It would like something out of the Red Dwarf series or HHTTG to have some intergalactic civilization to dedicate an entire millienium to polishing this planet into a perfect cut diamond, only for it to be demolished to make way for an intergalactic highway.
You need to have control over your overheads. I've heard stories of startup companies which were successful enough to survive in the marketplace, ended up being killed off by the landlord upping the rent/lease and sucking out the money intended research funding). One company made the mistake for competing for public research funds while leasing offices from a university landlord. Silicon valley people just used their garage as a workshop.
Having an education and access to the latest hardware is another requirement, either through savings or sources of funding (wealthy parents). This allows those people to learn the latest technologies and techniques (hardware, software tools, applications).
Having knowledge of a particular market segment - even partying on a university campus gave some people an idea of what technology would help. Lot of people worked in a large company, saw that their was an urgent need by their company as well as others, and saw that they could move into that niche and use their own savings as venture capital.
Having read some of those back magazine adverts, you could pay $65 for a disk cleanup tool, and find that someone has just sent you the command line program to format the disk.
It has come up before. BBC Horizon did a exploration of AI about 20 years. The one with Danny Hillis doing a talk of competitive genetic algorithms.
They documented the failure of a network of telephone exchanges. The intention was for any exchange that detected an internal fault or tampering to send a disconnect message to all its peers and go into standby mode. Each peer in turn would propagate that message, providing they hadn't heard it before. Only problem was, the actual bit of code propagating the message, sent the address of the current exchange, rather than the original sender. Consequence was the whole network shutdown whenever one exchange was hit by lightning.
Provide free development platforms for anyone who can demonstrate a screenshot of an application or game, they have the rights to the source code and would like to port to Android .
I always remember that time in 1986 when our lab PC's had CGA graphics,EGA was high-end, and even the Atari 800XL could do 256 colors using some HBI's. All the artists I knew, used Amigas for rendering characters and levels.
Phone companies used to charge Internet usage by the kilobyte via ISDN . Some phone companies tried billing voice calls by the second rather by the minute when Fax started to decline. Then other companies offered flat-rate internet access via ADSL/DSL.Then Skype came along . That very much killed off micro-payment schemes.
That was for programming in APL. I saw an APL keyword once. It was like a Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum on Steroids. There were more hieroglyphics on that keyboard than an SG-1 stargate. APL keyboard.
It started off as a term in distributed networks - to represent something that the end-points didn't need to know, understand or whose implementation may vary. Like in software, data structures can be "opaque" with "void *" pointers or referenced as "handles".
Network people used clouds to refer to the X.25 / ISDN packet switched network. There was no fixed route, as nodes would be dynamically reconfigured as traffic flow varied. So trying to draw any kind of structure was pointless, so they just drew a fluffy cloud with X.25 on it. Other times, they would use a lightning flash or a zig-zag line to represent the connection between two remote sites.
Sun had a marketing slogan from the dot com era - "The network is the computer" as well as "We are the dot in dot com". They even had a large kennel outside their main headquarters for "Network", as he fetches things for you.
Ten years ago they were saying that in the future, digital networking would become so fast, it would outperform local hard disk drives. Therefore, it will be cheaper to put everything "in the cloud" than it would to store locally.
The management would still offshore that one job and manufacturing plant to India. That is the way it is with fabric manufacturing. You only need one technician to supervise fifteen carpet weaving looms, and an artist using Photoshop to create the designs.
The story of Jack Tramiel, the Atari ST is a fascinating read. Especially the part about fired employees walking out of the building carrying hardware in lieu of final paychecks.
Seems Atari were forced to go in two directions - competing against IBM PC's/ Apple Mac's and console systems. Do they add more features and increase the price, or remove features and lower costs.
Problem was, Atari was bringing out new machines faster than the developers could learn the hardware. Something like a new system every year, while it would take two or three titles to really get to understand the system. So developers would get pissed off about investing time in learning skills that had to be abandoned.
The home PC's themselves had features like vertical blank interrupts, horizontal blank interrupts, virtual viewports, hardware collision detection of sprites, programmable character/tile sets, potential for digitized speech.
I believe you can actually register certain domain names (like.homelinux.org) and have the IP address defined to any address you like... So blocking the DNS lookup isn't going to help. It would have been simpler just to lock the blog accounts and change the file permissions, but it's probably just easier pulling the power cable out of the wall.
Some IT departments bill by the hour. So there is pressure to get some feature implemented as quickly as possible as well as do *exactly* what the customer wants, along with a need to make as few changes as possible to minimize breaking the code. In the short-term this saves costs. In the long-term this makes code unwieldy, monolithic and harder to maintain.
It's strange how we evolved C to C++ to make use of features like inheritance, polymorphism, pointers, templates and design patterns in order to encourage code reuse, then move over to other languages because doing all that design takes up too much time.
1850's: Punched cards and weaving looms killed off skilled craftspeople (Luddites)
1950's Punched cards and electro-mechanical computers killed off rooms of accountants and clerks. Automated electromechanical (Strowger) telephone exchanges kill off telephone switchboard operators.
1980's Laser printers killed off print technicans and departments (boiler plate technicians and strippers). BT's System X killed off electro-mechanical exchanges Word processors/Desktop PC's killed off the need for every manager to have a secretary (but they became admins, executaries and PA's). (some managers thought having to learn to typewriting skills meant they would become glorified typists). E-mail and Fax killed off Telex (Paper tape with punched holes in it).
1990's ATM killed off System X TCP/IP killed off ATM Broadband killed off ISDN / X.25 / dial-up modems Windows MFC/C++ killed off X-windows/Motif/ C programming Windows 95/NT + HAL kills off the need for users to fiddle about with IRQ's and motherboard settings Gameboy killed off the custom electronic game (Magic Merlin).
2000's
USB kills off serial/parallel/keyboard ports memory sticks kill off 3.5"/5.25" floppy disks Internet killed off the dominance of the newspapers over opinion and perception of world events. High density disk drives 100+ Gigabytes kill off low density disk drives (Megabytes) PDA killed off the Filofax
We knew the digital revolution was coming 30 years ago, since the 1980's:
"The Coming of the Chip" by Anthony Hyman, "The Computer Revolution", and "When the Chips are down" by BBC Horizon really document the era of the 1980's, and the fear that everyone had.
In each case, the authors knew that once you had the means of transferring documents, text, video and images at the speed of light back and forth through a communications link, there was no restriction where that work would be done, and that it usually ended up going wherever costs were lowest.
Sounds like California - they were wanting to make cost savings by reducing overtime payments or salary grades. It sounded simple, just update the Excel spreadsheet or whatever table they used. Didn't realize that the entire pay scale system was hard-coded in Cobol, as nested if-then-else statements. Every new employment grade had resulted in a new set of conditional statements. Just having a special exemption for a single year would have meant duplicating everything.
Maybe it was just me then - got my first PC in 1989 (20MHz Dell 310), got an upgrade to a 256K Paradise VGA board about 6 months later, moved onto a TIGA board with a few Megabytes memory and 32-bit framebuffer another 6 months later. Another six months later, I've got employment using a custom PC.
Had great fun programming the VGA directly; doing fun things like changing the character set, trying out Mode X from Dr. Dobbs, with 256 colors and page flipping, implementing scrollable viewports, palette editors, bitmap font editors, a 256 color version of the BGI drivers.
Fascinating reference to the Beagle and Gumstixx boards. I'm amazed by how far along embedded systems with graphics chips/OpenGL have come along.
That was really the fault of Microsoft and their spin machine - 1994/1995, Microsoft was announcing that "Windows NT was the future, UNIX was legacy". When NT came out, all the application developers were forced to abandon one UNIX platform each in order to support NT (all those compiler, manual and support licenses) cost a bundle. That forced many of the small-niche companies to switch to Windows NT (DEC, HP, SGI) and become "box integrators" like Dell (ie. take a PC motherboard, slap in a graphics board, disk drive, some memory chips, a CPU, and a Microsoft license and flog the whole caboodle for something that made enough profit to keep the shareholders happy).
Because CEO's are paid bonuses according to how much they expect the company to grow. Shareholders expect the predicted growth to be at least linear if not exponential.
It makes sense to blow off an entire perfectly division in the style of a dark sci-fi movie, because of the belief that those staff could be redeployed somewhere more profitable elsewhere (not factoring in that some staff may make a complete career change, leave the industry, go back to university or take early retirement as a way of saying F.U.) Shareholders would cheer when layoffs were made, because it meant lower overheads for social security payments for at least one quarter.
Some companies expect each division to make at least 10% growth, otherwise staff in the entire division would be redeployed elsewhere. There was a belief that divisions grew like living beings (child - growing rapidly, still findings its way around, teenager - still growing, knows how and where to go, finding its way, adult - slower growth, but self-sufficient, aristocrat - stopped growing, but has influence over other groups). The latter stage was reached after successive hiring freezes and layoffs.
ARM descended from Acorn Computers, who provided the Archimedes computer along with a RISC OS. They seem to have bought out every possible semiconductor design group and merged them together.
Remember those times in the mid/early 1990's. As mentioned, there was a vast variety of different consumer PC's, along with experimental operating systems like TAOS - a JAVA like system with cross-platform compilation and dynamic linking.
Graphics boards were upgraded every six months as they are now: CGA, Hercules, EGA, VGA, SVGA, accelerated SVGA, and so on.. Back in the 1980's, everything was aimed to be Hercules compatible. From an Ad Lib sound card manual:
Ad Lib Septembre 1987
Because of compatibility problems between Compaq's Deskpro 86
and Hercules graphics card, our software cannot make use of a
mouse unless you upgrade Compaq's BIOS to a newer version.
Slashdot Mirror
It would like something out of the Red Dwarf series or HHTTG to have some intergalactic civilization to dedicate an entire millienium to polishing this planet into a perfect cut diamond, only for it to be demolished to make way for an intergalactic highway.
The police seem to be getting kitted up with all the military hardware:
Why do the police have tanks?
Then there is Operation Fast and Furious
There seems to be several essential ingredients.
You need to have control over your overheads. I've heard stories of startup companies which were successful enough to survive in the marketplace, ended up being killed off by the landlord upping the rent/lease and sucking out the money intended research funding). One company made the mistake for competing for public research funds while leasing offices from a university landlord. Silicon valley people just used their garage as a workshop.
Having an education and access to the latest hardware is another requirement, either through savings or sources of funding (wealthy parents). This allows those people to learn the latest technologies and techniques (hardware, software tools, applications).
Having knowledge of a particular market segment - even partying on a university campus gave some people an idea of what technology would help. Lot of people worked in a large company, saw that their was an urgent need by their company as well as others, and saw that they could move into that niche and use their own savings as venture capital.
Yes, and it's own little rootkit with keylogger and remote desktop viewer.
The domain names MyCleanPC.com and DoubleMySpeed.com are both owned by a company called CyberDefender, a known spyware vendor.
Locker Gnome
Having read some of those back magazine adverts, you could pay $65 for a disk cleanup tool, and find that someone has just sent you the command line program to format the disk.
It has come up before. BBC Horizon did a exploration of AI about 20 years. The one with Danny Hillis doing a talk of competitive genetic algorithms.
They documented the failure of a network of telephone exchanges. The intention was for any exchange that detected an internal fault or tampering to send a disconnect message to all its peers and go into standby mode. Each peer in turn would propagate that message, providing they hadn't heard it before. Only problem was, the actual bit of code propagating the message, sent the address of the current exchange, rather than the original sender. Consequence was the whole network shutdown whenever one exchange was hit by lightning.
Provide free development platforms for anyone who can demonstrate a screenshot of an application or game, they have the rights to the source code and would like to port to Android .
That should help encourage developers.
I always remember that time in 1986 when our lab PC's had CGA graphics,EGA was high-end, and even the Atari 800XL could do 256 colors using some HBI's. All the artists I knew, used Amigas for rendering characters and levels.
Phone companies used to charge Internet usage by the kilobyte via ISDN . Some phone companies tried billing voice calls by the second rather by the minute when Fax started to decline. Then other companies offered flat-rate internet access via ADSL/DSL.Then Skype came along . That very much killed off micro-payment schemes.
That was for programming in APL. I saw an APL keyword once. It was like a Commodore 64 or ZX Spectrum on Steroids. There were more hieroglyphics on that keyboard than an SG-1 stargate. APL keyboard.
It started off as a term in distributed networks - to represent something that the end-points didn't need to know, understand or whose implementation may vary. Like in software, data structures can be "opaque" with "void *" pointers or referenced as "handles".
Network people used clouds to refer to the X.25 / ISDN packet switched network. There was no fixed route, as nodes would be dynamically reconfigured as traffic flow varied. So trying to draw any kind of structure was pointless, so they just drew a fluffy cloud with X.25 on it. Other times, they would use a lightning flash or a zig-zag line to represent the connection between two remote sites.
Sun had a marketing slogan from the dot com era - "The network is the computer" as well as "We are the dot in dot com". They even had a large kennel outside their main headquarters for "Network", as he fetches things for you.
Ten years ago they were saying that in the future, digital networking would become so fast, it would outperform local hard disk drives. Therefore, it will be cheaper to put everything "in the cloud" than it would to store locally.
The management would still offshore that one job and manufacturing plant to India. That is the way it is with fabric manufacturing. You only need one technician to supervise fifteen carpet weaving looms, and an artist using Photoshop to create the designs.
The story of Jack Tramiel, the Atari ST is a fascinating read. Especially the part about fired employees walking out of the building carrying hardware in lieu of final paychecks.
Seems Atari were forced to go in two directions - competing against IBM PC's/ Apple Mac's and console systems. Do they add more features and increase the price, or remove features and lower costs.
Problem was, Atari was bringing out new machines faster than the developers could learn the hardware. Something like a new system every year, while it would take two or three titles to really get to understand the system. So developers would get pissed off about investing time in learning skills that had to be abandoned.
The home PC's themselves had features like vertical blank interrupts, horizontal blank interrupts, virtual viewports, hardware collision detection of sprites, programmable character/tile sets, potential for digitized speech.
The Apple Newton / MessagePad 110 from 1994
I believe you can actually register certain domain names (like .homelinux.org) and have the IP address defined to any address you like...
So blocking the DNS lookup isn't going to help. It would have been simpler just to lock the blog accounts and change the file permissions, but it's probably just easier pulling the power cable out of the wall.
Some IT departments bill by the hour. So there is pressure to get some feature implemented as quickly as possible as well as do *exactly* what the customer wants, along with a need to make as few changes as possible to minimize breaking the code. In the short-term this saves costs. In the long-term this makes code unwieldy, monolithic and harder to maintain.
It's strange how we evolved C to C++ to make use of features like inheritance, polymorphism, pointers, templates and design patterns in order to encourage code reuse, then move over to other languages because doing all that design takes up too much time.
You can go back further:
1850's:
Punched cards and weaving looms killed off skilled craftspeople (Luddites)
1950's
Punched cards and electro-mechanical computers killed off rooms of accountants and clerks.
Automated electromechanical (Strowger) telephone exchanges kill off telephone switchboard operators.
1980's
Laser printers killed off print technicans and departments (boiler plate technicians and strippers).
BT's System X killed off electro-mechanical exchanges
Word processors/Desktop PC's killed off the need for every manager to have a secretary (but they became admins, executaries and PA's).
(some managers thought having to learn to typewriting skills meant they would become glorified typists).
E-mail and Fax killed off Telex (Paper tape with punched holes in it).
Group E-mail killed off steep pyramid hierachical management chains (director/assistant director/deputy assistant director/senior manager/ associate manager/ manager/junior manager/trainee manager/senior engineer/engineer/junior engineer)
1990's
ATM killed off System X
TCP/IP killed off ATM
Broadband killed off ISDN / X.25 / dial-up modems
Windows MFC/C++ killed off X-windows/Motif/ C programming
Windows 95/NT + HAL kills off the need for users to fiddle about with IRQ's and motherboard settings
Gameboy killed off the custom electronic game (Magic Merlin).
2000's
USB kills off serial/parallel/keyboard ports
memory sticks kill off 3.5"/5.25" floppy disks
Internet killed off the dominance of the newspapers over opinion and perception of world events.
High density disk drives 100+ Gigabytes kill off low density disk drives (Megabytes)
PDA killed off the Filofax
We knew the digital revolution was coming 30 years ago, since the 1980's:
"The Coming of the Chip" by Anthony Hyman, "The Computer Revolution", and "When the Chips are down" by BBC Horizon really document the era
of the 1980's, and the fear that everyone had.
In each case, the authors knew that once you had the means of transferring documents, text, video and images at the speed of light back and forth through a communications link, there was no restriction where that work would be done, and that it usually ended up going wherever costs were lowest.
Sounds like California - they were wanting to make cost savings by reducing overtime payments or salary grades. It sounded simple, just update the Excel spreadsheet or whatever table they used. Didn't realize that the entire pay scale system was hard-coded in Cobol, as nested if-then-else statements. Every new employment grade had resulted in a new set of conditional statements. Just having a special exemption for a single year would have meant duplicating everything.
Maybe it was just me then - got my first PC in 1989 (20MHz Dell 310), got an upgrade to a 256K Paradise VGA board about 6 months later, moved onto a TIGA board with a few Megabytes memory and 32-bit framebuffer another 6 months later. Another six months later, I've got employment using a custom PC.
Had great fun programming the VGA directly; doing fun things like changing the character set, trying out Mode X from Dr. Dobbs, with 256 colors and page flipping, implementing scrollable viewports, palette editors, bitmap font editors, a 256 color version of the BGI drivers.
Fascinating reference to the Beagle and Gumstixx boards. I'm amazed by how far along embedded systems with graphics chips/OpenGL have come along.
Simple. Shoot a hole going all the way through the moon. Now they only need one observation post.
That was really the fault of Microsoft and their spin machine - 1994/1995, Microsoft was announcing that "Windows NT was the future, UNIX was legacy". When NT came out, all the application developers were forced to abandon one UNIX platform each in order to support NT (all those compiler, manual and support licenses) cost a bundle. That forced many of the small-niche companies to switch to Windows NT (DEC, HP, SGI) and become "box integrators" like Dell (ie. take a PC motherboard, slap in a graphics board, disk drive, some memory chips, a CPU, and a Microsoft license and flog the whole caboodle for something that made enough profit to keep the shareholders happy).
Because CEO's are paid bonuses according to how much they expect the company to grow. Shareholders expect the predicted growth to be at least linear if not exponential.
It makes sense to blow off an entire perfectly division in the style of a dark sci-fi movie, because of the belief that those staff could be redeployed somewhere more profitable elsewhere (not factoring in that some staff may make a complete career change, leave the industry, go back to university or take early retirement as a way of saying F.U.) Shareholders would cheer when layoffs were made, because it meant lower overheads for social security payments for at least one quarter.
Some companies expect each division to make at least 10% growth, otherwise staff in the entire division would be redeployed elsewhere. There was a belief that divisions grew like living beings (child - growing rapidly, still findings its way around, teenager - still growing, knows how and where to go, finding its way, adult - slower growth, but self-sufficient, aristocrat - stopped growing, but has influence over other groups). The latter stage was reached after successive hiring freezes and layoffs.
ARM descended from Acorn Computers, who provided the Archimedes computer along with a RISC OS. They seem to have bought out every possible semiconductor design group and merged them together.
Remember those times in the mid/early 1990's. As mentioned, there was a vast variety of different consumer PC's, along with experimental operating systems like TAOS - a JAVA like system with cross-platform compilation and dynamic linking.
Graphics boards were upgraded every six months as they are now: CGA, Hercules, EGA, VGA, SVGA, accelerated SVGA, and so on..
Back in the 1980's, everything was aimed to be Hercules compatible.
From an Ad Lib sound card manual:
Ad Lib Septembre 1987
Because of compatibility problems between Compaq's Deskpro 86
and Hercules graphics card, our software cannot make use of a
mouse unless you upgrade Compaq's BIOS to a newer version.