You missed the 8088 (very important, it was on the first IBM PC), the 8051, the SLC series of 386 and 486, and all the CPUs and microcontrollers that use 8051 and 186 cores (TI, etc).
He said StrongARM. PC104 is Intel x86. I suppose you could have a PC104-like form factor with a Dragonball (MC68xx328), StrongARM or some other embedded non-Intel processor, but you'd have to design your chipset from scratch...
I believe QNX has a philosophy similar to the Hurd -- most of the traditional OS facilities there are moved in user space. Nevertheless, QNX is a leading hard real-time operating system with a very small footprint and elegant architecture.
Which makes me really excited about implementing real-time software in Hurd.
The August issue of the National Geographic magazine had a (what I thought to be interesting) article on spiders in general, and this larva in particular.
Informix was, I think, the first major DBMS vendor to offer a Linux port, circa 1998 (with the possible exception of SolidTech). Some time later, however, they ceased to support Linux, in which time all the other major players got in the Linux market, then Informix decided to try to recover its market share, but by that point it was too late...
Since I'm not intimately familiar with Transmeta's designs and strategy, does anyone know why they chose to compete on the x86 market, instead of aiming for IA-64 compatibility and early releasing of consumer IA-64 systems?
...many places would decay into a hellish pit of despair very rapidly.
Well, I think that's quite an exaggeration -- many places would probably have to outsource their IT work, until their own personnel gets trained in whatever fits their needs best. If they have become so dependent on Microsoft, that they cannot change to any other platform, then they have become inflexible and uncompetitive themselves. In a dynamic, unregulated capitalist economy such inflexibility is suicide -- economy regulated by Microsoft is just as bad as an economy regulated by the government.
This final passage is plainly ideological and even hero-worshipping. It is where the author drops all pretense at objectivity. In fact emacs is a design nightmare. It is wholly unsuitable for the use of non-engineers.
Although I agree that the passage you are referring to is less-than-objective, don't you think you are falling in the same trap, by calling Emacs a "design nightmare," without elaborating why, and then going on to claim that it is "unsuitable for the use of non-engineers," which I'm not even sure what it means.
I personally find that Emacs has a very flexible, extensive framework, and the fact that is has survived for such a long time demonstrates its adaptability. I do recognize its technical shortcomings, such as the single-threadedness of the Lisp interpreter, or the fact that the 20.x series used integers to represent text characters -- a remnant from the 1980s, but it nevertheless manages to combine many powerful utilities and provide consistent, extensible interface to them. I have yet to encounter a functional equivalent to Emacs/XEmacs.
"...The fact that a medium of expression has a functional capacity should not preclude constitutional protection... [C]omputer source code, though unintelligible to many, is the preferred method of communication among computer programmers. Because computer source code is an expressive means for the exchange of information and ideas of computer programming, we hold that it is protected by the First Amendment..." Junger v. Daley (6th Cir. 2000) 209 F. 3d 481, 484-485
ZAP! Hey look, there's a smoldering hole where Afghanistan used to be!;-)
Unrestricted Migration of Labor
on
Globalization
·
· Score: 1
Open the gates: Let the huddled masses go free -- the best way to show globalization can benefit the poor and rich is to allow an unrestricted migration of labour
Financial Post - Canada; Oct 30, 2001 BY SAMUEL BRITTAN
For all the effect they have had on hostile opinion, the many books and articles showing the benefits of globalization might as well have been printed in invisible ink. Most people's reactions are based on their political prejudices or favourite newspapers.
What is needed is a dramatic gesture, which is worthwhile for its own sake and would demonstrate that the free movement of capital and labour is of benefit to the world's poor.
The trouble is that there is too little globalization rather than too much. There was far more economic free movement a century ago than there is today. The big difference is, of course, in migration policies.
Many countries then allowed free inward and outward movement of labour. Today, legal migration is tightly restricted and, in practice, a focus of illegality and criminal violence. The resemblance to traditional drugs policy, where prohibition produces the very evils it claims to prevent, is all too obvious.
My proposal is to abolish the distinction between economic migrants and asylum-seekers -- who in the U.K. are not permitted to work for the first six months and are provided with vouchers at sub-benefit levels -- and allow anyone who so wishes to seek his or her fortune in any country of choice. This goes far beyond the ideas of David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, of merely extending the number of work permits.
Like nearly all economic liberalization, the free movement of labour would increase the world's national income and would particularly benefit people in poorer countries, where even those who stayed behind would find a brisker demand for their services. Although the best results would be obtained at the lowest cost if this change were generally adopted, many Western countries could move unilaterally.
Would there be any quid pro quo? Not as such. Recipient countries could impose a minimum qualifying period for state pensions. The main counterweight to liberal migration policy would be a relentless policy of exposure and punishment for anyone, irrespective of origin, who incited violence not merely against religious or racial groups but against any individuals, irrespective of the country in which they resided. Most human rights charters have provisions for amendment in emergencies.
The obvious European country to initiate a laissez-faire policy would be Ireland, which has a low population density and needs the safety valve of immigrant labour for a potentially overheated economy. But even the U.K. has a lower density than, say, the Netherlands, which is not obviously suffering from a low quality of life.
Given the extreme hostility to immigration in Germany and Italy, a common European Union immigration policy is unthinkable except on highly restrictive lines; but one can live without it. It is hardly likely immigrants will try to smuggle themselves from the U.K. and Ireland into some smoulderingly hostile German city.
The potential concession that an economic analyst has to make is that wages of workers competing with migrants could be relatively or even absolutely depressed. A high-quality and under-publicized research study -- Migration: An Economic and Social Analysis from the Home Office -- shows that native wages have not been depressed in the U.K. Immigrants have tended to perform three types of job. They have worked in public services, especially health, where pay is determined by the government. Wages are well below market levels and the effect of newcomers is to reduce shortages. In London, 23% of doctors and 47% of nurses are non-U.K. born. At the other extreme, "in relatively low paid and insecure sectors (such as) catering and domestic services, unskilled natives are simply unwilling or unable... to take the large number of available jobs."
Companies benefit from immigration "but it is not likely that natives are significantly disadvantaged: If migrants do not fill these jobs they simply go unfilled or uncreated." An estimated 70% of catering jobs are filled by migrants.
There are also the highly skilled information technology workers. According to the Home Office study, the inflow of these technicians has enabled the IT sector to grow faster rather than to depress pay in it.
The study confirms migrants are more polarized than the rest of the population, with larger concentrations of wealth and poverty and high and low skills. Not only are they highly concentrated in London and the southeast, but there are also large clusters both in wealthy Kensington and in the impoverished East End. "Levels of entrepreneurship in self-employment also appear to be high among migrants," it adds. It is not only Pakistani and east African businesses that have been attracted to the U.K.: About 150,000 French entrepreneurs are said to have arrived since 1995.
In general, earnings behaviour follows what is known in the United States as the "assimilation hypothesis." Wages in a particular age cohort start off lower for migrants but, as skills are acquired, eventually overtake those of comparable native workers. And, contrary to the popular view that immigrants are a burden on the public purse, they contribute 10% more to government revenues than they receive in government expenditures.
About 400,000 people arrived legally in the U.K. in 1998 with the intention of staying a year or more; but some estimates suggest that up to another 200,000 entered the country illegally.
The net effect of strict official restriction and feeble enforcement is, as one would expect, nightmarish conditions for those who depend on criminal gangs to enter the country. Harriet Sergeant, in Welcome to the Asylum, explains how the process leads to "slavery and child labour." She advocates a government drive for better statistics and better control. But given that very few illegal immigrants are in fact sent back, the alternative laissez-faire policy might make surprisingly little difference to the net numbers but would ensure that arrivals are recognized as human beings.
The author's main objection is that the U.K. would be swamped by, for instance, the 25% of Slovak citizens who say they want to emigrate. But would they in practice? If evidence from the European Union is anything to go by, it is surprising how few people would make the leap.
The present policy has reached a dead end. Why not try five years of laissez-faire, then review the strategy?
I hope you are aware of the fact that ever since MS-DOS 6.0, you could have multiple configurations in your config.sys, and select one of them at boot time.
Before 6.0, there was a shareware tool, whose name I'm forgetting, which let you that same thing, and a myriad of ways to have multiple AUTOEXEC.BAT configurations.
Now that I think back... weren't Win95/98/ME/2K all supposed to be "the death of DOS"... but years later and it's still around.
Yes, Windows 95 was supposed to be a complete rewrite, no DOS whatsoever. I wonder if XP has a file called IO.SYS somewhere in the system directories...
The Wind in the Willows, by the Scottish author Kenneth Grahame, is based on stories written by him for his young son, Alastair, and is certainly a children's book. Nevertheless, it is considered to be one of the finest works of Edwardian literature (and British literature in general, for that matter). It remains one of my favorite books, and I keep rereading it in my twenties, although it was one of the first books I've ever read.
Just So Stories, by the English writer Rudyard Kipling, is a collection of stories written for his little daughter, and I remember my father reading it to me before I was even able to read, yet I keep rereading those stories up to this day.
So the fact that a book is labelled as a "children's" book does not mean it cannot be written in an exquisitely beautiful language, or that it doesn't have deep meaning.
That being said, I tried to read the first Harry Potter book once, and I wasn't particularly impressed with the language, or the plot that was unravelling in the first few pages I read. So I never bothered to read any more of those books.
In other news, the Ispell dictionary prepared by the editors of the online discussion forum Slashdot proposes the following changes to the beautiful language of William Shakespeare and Samuel Coleridge:
your -> you're
you're/you are -> your
lose -> loose grammar -> grammer
corporate -> corperate ...
Actually, it was the methodology I was remarking upon; the purported motives are irrelevant, because in both cases it is a struggle for power, masked by propaganda warfare.
I just thought it was remarkable what severe punishments the industry wants to apply towards those who dare to infringe copyright.
So they'll be like this school principal, who eliminated the American classic "Of Mice and Men" from the curriculum, because it contained the word "nigger." Well, that's certainly doubleplusungood.
So perhaps the next step is to alter the MS spell checker to detect "bad" words and report back to Redmond all users who type them?
That's right, I also don't understand why poetry and literature are treated differently from building construction. Silly me, writing books on my own, I should instead let the state regulate that activity...
Slashdot Mirror
You missed the 8088 (very important, it was on the first IBM PC), the 8051, the SLC series of 386 and 486, and all the CPUs and microcontrollers that use 8051 and 186 cores (TI, etc).
That's called microcontroller, and it probably was the Intel 8051.
He said StrongARM. PC104 is Intel x86. I suppose you could have a PC104-like form factor with a Dragonball (MC68xx328), StrongARM or some other embedded non-Intel processor, but you'd have to design your chipset from scratch...
I believe QNX has a philosophy similar to the Hurd -- most of the traditional OS facilities there are moved in user space. Nevertheless, QNX is a leading hard real-time operating system with a very small footprint and elegant architecture.
Which makes me really excited about implementing real-time software in Hurd.
The August issue of the National Geographic magazine had a (what I thought to be interesting) article on spiders in general, and this larva in particular.
More information here.
Informix was, I think, the first major DBMS vendor to offer a Linux port, circa 1998 (with the possible exception of SolidTech). Some time later, however, they ceased to support Linux, in which time all the other major players got in the Linux market, then Informix decided to try to recover its market share, but by that point it was too late...
Since I'm not intimately familiar with Transmeta's designs and strategy, does anyone know why they chose to compete on the x86 market, instead of aiming for IA-64 compatibility and early releasing of consumer IA-64 systems?
Here's some statistics and information on the ozone hole from the Climate Prediction Center:
e /sbuv2to/ozone_hole.html
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/stratospher
...many places would decay into a hellish pit of despair very rapidly.
Well, I think that's quite an exaggeration -- many places would probably have to outsource their IT work, until their own personnel gets trained in whatever fits their needs best. If they have become so dependent on Microsoft, that they cannot change to any other platform, then they have become inflexible and uncompetitive themselves.
In a dynamic, unregulated capitalist economy such inflexibility is suicide -- economy regulated by Microsoft is just as bad as an economy regulated by the government.
derail the U.S. economy to the tune of several billion dollars a year
The GDP of the United States is 9.3 trillion dollars. May I inquire how a few billion dollars will derail the economy?
kill Windows XP WITHOUT a viable alternative of equal quality and support in both software and human support
Could that be due to a monopoly in said software field, I wonder?
put thousands of people out of work
Now, THAT's a good reason to keep Microsoft around... not!
You'd think that the antitrust suits against the steel industry, the railroad industry, AT&T, IBM, etc. would teach you something...
This final passage is plainly ideological and even hero-worshipping. It is where the author drops all pretense at objectivity. In fact emacs is a design nightmare. It is wholly unsuitable for the use of non-engineers.
Although I agree that the passage you are referring to is less-than-objective, don't you think you are falling in the same trap, by calling Emacs a "design nightmare," without elaborating why, and then going on to claim that it is "unsuitable for the use of non-engineers," which I'm not even sure what it means.
I personally find that Emacs has a very flexible, extensive framework, and the fact that is has survived for such a long time demonstrates its adaptability. I do recognize its technical shortcomings, such as the single-threadedness of the Lisp interpreter, or the fact that the 20.x series used integers to represent text characters -- a remnant from the 1980s, but it nevertheless manages to combine many powerful utilities and provide consistent, extensible interface to them. I have yet to encounter a functional equivalent to Emacs/XEmacs.
Can we PLEASE get over the election fiasco.
Dear Al,
Yesterday, we found some more votes from the election. Congratulations, you won! When do you want to take over?
Sincerely,
Dubya
At least you don't find websites on MSN, Zone, Hotmail, etc that require a Microsoft Keyboard or Mouse.
Heh... "This site requires MS brain and eyeballs to view..."
"...The fact that a medium of expression has a functional capacity should not preclude constitutional protection... [C]omputer source code, though unintelligible to many, is the preferred method of communication among computer programmers. Because computer source code is an expressive means for the exchange of information and ideas of computer programming, we hold that it is protected by the First Amendment..."
Junger v. Daley (6th Cir. 2000) 209 F. 3d 481, 484-485
ZAP! Hey look, there's a smoldering hole where Afghanistan used to be! ;-)
Open the gates: Let the huddled masses go free -- the best way to show globalization can benefit the poor and rich is to allow an unrestricted migration of labour
Financial Post - Canada; Oct 30, 2001
BY SAMUEL BRITTAN
For all the effect they have had on hostile opinion, the many books and articles showing the benefits of globalization might as well have been printed in invisible ink. Most people's reactions are based on their political prejudices or favourite newspapers.
What is needed is a dramatic gesture, which is worthwhile for its own sake and would demonstrate that the free movement of capital and labour is of benefit to the world's poor.
The trouble is that there is too little globalization rather than too much. There was far more economic free movement a century ago than there is today. The big difference is, of course, in migration policies.
Many countries then allowed free inward and outward movement of labour. Today, legal migration is tightly restricted and, in practice, a focus of illegality and criminal violence. The resemblance to traditional drugs policy, where prohibition produces the very evils it claims to prevent, is all too obvious.
My proposal is to abolish the distinction between economic migrants and asylum-seekers -- who in the U.K. are not permitted to work for the first six months and are provided with vouchers at sub-benefit levels -- and allow anyone who so wishes to seek his or her fortune in any country of choice. This goes far beyond the ideas of David Blunkett, the Home Secretary, of merely extending the number of work permits.
Like nearly all economic liberalization, the free movement of labour would increase the world's national income and would particularly benefit people in poorer countries, where even those who stayed behind would find a brisker demand for their services. Although the best results would be obtained at the lowest cost if this change were generally adopted, many Western countries could move unilaterally.
Would there be any quid pro quo? Not as such. Recipient countries could impose a minimum qualifying period for state pensions. The main counterweight to liberal migration policy would be a relentless policy of exposure and punishment for anyone, irrespective of origin, who incited violence not merely against religious or racial groups but against any individuals, irrespective of the country in which they resided. Most human rights charters have provisions for amendment in emergencies.
The obvious European country to initiate a laissez-faire policy would be Ireland, which has a low population density and needs the safety valve of immigrant labour for a potentially overheated economy. But even the U.K. has a lower density than, say, the Netherlands, which is not obviously suffering from a low quality of life.
Given the extreme hostility to immigration in Germany and Italy, a common European Union immigration policy is unthinkable except on highly restrictive lines; but one can live without it. It is hardly likely immigrants will try to smuggle themselves from the U.K. and Ireland into some smoulderingly hostile German city.
The potential concession that an economic analyst has to make is that wages of workers competing with migrants could be relatively or even absolutely depressed. A high-quality and under-publicized research study -- Migration: An Economic and Social Analysis from the Home Office -- shows that native wages have not been depressed in the U.K. Immigrants have tended to perform three types of job. They have worked in public services, especially health, where pay is determined by the government. Wages are well below market levels and the effect of newcomers is to reduce shortages. In London, 23% of doctors and 47% of nurses are non-U.K. born. At the other extreme, "in relatively low paid and insecure sectors (such as) catering and domestic services, unskilled natives are simply unwilling or unable ... to take the large number of available jobs."
Companies benefit from immigration "but it is not likely that natives are significantly disadvantaged: If migrants do not fill these jobs they simply go unfilled or uncreated." An estimated 70% of catering jobs are filled by migrants.
There are also the highly skilled information technology workers. According to the Home Office study, the inflow of these technicians has enabled the IT sector to grow faster rather than to depress pay in it.
The study confirms migrants are more polarized than the rest of the population, with larger concentrations of wealth and poverty and high and low skills. Not only are they highly concentrated in London and the southeast, but there are also large clusters both in wealthy Kensington and in the impoverished East End. "Levels of entrepreneurship in self-employment also appear to be high among migrants," it adds. It is not only Pakistani and east African businesses that have been attracted to the U.K.: About 150,000 French entrepreneurs are said to have arrived since 1995.
In general, earnings behaviour follows what is known in the United States as the "assimilation hypothesis." Wages in a particular age cohort start off lower for migrants but, as skills are acquired, eventually overtake those of comparable native workers. And, contrary to the popular view that immigrants are a burden on the public purse, they contribute 10% more to government revenues than they receive in government expenditures.
About 400,000 people arrived legally in the U.K. in 1998 with the intention of staying a year or more; but some estimates suggest that up to another 200,000 entered the country illegally.
The net effect of strict official restriction and feeble enforcement is, as one would expect, nightmarish conditions for those who depend on criminal gangs to enter the country. Harriet Sergeant, in Welcome to the Asylum, explains how the process leads to "slavery and child labour." She advocates a government drive for better statistics and better control. But given that very few illegal immigrants are in fact sent back, the alternative laissez-faire policy might make surprisingly little difference to the net numbers but would ensure that arrivals are recognized as human beings.
The author's main objection is that the U.K. would be swamped by, for instance, the 25% of Slovak citizens who say they want to emigrate. But would they in practice? If evidence from the European Union is anything to go by, it is surprising how few people would make the leap.
The present policy has reached a dead end. Why not try five years of laissez-faire, then review the strategy?
I hope you are aware of the fact that ever since MS-DOS 6.0, you could have multiple configurations in your config.sys, and select one of them at boot time.
Before 6.0, there was a shareware tool, whose name I'm forgetting, which let you that same thing, and a myriad of ways to have multiple AUTOEXEC.BAT configurations.
Now that I think back... weren't Win95/98/ME/2K all supposed to be "the death of DOS"... but years later and it's still around.
Yes, Windows 95 was supposed to be a complete rewrite, no DOS whatsoever. I wonder if XP has a file called IO.SYS somewhere in the system directories...
The Wind in the Willows, by the Scottish author Kenneth Grahame, is based on stories written by him for his young son, Alastair, and is certainly a children's book. Nevertheless, it is considered to be one of the finest works of Edwardian literature (and British literature in general, for that matter). It remains one of my favorite books, and I keep rereading it in my twenties, although it was one of the first books I've ever read.
Just So Stories, by the English writer Rudyard Kipling, is a collection of stories written for his little daughter, and I remember my father reading it to me before I was even able to read, yet I keep rereading those stories up to this day.
So the fact that a book is labelled as a "children's" book does not mean it cannot be written in an exquisitely beautiful language, or that it doesn't have deep meaning.
That being said, I tried to read the first Harry Potter book once, and I wasn't particularly impressed with the language, or the plot that was unravelling in the first few pages I read. So I never bothered to read any more of those books.
There are two major projects whose purpose is to create a hard real-time kernel running on top of Linux -- RT Linux and RTAI.
There are also others, but they are a lot more immature than those two.
Curiously, there's a photograph of Bill Gates on the same page, in the lower left corner. Coincidence?
In other news, the Ispell dictionary prepared by the editors of the online discussion forum Slashdot proposes the following changes to the beautiful language of William Shakespeare and Samuel Coleridge:
...
your -> you're
you're/you are -> your
lose -> loose
grammar -> grammer
corporate -> corperate
8-)
Actually, it was the methodology I was remarking upon; the purported motives are irrelevant, because in both cases it is a struggle for power, masked by propaganda warfare.
I just thought it was remarkable what severe punishments the industry wants to apply towards those who dare to infringe copyright.
So they'll be like this school principal, who eliminated the American classic "Of Mice and Men" from the curriculum, because it contained the word "nigger." Well, that's certainly doubleplusungood.
So perhaps the next step is to alter the MS spell checker to detect "bad" words and report back to Redmond all users who type them?
That's right, I also don't understand why poetry and literature are treated differently from building construction. Silly me, writing books on my own, I should instead let the state regulate that activity...