Wasn't Bill's mum also a lawyer for a firm that was working with IBM at the time? I'm sure I read something convincing about this. As I recall, she heard about the problems that IBM were having with the author of CP/M and paved the way for Bill to license DOS to them instead.
And the Intel processors of 1983-86 vintage were too underpowered to handle the overhead of a GUI at an acceptable performance level.
Which is probably why Apple, Atari and Sun to name but a few used a much more capable processor, the Motorola 68000. The 68K has a very "clean" instruction set compared to the Intel x86 bodge job. The 68K still has a niche in the embedded world, but was eclipsed in the PC/workstation world by RISC chips - Apple switched to the PowerPC, Sun switched to the SPARC and Atari went bust.
I still have a bunch of 68K machines - a NeXT slab, Apple LC II and an Atari ST. I'd love to have a Lisa as well, but they're not exactly cheap as collectors will still pay a serious stack of cash for them...
Xerox is a classic example. it is in business to sell toner.
Xerox hasn't always been primarily a manaufacturer of printers and copiers. Their R&D departments have always had a wide variety of projects on the go, and they did market a GUI computer before the Lisa - the Star. The article linked to from Slashdot has some galring inaccuracies, and the claim that the Lisa was the first commercial computer with a GUI is one of them. However, Apple had much better marketing than Xerox and the Lisa is supposed to be much easier to use than the Star.
I have been warned about how so many women will pursue American men.
Let me guess, warned by people who have never been to Russia but have seen some crap on HBO where a lonely bloke gets hitched to a mail order bride who is only after a passport. Despite the small minded, insular beliefs of many Westerners, Russian cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg are thriving business centres. So much so that finding a decent apartment at an affordable price is tricky, but finding a bar where a beer will empty your wallet isn't.
Mob thugs are no better at crime than regular thugs, they just have infrastructure in place to make it easier.
The small time "mafia" are brutal, messy and get lurid writeups. The really organised criminal only makes the headlines on rare occasions. The big money is in kickbacks from otherwise legal contracts - the criminal doesn't make the cheapest bid, but greases the right palms. Perhaps Kushnir was involved in things far more unsavoury than just span, upset one of the big boys and got made an example of.
Steven's APUE and Unix Network Programming are the books that turned me from a novice into someone who felt confident enough to pursue programming for a career. The first edition of APUE is so extremely well written - clear, concise and lucid. I'm definitely going to flick through the new edition, but the great thing is that the first one is still reelveant, in fact it's one of the five books I take with me to any new job.
how often do you use Bomb littleBoy = new AtomBomb();?
This is known in the Java world as "coding to interfaces", but it is equally applicable to C++ and many other OOP languages. For example, say I write a class that has some data stored in a list like structure:
public class Thing { List things = new ArrayList();
public List getThings() { return things; }
... }
Then I decide that I want to use a different list type, say a Vector that synchronises access to the data for me. All I have to is change one line in the class itself:
List things = new Vector();
Any code using the Thing class will continue to compile correctly, as it is only relying on the List interface.
It's thought that the bombs were detonated by mobile devices.
No, the phones were switched off to prevent overloading of the networks as they are used by the emergency services as well as the public. It's unlikely (impossible actually) that mobile phones were used to trigger the underground blasts as there's no signal down there.
I was in the midst of this when it happened. The Metropolitan line was halted, then the Jubilee. The train driver announced a "power surge on the combine", which is probably a prearranged message to prevent panic in an emergency. Trains were then brought into the nearest station and the passengers requested to evacuate. The tube staff were very calm and efficient, and I didn't see any panic. There was defnitely a sense that something unusual had happened, and people were mostly silent as we filed out to the sound of recorded evacuation messages.
Anyone trying to contact friends and relatives, please don't panic if you cannot get through. the cellphone networks are being taking in and out of public service so that the emergency services can use them reliably. Same may be true for regular phone lines.
It was only a secret from the clueless. MacOS X is OpenSTEP with eye-candy. OpenSTEP is an Intel-based operating system; always has been.
Count yourself one of the clueless too. OPENSTEP was a port of a Motorola 68k based operating system to various architectures (SPARC being the other one I've used). The original NeXTstations were 68030 and 68040 boxes. Sure, they were CISC like the x86, but they were far more elegant in terms of instruction set and much richer when it came to number of registers.
First, the first development kits for MacOS X (Rhapsody) were for x86, since NEXTSTEP was primarily a x86 OS.
Bullshit. It was primarily a Motorola 68k OS that was renamed and ported to architectures including x86 and SPARC. I've got a NeXTstation slab humming away on the desk next to me, and that's a 68040 box.
Don't be ridiculous. Web Applications must depend upon a client side programming language.
Bullshit. A "web application" is a server side application that generates dynamic content. What you're talking about is dynamic HTML, which has sucked a fat one since its inception.
Jobs was also the guy who did his best to scupper NeXT, the outfit he created after his first tenure at Apple. When the NeXT cube was designed, he insisted that the magnesium case be a perfect cube. In manufacturing, you don't make perfect cubes, as they are nigh on impossible to remove from a single piece mould or punch. Job's insistence on a perfect cube meant that the NeXT factory was littered with ruined cases and the cost of the cube escalated. I guess that's why NeXT started making "slabs".
Old SCO was fairly evil - well, their operating systems were. Xenix was a nightmare to port to from BSD derived systems like SunOS. The only thing the SCO operating systems had going for them was that you could run them on realtively cheap PC hardware in the days before 386BSD and Linux.
Then it's not an UltraSparc. An Ultra is a sun4u architecture machine, which is the 64bit successor to the 32bit sun4m architecture.
Re:New language versions break code? Unforgivable!
on
Perl Medic
·
· Score: 1
Back in the early to mid-1990s, Perl made programming accessible to people who would have struggled with systems programming languages like C or C++. The alternative, shell programming constructs, did not provide the rich set of features provided by Perl. Unfortunately, Perl's use by novices and the "101 ways to do the same thing" approach has left a legacy of spaghetti code written in dozens of weird idioms.
Amongst the Slashdot readership, there are a lot of these novice programmers (although some of are now Ruby or Python proponents). To criticise Perl (or Python, Ruby, etc) on the grounds that they do not provide the backwards compatability that you would expect from standardised languages and libraries is considered sacrilege.
Panacea for Perl woes
on
Perl Medic
·
· Score: -1, Flamebait
Alternatively, just reverse engineer the system and write in a better language.
68xxx processors are somewhat RISCy, but they are not RISC
They weren't RISCy at all, in fact the Motorola 68k family was a very clean CISC design. I did my first real programming on a 68k machine - an Atari ST. Assembly language programming was actually quite fun for that system, so it came as a bit of a shock when I tried to learn assembly for the x86.
A few years ago there was something similar in the UK, frogs developed some kind of infection that caused them to become "spawn bound". The females couldn't lay their spawn, instead they became all bloated and reddish in colour. Eventually they ruptured. Not quite as explosive as the toads, but it was pretty vile as I'd agreed to clear my parents pond right when this was happening.
(At the time I had a friend who wasn't much good with ladies. He was quite fat, so in honour of the frogs it was decided that he was "sperm bound".)
Linux drivers tend to have magic numbers sprinkled all over the place, rather than nice defines with meaningful names. This make the drivers worthless as a reference, unless you take the time to document the magic numbers first.
You can get C99 support by specifying -std=c99 in your CFLAGS. I recently did this to get inline functions, but the code looked horrible (external definitions in header files), so I switched back to C89.
*Choke*. Objective-C++ was an absolutely atrocious idea. Objective-C is a simple extension to C that adds support for Object Oriented Programming without the syntactical abortions found in C++. Objective-C++ was just an attempt to appeal to C++ programmers who didn't want to learn a language that did OOP far more elegantly than the langague they already knew.
Slashdot Mirror
Wasn't Bill's mum also a lawyer for a firm that was working with IBM at the time? I'm sure I read something convincing about this. As I recall, she heard about the problems that IBM were having with the author of CP/M and paved the way for Bill to license DOS to them instead.
And the Intel processors of 1983-86 vintage were too underpowered to handle the overhead of a GUI at an acceptable performance level.
Which is probably why Apple, Atari and Sun to name but a few used a much more capable processor, the Motorola 68000. The 68K has a very "clean" instruction set compared to the Intel x86 bodge job. The 68K still has a niche in the embedded world, but was eclipsed in the PC/workstation world by RISC chips - Apple switched to the PowerPC, Sun switched to the SPARC and Atari went bust.
I still have a bunch of 68K machines - a NeXT slab, Apple LC II and an Atari ST. I'd love to have a Lisa as well, but they're not exactly cheap as collectors will still pay a serious stack of cash for them ...
Xerox is a classic example. it is in business to sell toner.
Xerox hasn't always been primarily a manaufacturer of printers and copiers. Their R&D departments have always had a wide variety of projects on the go, and they did market a GUI computer before the Lisa - the Star. The article linked to from Slashdot has some galring inaccuracies, and the claim that the Lisa was the first commercial computer with a GUI is one of them. However, Apple had much better marketing than Xerox and the Lisa is supposed to be much easier to use than the Star.
Hmm. The only machine I've used GEM on had 4Mb of RAM. An Atari ST, which was a damn site nicer to program on than the PC's of the same era.
I have been warned about how so many women will pursue American men.
Let me guess, warned by people who have never been to Russia but have seen some crap on HBO where a lonely bloke gets hitched to a mail order bride who is only after a passport. Despite the small minded, insular beliefs of many Westerners, Russian cities like Moscow and St. Petersburg are thriving business centres. So much so that finding a decent apartment at an affordable price is tricky, but finding a bar where a beer will empty your wallet isn't.
Mob thugs are no better at crime than regular thugs, they just have infrastructure in place to make it easier.
The small time "mafia" are brutal, messy and get lurid writeups. The really organised criminal only makes the headlines on rare occasions. The big money is in kickbacks from otherwise legal contracts - the criminal doesn't make the cheapest bid, but greases the right palms. Perhaps Kushnir was involved in things far more unsavoury than just span, upset one of the big boys and got made an example of.
Steven's APUE and Unix Network Programming are the books that turned me from a novice into someone who felt confident enough to pursue programming for a career. The first edition of APUE is so extremely well written - clear, concise and lucid. I'm definitely going to flick through the new edition, but the great thing is that the first one is still reelveant, in fact it's one of the five books I take with me to any new job.
how often do you use Bomb littleBoy = new AtomBomb();?
This is known in the Java world as "coding to interfaces", but it is equally applicable to C++ and many other OOP languages. For example, say I write a class that has some data stored in a list like structure:
Then I decide that I want to use a different list type, say a Vector that synchronises access to the data for me. All I have to is change one line in the class itself:
Any code using the Thing class will continue to compile correctly, as it is only relying on the List interface.
It's thought that the bombs were detonated by mobile devices.
No, the phones were switched off to prevent overloading of the networks as they are used by the emergency services as well as the public. It's unlikely (impossible actually) that mobile phones were used to trigger the underground blasts as there's no signal down there.
I was in the midst of this when it happened. The Metropolitan line was halted, then the Jubilee. The train driver announced a "power surge on the combine", which is probably a prearranged message to prevent panic in an emergency. Trains were then brought into the nearest station and the passengers requested to evacuate. The tube staff were very calm and efficient, and I didn't see any panic. There was defnitely a sense that something unusual had happened, and people were mostly silent as we filed out to the sound of recorded evacuation messages.
Anyone trying to contact friends and relatives, please don't panic if you cannot get through. the cellphone networks are being taking in and out of public service so that the emergency services can use them reliably. Same may be true for regular phone lines.
It was only a secret from the clueless. MacOS X is OpenSTEP with eye-candy. OpenSTEP is an Intel-based operating system; always has been.
Count yourself one of the clueless too. OPENSTEP was a port of a Motorola 68k based operating system to various architectures (SPARC being the other one I've used). The original NeXTstations were 68030 and 68040 boxes. Sure, they were CISC like the x86, but they were far more elegant in terms of instruction set and much richer when it came to number of registers.
First, the first development kits for MacOS X (Rhapsody) were for x86, since NEXTSTEP was primarily a x86 OS.
Bullshit. It was primarily a Motorola 68k OS that was renamed and ported to architectures including x86 and SPARC. I've got a NeXTstation slab humming away on the desk next to me, and that's a 68040 box.
You can have a basic database driven dynamic site up in five minutes with five lines of code - and only one of those typed yourself.
And then you try to implement something non-trivial, and find your brain melting as you struggle with Ruby and RoR's syntax. At least I did.
Don't be ridiculous. Web Applications must depend upon a client side programming language.
Bullshit. A "web application" is a server side application that generates dynamic content. What you're talking about is dynamic HTML, which has sucked a fat one since its inception.
Jobs was also the guy who did his best to scupper NeXT, the outfit he created after his first tenure at Apple. When the NeXT cube was designed, he insisted that the magnesium case be a perfect cube. In manufacturing, you don't make perfect cubes, as they are nigh on impossible to remove from a single piece mould or punch. Job's insistence on a perfect cube meant that the NeXT factory was littered with ruined cases and the cost of the cube escalated. I guess that's why NeXT started making "slabs".
Old SCO was fairly evil - well, their operating systems were. Xenix was a nightmare to port to from BSD derived systems like SunOS. The only thing the SCO operating systems had going for them was that you could run them on realtively cheap PC hardware in the days before 386BSD and Linux.
Like I said, there's no Java in the Libre *Nix arena.
That's strange, I must have imagined that I'm running Sun's Java on my NetBSD machine at work:
$ java -version
Java version "1.4.2_08"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.2_08-b03)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2-08-b03, mixed mode)
$ uname
NetBSD
The ultrasparc I got for free is 32 bit.
Then it's not an UltraSparc. An Ultra is a sun4u architecture machine, which is the 64bit successor to the 32bit sun4m architecture.
Back in the early to mid-1990s, Perl made programming accessible to people who would have struggled with systems programming languages like C or C++. The alternative, shell programming constructs, did not provide the rich set of features provided by Perl. Unfortunately, Perl's use by novices and the "101 ways to do the same thing" approach has left a legacy of spaghetti code written in dozens of weird idioms.
Amongst the Slashdot readership, there are a lot of these novice programmers (although some of are now Ruby or Python proponents). To criticise Perl (or Python, Ruby, etc) on the grounds that they do not provide the backwards compatability that you would expect from standardised languages and libraries is considered sacrilege.
Alternatively, just reverse engineer the system and write in a better language.
68xxx processors are somewhat RISCy, but they are not RISC
They weren't RISCy at all, in fact the Motorola 68k family was a very clean CISC design. I did my first real programming on a 68k machine - an Atari ST. Assembly language programming was actually quite fun for that system, so it came as a bit of a shock when I tried to learn assembly for the x86.
A few years ago there was something similar in the UK, frogs developed some kind of infection that caused them to become "spawn bound". The females couldn't lay their spawn, instead they became all bloated and reddish in colour. Eventually they ruptured. Not quite as explosive as the toads, but it was pretty vile as I'd agreed to clear my parents pond right when this was happening.
(At the time I had a friend who wasn't much good with ladies. He was quite fat, so in honour of the frogs it was decided that he was "sperm bound".)
Linux drivers tend to have magic numbers sprinkled all over the place, rather than nice defines with meaningful names. This make the drivers worthless as a reference, unless you take the time to document the magic numbers first.
You can get C99 support by specifying -std=c99 in your CFLAGS. I recently did this to get inline functions, but the code looked horrible (external definitions in header files), so I switched back to C89.
*Choke*. Objective-C++ was an absolutely atrocious idea. Objective-C is a simple extension to C that adds support for Object Oriented Programming without the syntactical abortions found in C++. Objective-C++ was just an attempt to appeal to C++ programmers who didn't want to learn a language that did OOP far more elegantly than the langague they already knew.