The ROC is oferring access to government contracts for critical systems. If MS want their stuff to be used for these systems, they will have to open up the source. MS can still sell them non-critical stuff, and they can look elsewhere for their server solutions.
In our case, thanks to some Androids, they had a naming convention that negated the whole idea of COBOL data structures, that is all elements must be qualified by their record, instead of using A OF B. This also means that you can't use stuff like 'MOVE CORRESPONDING'. Bleagh!!!!!
Oh, we had some high tech stuff as well, a front-end written in Java. Trouble was that the whole thing was written by a bunch of kiddies who had no concept of engineering. The C code was ok though.
I am happy with the idea of intrinsically safe reactor designs like CANDU. I'm not so happy with the idea of whqat happens to the waste and the plant when it is scrapped.
I am also perfectly happy with the little Radio Isotope Generators used inside of people. I am less happy with what happens when there are larger numbers of these things knocking around. Morticians know about these things when they are inside pacemakers and that they must be removed before cremation.
If there were larger numbers of these thermal generators knocking around, would they be correctly disposed of?
Yep, my most recent project was supposed to be C. That was until they discovered that I knew COBOL.
Then a good half year of COBOL, some new modules and a lot of maintenance. Then I discovered a file dump tool wasn't quite working properly, so I fixed it. It was written in FORTRAN.
The only one of my old skills I haven't recycled recently is assembler.
First of all as you suggest, RAID will faithfully write whatever screwed up data that the host system tells it to. It only protects against a bad drive.
The problem is if the PSU goes on the blink, this can trash multiple drives. If you are unlucky, it can trash your entire RAID-5 set. The PSU on many machines is selected purely on a cost basis and even if can deliver the watts, it may send spurious voltages in the process of self-destruction.
The only way is a second system and to synchronize, i.e., with rsync, the data on each system. Regrettably, disks have expanded beyond the capacity of all but the most expensive tape drives.
Moving the time so much that fans lose track of where it is
Splitting the series in two
Somebody up high wanted the series nuked and they were successful. It seems that the Sci-Fi channel is afraid of Sci-Fi unless it is star-drek related.
Sorry, I was working with RAM drives 10 years ago. They are neat but expensive and somewhat more limited in their capacity. However, I can say with these things to store their hot files on, the world's largest electronic derivatives wouldn't be able to cope with the load that it does.
The point is that with the drives that I have used (SCSI-U2W through fibre channel) is that they used good old fashioned interfaces which meant that they were plug compatible with older hardware.
If we all boycott buying CDs, then where do we find the source material for putting up on Kazaa, ed2K, etc?
No seriously, I would encourage selective purchasing of those CDs that do not have protection. I like to take music with me when I travel, and I have a notebook PC, why should I buy another CD player? I'm not even talking about MP3s, why can't we play the original on a PC-attached CD player?
I believe you will find the original was published throughe Heisse, they publish c't amongst other things. They are open source heavy weights but they definitely are not a National Enquirer. Neither for that matter is The Register, they like a bit of fun but their reporting tends to be accurate.
The INS and the sate dept employees who do the actual screening were tasked to look for two things only:
Is the person going to overstay their visa and/or work illegally?
Has the person been convicted of any crime?
They were not tasked to look for potential terrorists because they have no access to the FBI computers. The FBI does have access to lists of all persons entering the US and can request copies of the forms presented to the INS representatives.
There wasn't even a formal way in which they could warn the FBI that a person looked interesting. Certainly they don't have time to give people the third degree and in any case, those people from many EU countries get automatic waivers (visa granted on entry).
It should be emphasised that on paper at least, the terrorists had good reasons for their visit to the US. They could support themselves and were seen to be likely to leave (they had commitments back in their own countries).
The danger is that if you give everyone the third degree before they are allowed in, they will stop coming to your country to spend money. The US needs both tourists and trade.
It doesn't matter why it was originally done, the problem is there only ever seems to be negligable time available for clean-ups.
I first was on a system many years ago and the design decisions had a reason, for example checking for errors first at the user end and then again at the host side. This was complicated and added considerably to the maintenance work load. People wanted to ditch this double checking until I recalled the reason for the design decision, check once at the user side for typos and then check again at the host side because the user end was running on an untrusted computer. Simple enough, but the documentation seems to have been lost.
The budget is more for new features than housekeeping so time to do cleanups is limited. I always did a two pass operation, implement the features and then attemp to clean up *if* I had time. Often I had inadequate time or the clean-up was considered to be too high a risk. I can therefore say that in a 30 million line application, probably 10% never gets executed.
In the trading industry, some users have as many as 10 Monitors all running from 1 PC, and I've heard of more. Most traders have at least 4.
At 4 displays or above, I start to get nervous, particularly if the trader is running Win2K or XP. It slowly becomes better to have two separate PCs in case one goes down. I don't even mind having the extra keyboard rather than a KVM because the trader is less likely to get confused and type the wrong thing into the wrong PC. So I prefer a max of 2-3 screens per PC.
In any case, the real cost issue is licensing and the big flat screens. The PC itself costs almost nothing in comparison.
La Rance is an estuary dam (all sorts of ecological issues there) and requires a massive difference between high and low tides (10 metres plus).
From what I understand, this can just be placed on the sea floor in a relatively tidal area without requiring the dam or massive tide difference, just a strong current would do it.
An OS is primarily a layer for hiding the hardware and scheduling tasks. It means that application software dosn't give a monkeys which hd or video card I have or anything else.
Sure we should agree that there are much better ways to present higher level abstractions such as presentation and storage of informatio, however in the end it must sit on an OS.
As to which OS, perhaps users shoudn't care if each system was able to provide a similar set of services, however in relity operating systms tend to specialise somewhat. For example the Win speciality is the BSOD!!!!
No seriously, there are two questions to be asked here:
Should the user have to care about the OS? and
Does the user have to care about the OS?
Whith specialised system like the engine management system in a car, I as a user don't give a damn. The only interface is presented by the application (throttle, etc). With a general purpose system like a PC, the user is exposed to the system in a number of ways, indeed Linux (and other Unixes) are slightly better in this respect because at least the GUI and the desktop are not integrated into the OS.
The patent makes no reference to the Internet. Indeed, it refers to dialup terminals. What seems to be core is the ability to present sales options based upon customer preferences.
Even in the early 90s it was possible to use computer systems before the Internet to trade in many items, including the specific travel application that they quote. For example, it was possible to book flights and hotels via SABRE (i.e., you didn't need to refer to printed copies of the OAG). SABRE certainly built up a profile of customer preferences. Certainly in the UK, the Prestel system provided travel agents in the 80s with a generalised interface for flight/hotel reservations. Many agents had automatic systems for determining best buys (Thom Cooks, was one).
Yeah, the price of coke is really high at those promotional parties (I don't mean the stuff coming from Atlanta) and needlr time gets more and more expensive.
Selling 10^5 of something means that fixed costs are spread more broadly than when 10^3 of something but remember that only $1 or less of that CD represents the total of fixed costs plus variable (pressing costs) w/o the marketing.
The scale of marketing for music media begs the question, is it limiting the choice of available music?
First, I have only followed the thread summaries on kernel traffic, but I'm aware of the ongoing debate.
Linus writes very good code. He therefore tends to regard those of us mere mortals who need debugging tools, in this case, a crash dump and earlier, a kernel debugger as lesser mortals.
Do any of us really like kernel bloat? At the same time what do we do when it has tanked and we only have a vague idea why. Linus's view is that the kernel shouldn't have crashed. True, but in real life, even if the s/w is perfect, the hardware isn't and a cosmic ray may have flipped a bit. This is why we have crash dumps and debugging tools. Linus doesn't believe in this. This is why the kdb project has to stay as an external patch.
Most vendors consider Linus's kernel to be a little bit bleeding edge, they wait a while before upgrading and they may apply patches of their own (*sometimes* back ported from newer releases) to improve stability but normally not to add features. It certainly isn't the vendor's job to add this.
Regrettably my board may be ATX but it isn't going to support AGP-8x or a 2GHz+ processor. So, eventually I will upgrade. I guess a lot of other people treat the motherboard as another item to be upgraded, after all it isn't expensive compared to CPU chips or graphics cards.
Palladium is optional. You aren't forced to use it. Some s/w (such as the new DRM compliant WinXX) won't run without it, but you should always be able to run untrusted s/w.
There isn't a real lot to choose between the different offerrings from the major phone manufacturers. Nokia is now going for market differentiation with premium models in pretty housings. This isn't the diamond studded version, but the Ti alloy housing will seriously push the price upwards.
Wait until the same functionality is available in a slightly heavier/bigger. It won't be top of the range (i.e., to show off to the rest of the world), but it will be one heck of a lot cheaper.
That is unless you really want to show the rest of the worls that you are the best pimp/drug dealer/flat-head, etc.
We successfully (?) bombed Serbia during peace-time.
Actually it was more a case of putting a large number of microwave ovens out of action. Those dirty-tricky freigners had microwave ovens with the door interlocks disabled. The HARM missles found a series of microwave pulses and a $50,000 missle successfuly destroyed a $150 microwave oven. Repeat a few hundred times and you see where the budget goes.
I guess those dirty rottrn Serb bastards had to go without microwave-ready meals for a while.....
When you don't run a games, your PC's GPU is doing very little. Simple 2d window management as with Win or X does not require much from the processor.
Running a distributed client on a GPU is an interesting idea, as it is esentially a very fast processor Optimised for 3d-math but with some general capabilities.
OTOH, it would be difficult because it is hard to work directly on the GPU as the driver translates the instructions and GPUs very a lot (NVidia, Radeon, etc., and then the individual models). Also, the GPU would tend to run hotter as it would have to do more work (hard-gamers tend to ensure that their graphics card has additional cooling).
Slashdot Mirror
They will probably save a bundle too!
Oh, we had some high tech stuff as well, a front-end written in Java. Trouble was that the whole thing was written by a bunch of kiddies who had no concept of engineering. The C code was ok though.
I am also perfectly happy with the little Radio Isotope Generators used inside of people. I am less happy with what happens when there are larger numbers of these things knocking around. Morticians know about these things when they are inside pacemakers and that they must be removed before cremation.
If there were larger numbers of these thermal generators knocking around, would they be correctly disposed of?
Then a good half year of COBOL, some new modules and a lot of maintenance. Then I discovered a file dump tool wasn't quite working properly, so I fixed it. It was written in FORTRAN.
The only one of my old skills I haven't recycled recently is assembler.
The problem is if the PSU goes on the blink, this can trash multiple drives. If you are unlucky, it can trash your entire RAID-5 set. The PSU on many machines is selected purely on a cost basis and even if can deliver the watts, it may send spurious voltages in the process of self-destruction.
The only way is a second system and to synchronize, i.e., with rsync, the data on each system. Regrettably, disks have expanded beyond the capacity of all but the most expensive tape drives.
- Moving the time so much that fans lose track of where it is
- Splitting the series in two
Somebody up high wanted the series nuked and they were successful. It seems that the Sci-Fi channel is afraid of Sci-Fi unless it is star-drek related.The point is that with the drives that I have used (SCSI-U2W through fibre channel) is that they used good old fashioned interfaces which meant that they were plug compatible with older hardware.
No seriously, I would encourage selective purchasing of those CDs that do not have protection. I like to take music with me when I travel, and I have a notebook PC, why should I buy another CD player? I'm not even talking about MP3s, why can't we play the original on a PC-attached CD player?
I believe you will find the original was published throughe Heisse, they publish c't amongst other things. They are open source heavy weights but they definitely are not a National Enquirer. Neither for that matter is The Register, they like a bit of fun but their reporting tends to be accurate.
I agree with what I understand from my bad German. This is very much a take it or leave it!
Isn't there a tax on blank tapes and CD-Rs in Germany anyway?
- Is the person going to overstay their visa and/or work illegally?
- Has the person been convicted of any crime?
They were not tasked to look for potential terrorists because they have no access to the FBI computers. The FBI does have access to lists of all persons entering the US and can request copies of the forms presented to the INS representatives.There wasn't even a formal way in which they could warn the FBI that a person looked interesting. Certainly they don't have time to give people the third degree and in any case, those people from many EU countries get automatic waivers (visa granted on entry).
It should be emphasised that on paper at least, the terrorists had good reasons for their visit to the US. They could support themselves and were seen to be likely to leave (they had commitments back in their own countries).
The danger is that if you give everyone the third degree before they are allowed in, they will stop coming to your country to spend money. The US needs both tourists and trade.
I first was on a system many years ago and the design decisions had a reason, for example checking for errors first at the user end and then again at the host side. This was complicated and added considerably to the maintenance work load. People wanted to ditch this double checking until I recalled the reason for the design decision, check once at the user side for typos and then check again at the host side because the user end was running on an untrusted computer. Simple enough, but the documentation seems to have been lost.
The budget is more for new features than housekeeping so time to do cleanups is limited. I always did a two pass operation, implement the features and then attemp to clean up *if* I had time. Often I had inadequate time or the clean-up was considered to be too high a risk. I can therefore say that in a 30 million line application, probably 10% never gets executed.
In any case, the real cost issue is licensing and the big flat screens. The PC itself costs almost nothing in comparison.
From what I understand, this can just be placed on the sea floor in a relatively tidal area without requiring the dam or massive tide difference, just a strong current would do it.
Sure we should agree that there are much better ways to present higher level abstractions such as presentation and storage of informatio, however in the end it must sit on an OS.
As to which OS, perhaps users shoudn't care if each system was able to provide a similar set of services, however in relity operating systms tend to specialise somewhat. For example the Win speciality is the BSOD!!!!
No seriously, there are two questions to be asked here:
Whith specialised system like the engine management system in a car, I as a user don't give a damn. The only interface is presented by the application (throttle, etc). With a general purpose system like a PC, the user is exposed to the system in a number of ways, indeed Linux (and other Unixes) are slightly better in this respect because at least the GUI and the desktop are not integrated into the OS.
Ironically, the system upon which this is based, Prestel is also a major source of prior-art for this patent.
The service otherwise bombed, but was very popular with travel agents in the UK.
Even in the early 90s it was possible to use computer systems before the Internet to trade in many items, including the specific travel application that they quote. For example, it was possible to book flights and hotels via SABRE (i.e., you didn't need to refer to printed copies of the OAG). SABRE certainly built up a profile of customer preferences. Certainly in the UK, the Prestel system provided travel agents in the 80s with a generalised interface for flight/hotel reservations. Many agents had automatic systems for determining best buys (Thom Cooks, was one).
Selling 10^5 of something means that fixed costs are spread more broadly than when 10^3 of something but remember that only $1 or less of that CD represents the total of fixed costs plus variable (pressing costs) w/o the marketing.
The scale of marketing for music media begs the question, is it limiting the choice of available music?
Linus writes very good code. He therefore tends to regard those of us mere mortals who need debugging tools, in this case, a crash dump and earlier, a kernel debugger as lesser mortals.
Do any of us really like kernel bloat? At the same time what do we do when it has tanked and we only have a vague idea why. Linus's view is that the kernel shouldn't have crashed. True, but in real life, even if the s/w is perfect, the hardware isn't and a cosmic ray may have flipped a bit. This is why we have crash dumps and debugging tools. Linus doesn't believe in this. This is why the kdb project has to stay as an external patch.
Most vendors consider Linus's kernel to be a little bit bleeding edge, they wait a while before upgrading and they may apply patches of their own (*sometimes* back ported from newer releases) to improve stability but normally not to add features. It certainly isn't the vendor's job to add this.
One ring to rule them all....
Sorry!
Palladium is optional. You aren't forced to use it. Some s/w (such as the new DRM compliant WinXX) won't run without it, but you should always be able to run untrusted s/w.
Wait until the same functionality is available in a slightly heavier/bigger. It won't be top of the range (i.e., to show off to the rest of the world), but it will be one heck of a lot cheaper.
That is unless you really want to show the rest of the worls that you are the best pimp/drug dealer/flat-head, etc.
I guess those dirty rottrn Serb bastards had to go without microwave-ready meals for a while.....
Running a distributed client on a GPU is an interesting idea, as it is esentially a very fast processor Optimised for 3d-math but with some general capabilities. OTOH, it would be difficult because it is hard to work directly on the GPU as the driver translates the instructions and GPUs very a lot (NVidia, Radeon, etc., and then the individual models). Also, the GPU would tend to run hotter as it would have to do more work (hard-gamers tend to ensure that their graphics card has additional cooling).