous resources to identifying and grooming talent (which is why so many CEOs at other companys are ex-GE people). No other company that I'm aware of spends as much money on developing managerial talent.
He's right - this is a pretty sketchy idea. I polled my MBA classmates and every one of them was saying WTF.
You want examples? The whole "diworsification" trend of the 70s and 80s. GM bought a satellite company (Hughes) and a data processing firm (EDS), for instance. See how well that worked out for them. The idea was that they'd use these businesses to ride out the slumps in the economic cycle...in reality, all it did was divert management's attention from their core business.
All of the derived wisdom in business is that you find what your company is great at and put everything behind it. Read Good to Great.
eBay buying Paypal makes sense because there are obvious synergies - you buy something on eBay and pay for it with Paypal (and Paypal was also profitable). Sometimes big acquisitions make sense - Oracle buying Peoplesoft and Seibel, or Ford buying Hertz (though after 15+ years they're now ditching it). Sometimes the deals are more of a stretch...e.g., FedEx/Kinko's and UPS/Mailboxes are both based on a very specific strategy and set of assumptions.
eBay buying Skype makes zero sense to me. If eBay had bought Christie's or Sotheby's, I might understand...but buying Skype is (a) reaching waaaay over to a completely different market where the synergies are very speculative, and (b) investing in an unproven, unprofitable venture with a LOT of cash, reminiscent of the dot-com days.
I have a Treo 650 and work with many other people who do as well. No one complains about lock-ups. All of us are quite happy. I think your experience is atypical, based on what I've experienced and what I've seen...of course, if you're running lots of "little OS mod programs", that might be the cause.
Finding bugs in software requires a lot of patience and attention to detail because often times you have to manipulate time and memory to get what you want.
it hasn't been throughput, because those things turn out to be terrible.
I'm not sure what mainframes you are talking about. The ones in our universe are absolute monsters at throughput. Hundreds of network sessions going while printing to thousands of printers while running batch jobs, etc. In fact, that is one of the mainframe's biggest strengths.
The other strengths are obvious: (a) bullet-proof reliability, the likes of which no open source box has yet to achieve (yes, I know of what I speak), and (b) extremely mature code and practices.
If the question is culture, then the mainframe culture is best described by the word "mature," in all senses of the word. The world is very stable, very known, has no surprises, and is very professionally run. It's also very old - and so are most people in it. I periodically contemplate rebooting my career as a mainframe systems programmer...in about 10 years there will be a gazillion openings.
...wouldn't the culture they create be a reflection of the motivations they're given? 1,000 humans are so diverse that the culture could be anything. How do you get that level of diversity into AIs, using present technology?
Seriously, I imagine even describing programmatically the motivations and desires of 1,000 humans is impossible right now. You could simplify it (Sims, most CRPGs) but then you're at my question.
I have a feeling that if they are AIs who simply need to do X, Y, and Z to survive and survival is their priority, then there will be only a sterile culture of efficiency.
This isn't my area of expertise...just musing.
(Yes, I'm aware that you could therefore say that humans are result of the motivations our creators gave us...I'm not going into that.)
IGNFF: Do you feel like you would ever give your life for a stranger or an ideal? PORTMAN: No.
What a piece of trash. If her nation was being invaded by Nazis, she wouldn't give her life to protect it? If she saw a child inside a burning building, she wouldn't go in?
Either she's incredibly stupid because she didn't think before she spoke, or she's incredibly self-centered. Or more likely, both.
Yes, but it was possible to learn Windows because there were manuals that were in sync with the code, documentation was available, etc.
I wouldn't want another OS that was exactly like Windows...but a free (in all senses of the word) OS that was exactly like the Mac, on the other hand...(at least in a user-interface sense)
Slashdot Mirror
It was diculous the first time. No need to re-diculize it.
Bwaaaaahahaahahaha. That's the silliest thing I've read on Slashdot in quite a while, and that's saying something.
How is Blizzard doing these days? SAP? SAS? A few thousand makers of industry-specific packages you've never heard of?
Far be it from me to recommend Microsoft products, but...if you're primarily a Windows shop, there's SharePoint, which is sort of a Wiki.
You are hosting this on a 56K dial-up in your root cellar?
Your apps need to run on Microsoft Windows or HP-UX or...?
You've got a SAN or local disk or...?
You're using home-built white-box x86s or Sun E15000s or...?
You have sysadmin talent on hand? You're outsourced to IBM global services?
Who vets these silly questions? Oh, I forgot - the "Editors".
80s band names would be cool. Baby Boomer twaddle is not.
Because of course, everyone must be interested in some kind of MMORPG.
Yawn...
Additionally, using abiword means using a mouse for editing text. Mice are slow. I'm not anti-mouse, but I bet I can edit a text file in vi a lot faster than anyone can type them in abiword. With vi, you don't need to take your hands off the keyboard to do editing functions, the commands are built for speed on a QWERTY keyboard, etc. And the same is true for emacs (which you can always run in vi compatibility mode ;)
Microsoft has only recently had a real enterprise mindframe. They still think from the PC up, rather than from the ERP system down.
Exactly.
(eBay sure doesn't ;)
You want examples? The whole "diworsification" trend of the 70s and 80s. GM bought a satellite company (Hughes) and a data processing firm (EDS), for instance. See how well that worked out for them. The idea was that they'd use these businesses to ride out the slumps in the economic cycle...in reality, all it did was divert management's attention from their core business.
All of the derived wisdom in business is that you find what your company is great at and put everything behind it. Read Good to Great.
eBay buying Paypal makes sense because there are obvious synergies - you buy something on eBay and pay for it with Paypal (and Paypal was also profitable). Sometimes big acquisitions make sense - Oracle buying Peoplesoft and Seibel, or Ford buying Hertz (though after 15+ years they're now ditching it). Sometimes the deals are more of a stretch...e.g., FedEx/Kinko's and UPS/Mailboxes are both based on a very specific strategy and set of assumptions.
eBay buying Skype makes zero sense to me. If eBay had bought Christie's or Sotheby's, I might understand...but buying Skype is (a) reaching waaaay over to a completely different market where the synergies are very speculative, and (b) investing in an unproven, unprofitable venture with a LOT of cash, reminiscent of the dot-com days.
I have a Treo 650 and work with many other people who do as well. No one complains about lock-ups. All of us are quite happy. I think your experience is atypical, based on what I've experienced and what I've seen...of course, if you're running lots of "little OS mod programs", that might be the cause.
Even Donald Knuth can't manipulate time.
You'd expect "editing" to catch something like that...
...theglobe.com? If memory serves, they held some sort of record regarding IPOs for a while - biggest first-day pop?
I wonder how hard it would be to retrofit, though...
I'm not sure what mainframes you are talking about. The ones in our universe are absolute monsters at throughput. Hundreds of network sessions going while printing to thousands of printers while running batch jobs, etc. In fact, that is one of the mainframe's biggest strengths.
The other strengths are obvious: (a) bullet-proof reliability, the likes of which no open source box has yet to achieve (yes, I know of what I speak), and (b) extremely mature code and practices.
If the question is culture, then the mainframe culture is best described by the word "mature," in all senses of the word. The world is very stable, very known, has no surprises, and is very professionally run. It's also very old - and so are most people in it. I periodically contemplate rebooting my career as a mainframe systems programmer...in about 10 years there will be a gazillion openings.
Seriously, I imagine even describing programmatically the motivations and desires of 1,000 humans is impossible right now. You could simplify it (Sims, most CRPGs) but then you're at my question.
I have a feeling that if they are AIs who simply need to do X, Y, and Z to survive and survival is their priority, then there will be only a sterile culture of efficiency.
This isn't my area of expertise...just musing.
(Yes, I'm aware that you could therefore say that humans are result of the motivations our creators gave us...I'm not going into that.)
It's not strictly Nigeria. However, according to 419eater.com, it it somewhat cultural - see question 5, forward search for "Old Coaster".
Yep...all they had to do was add a graphical layer to Rogue/Angband ;)
Dude, she isn't going to date you. There's a reason transhumanists never get laid.
PORTMAN: No.
What a piece of trash. If her nation was being invaded by Nazis, she wouldn't give her life to protect it? If she saw a child inside a burning building, she wouldn't go in?
Either she's incredibly stupid because she didn't think before she spoke, or she's incredibly self-centered. Or more likely, both.
...why she's destroying her nose with bad plastic surgery.
I wouldn't want another OS that was exactly like Windows...but a free (in all senses of the word) OS that was exactly like the Mac, on the other hand...(at least in a user-interface sense)
Paging Marshall T. Savage...