I'm sorry, but calling that woman a Security Expert is wrong. She discovered the hard way that not being aware of security was a mistake but all that makes her is a security-aware user. Of course, that implies most computer owners aren't.
I'm a volunteer firefighter and I've seen plenty of accidents, and you're totally correct. Whenever one vehicle outweighs the other, the heavier one usually wins. In a head-on, it's even worse. That solar car was about as light as you can get (possibly even lighter than a motorcycle) and its low ride height makes it hard to recognize in an emergency and might have (not enough detail in the articles) have caused it to run under the minivan on impact. Even a "minor" impact would have caused significant damage and trauma to the driver.
No one in their right mind is going to ditch OS X on a desktop machine for Solaris. No one. It might have a chance as a server OS but given that you can already run Linux on the Power architecture, there's no compelling reason to consider Solaris unless you're already a Solaris shop and want to buy Power machines.
The idea behind the turbines is to harness the energy in the East River, right? That energy must be doing someting in the local environment. What happens when that energy is used by the turbines? Hard to believe there won't be some environmental impact somewhere downstream.
At one time, probably the early/mid 80's, Rochester Institute of Technology's VAXen were record holders for number of simultaneous users. It required a lot of work to keep them going, but even stressed as they were the uptime was orders of magnitude better than the Xerox Sigma systems they replaced.
Not only does Ken know a lot, he's got his "signalling button fu" working. He's going to be hard to beat as a result of that alone, as we've seen. But even when he guesses, he seems to guess correctly, so there's no doubt about the breadth of his knowledge. Go Ken!
Cisco has so much of the networking infrastructure market they obviously didn't care about the quality of their documentation. Luckily, there has always been a market for outsiders who can figure things out and explain them to others. Cisco would be smart to work with this guy.
When I switched my G3 to OS X from OS9, I told my kids that in OS X they each have their own logins and their files weren't visible to each other. What I didn't mention was that the protections didn't apply to anthing on the older OS9 disk. My oldest thought that meant she could delete files that appeared in her login and they would only disappear from her view...
I was able to retrieve some of the files but I was handicapped by not knowing they were deleted until after I had moved things around. I lost some ProTools files that I've never been able to recover, and all I have is a single CD I burned from them.
I work for a company that used to give out stock options as a bonus. I have four blocks that were issued at different times. None of them were immediately mature and only the last block has a strike price that's below the current stock price.
So, while these options are theoretically an expense, only the last block really has any value to me and that's really the only (future) expense to the company. The other ones will likely expire (who's going to pay $60 for an option when the stock is $14?). It doesn't seem fair to me to call all of my stock options as expenses given that.
Not only are the people cheap, but the companies they work for are too. Let's face it, if your company is considering outsourcing and/or offshoring jobs, how likely are they to send you to Vegas for a trade show? Given you can see many of the products on the web, as you indicate, you can download them and possibly demo them in less time than it would have taken to send you to Comdex. Hard to argue that physically being there makes sense given that.
Brooks was writing in a time and for a time. Ed, as you've noticed, is reading the book in the now. Nothing wrong with that, but he spends far too much time in the beginning of the article laughing at Brooks' words and examples and too little time at the end in dealing with the principles that Brooks was trying to get across. Since the book is still widely read, it would have been far more helpful if he had stuck to a critique of Brooks' points in terms of today's software development environment.
Assembly is a great idea when speed and compactness is necessary, but it's tough to do it well on some processor architectures, RISC in particular. A well-tuned compiler backend for those can probably out-code most (but not all) humans - and the more registers you have to keep track of, the bigger the gap. But even CISC (or CISC-like) architectures can be problematic. Consider branch prediction, to cite one example. As much as I loved getting down to the "bare metal" on the 6800 and 68000, I'm glad I can use something else today.
Perhaps I'm old fashioned but once you have enough computing power on a device to be able to run Linux what you have is a general computing device, not a calculator. Sure, you'll be able to do lots of nifty things with it, but you can do that with a lot of other devices that you can actually buy now. Give me a dedicated calculator anytime.
RMS wasn't able to, either. Or should I say a team working for RMS. But that can probably be explained by philosophy and working style rather than by competence (EMACS is no small accomplishment, after all). Perhaps Brown is unfamiliar with the power of small teams (or individuals) working on a narrow domain problem (which Linux was at first) despite the number of historical examples.
The ability to modify open source software is part of the value proposition for those organizations that can take advantage of it, in other words those that have in-house programming capability. The advantage becomes less clear when you have to pay someone from outside to do the modifications but may still be less than proprietary code (which, in some cases, may also need customization). So you're right on about the money angle, even if the per-job income is smaller, you can do a lot of customization jobs in a year vs. writing applications from the ground up.
Hey Rambus, there's a lesson you should have learned from your ol' pal Sony. Ask them what happened to their Betamax format.
Seriously, "cheap but good enough" almost always manages to beat "expensive and techically superior." Apple might be an exception, but that's open to debate. Too bad Rambus didn't read the history books.
Regardless of whether Mark derives income from sales of his graphics, it's clearly marked that his permission is required prior to use of the images. Not "if used in commercial work" or "free for individual use". They clearly didn't get his permission (or even ask for it) even though it was for use in a Flash movie.
If they have such a cavalier attitude towards ownership of something visible, what might they have done with something not quite as obvious?
If nothing else, it might help to identify the real sources of spam in a way that reading through mail headers doesn't do. I'm assuming, of course, that there will eventually be mapping tools for the data GaTech collects.
Arrests are usually a matter of public record (what's going on down in Guantanamo Bay is an exception) so there's at least some expectation that personal information will be made available. I do agree there is a difference between making it available and actually "pushing" it to lawyers and therefore the public benefit, if any, is highly questionable.
I remember Dylan, as a matter of fact I still have the book somewhere. It was another amalgam of programming language concepts that never went anywhere.
As elegant and admired as Lisp and Smalltalk are, they aren't exactly the most heavily used programming languages available (and I say that even though I love Smalltalk). Just because a language appeals to language designers, doesn't mean it's going to be embraced by the masses of programmers out there in the trenches. And the more of a mindshift necessary to use it, the less likely it will succeed.
People sometimes disparage C++, but it gained acceptance because C programmers could get their work done using it even if they weren't doing OOP programming. Evolution works where revolution fails.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm sorry, but calling that woman a Security Expert is wrong. She discovered the hard way that not being aware of security was a mistake but all that makes her is a security-aware user. Of course, that implies most computer owners aren't.
So, when other registrars try get ICANN to do something, it's bad but when Verisign tries to get ICANN to do something, it's good?
Buzzzzzzzzzz! We're sorry, but that's incorrect.
I'm a volunteer firefighter and I've seen plenty of accidents, and you're totally correct. Whenever one vehicle outweighs the other, the heavier one usually wins. In a head-on, it's even worse. That solar car was about as light as you can get (possibly even lighter than a motorcycle) and its low ride height makes it hard to recognize in an emergency and might have (not enough detail in the articles) have caused it to run under the minivan on impact. Even a "minor" impact would have caused significant damage and trauma to the driver.
No one in their right mind is going to ditch OS X on a desktop machine for Solaris. No one. It might have a chance as a server OS but given that you can already run Linux on the Power architecture, there's no compelling reason to consider Solaris unless you're already a Solaris shop and want to buy Power machines.
The idea behind the turbines is to harness the energy in the East River, right? That energy must be doing someting in the local environment. What happens when that energy is used by the turbines? Hard to believe there won't be some environmental impact somewhere downstream.
At one time, probably the early/mid 80's, Rochester Institute of Technology's VAXen were record holders for number of simultaneous users. It required a lot of work to keep them going, but even stressed as they were the uptime was orders of magnitude better than the Xerox Sigma systems they replaced.
Not only does Ken know a lot, he's got his "signalling button fu" working. He's going to be hard to beat as a result of that alone, as we've seen. But even when he guesses, he seems to guess correctly, so there's no doubt about the breadth of his knowledge. Go Ken!
Cisco has so much of the networking infrastructure market they obviously didn't care about the quality of their documentation. Luckily, there has always been a market for outsiders who can figure things out and explain them to others. Cisco would be smart to work with this guy.
When I switched my G3 to OS X from OS9, I told my kids that in OS X they each have their own logins and their files weren't visible to each other. What I didn't mention was that the protections didn't apply to anthing on the older OS9 disk. My oldest thought that meant she could delete files that appeared in her login and they would only disappear from her view...
I was able to retrieve some of the files but I was handicapped by not knowing they were deleted until after I had moved things around. I lost some ProTools files that I've never been able to recover, and all I have is a single CD I burned from them.
I did an "ego surf" on my last name, and got no results. Google returns almost 300 references (I have an uncommon last name). I'm not impressed.
I work for a company that used to give out stock options as a bonus. I have four blocks that were issued at different times. None of them were immediately mature and only the last block has a strike price that's below the current stock price.
So, while these options are theoretically an expense, only the last block really has any value to me and that's really the only (future) expense to the company. The other ones will likely expire (who's going to pay $60 for an option when the stock is $14?). It doesn't seem fair to me to call all of my stock options as expenses given that.
Not only are the people cheap, but the companies they work for are too. Let's face it, if your company is considering outsourcing and/or offshoring jobs, how likely are they to send you to Vegas for a trade show? Given you can see many of the products on the web, as you indicate, you can download them and possibly demo them in less time than it would have taken to send you to Comdex. Hard to argue that physically being there makes sense given that.
Brooks was writing in a time and for a time. Ed, as you've noticed, is reading the book in the now. Nothing wrong with that, but he spends far too much time in the beginning of the article laughing at Brooks' words and examples and too little time at the end in dealing with the principles that Brooks was trying to get across. Since the book is still widely read, it would have been far more helpful if he had stuck to a critique of Brooks' points in terms of today's software development environment.
Assembly is a great idea when speed and compactness is necessary, but it's tough to do it well on some processor architectures, RISC in particular. A well-tuned compiler backend for those can probably out-code most (but not all) humans - and the more registers you have to keep track of, the bigger the gap. But even CISC (or CISC-like) architectures can be problematic. Consider branch prediction, to cite one example. As much as I loved getting down to the "bare metal" on the 6800 and 68000, I'm glad I can use something else today.
Perhaps I'm old fashioned but once you have enough computing power on a device to be able to run Linux what you have is a general computing device, not a calculator. Sure, you'll be able to do lots of nifty things with it, but you can do that with a lot of other devices that you can actually buy now. Give me a dedicated calculator anytime.
RMS wasn't able to, either. Or should I say a team working for RMS. But that can probably be explained by philosophy and working style rather than by competence (EMACS is no small accomplishment, after all). Perhaps Brown is unfamiliar with the power of small teams (or individuals) working on a narrow domain problem (which Linux was at first) despite the number of historical examples.
...be on drugs?
Or do they only test the worker bees?
The ability to modify open source software is part of the value proposition for those organizations that can take advantage of it, in other words those that have in-house programming capability. The advantage becomes less clear when you have to pay someone from outside to do the modifications but may still be less than proprietary code (which, in some cases, may also need customization). So you're right on about the money angle, even if the per-job income is smaller, you can do a lot of customization jobs in a year vs. writing applications from the ground up.
Hey Rambus, there's a lesson you should have learned from your ol' pal Sony. Ask them what happened to their Betamax format.
Seriously, "cheap but good enough" almost always manages to beat "expensive and techically superior." Apple might be an exception, but that's open to debate. Too bad Rambus didn't read the history books.
After Y2K
I have the Tubes Rock t-shirt. It glows in the dark, naturally!
Regardless of whether Mark derives income from sales of his graphics, it's clearly marked that his permission is required prior to use of the images. Not "if used in commercial work" or "free for individual use". They clearly didn't get his permission (or even ask for it) even though it was for use in a Flash movie.
If they have such a cavalier attitude towards ownership of something visible, what might they have done with something not quite as obvious?
Honestly, it could have been much better, too.
If nothing else, it might help to identify the real sources of spam in a way that reading through mail headers doesn't do. I'm assuming, of course, that there will eventually be mapping tools for the data GaTech collects.
I tried to access it at 10:13 EDT, and the entire site is unreachable. Perhaps my ISP is blocking it at some level or Apple got to them already.
Arrests are usually a matter of public record (what's going on down in Guantanamo Bay is an exception) so there's at least some expectation that personal information will be made available. I do agree there is a difference between making it available and actually "pushing" it to lawyers and therefore the public benefit, if any, is highly questionable.
I remember Dylan, as a matter of fact I still have the book somewhere. It was another amalgam of programming language concepts that never went anywhere.
As elegant and admired as Lisp and Smalltalk are, they aren't exactly the most heavily used programming languages available (and I say that even though I love Smalltalk). Just because a language appeals to language designers, doesn't mean it's going to be embraced by the masses of programmers out there in the trenches. And the more of a mindshift necessary to use it, the less likely it will succeed.
People sometimes disparage C++, but it gained acceptance because C programmers could get their work done using it even if they weren't doing OOP programming. Evolution works where revolution fails.