90% of the planet's surface does not, and never will have, a POTS that works properly - 56k modems deliver 2400 baud at best. T1, or even ISDN, is beyond their wildest dreams.
As for ADSL, it won't even work in the parts of England that can afford it, and the rest can't afford it:-( What chance have Africa or China got?
Modems have a long life - but anyone with half a brain would prefer to have a second-hand hardware modem than a new winmodem.
This poster must have a specific bee in his bonnet. (Maybe his employer has 20,000 winmodems, and is using them as an excuse not to switch to NetBSD.)
Hang on, it was on www.silicon.com a couple of days ago, that the whole lot had been outsourced to the people who feature most frequently in www.websitesthatsuck.com, and Ross Perot (EDS).
In short, the position is: Protected CDs can be ripped and copied, but can't be played in your car? This is a technology that is intended to reduce piracy?
The customer is practically driven to buy the CD, copy it, and then return it. Under the "Sale of Goods Act" it is against the law to sell CDs like this in England - the legal term is "goods not of merchandiseable quality - unfit for the purpose for which it was sold"
As an aside: If you are making minority interest music, you probably depend on piracy to advertise your work! fans hear pirate copies, and then buy a legit copy Its only chronically commercial dross that is adversely affected by piracy.
I seem to remember being asked to migrate from the original Snobol to Snobol4, and deciding the original one was better! Or was that Snobol3?
The application was taking data formatted by one, extremely lame, mainframe, and re-formatting it for another equally lame, but completely incompatible system (eg single quotes to double, commas to semicolons, expand tabs to column alignment).
Nowadays, I'd do it in Basic!
I have no intention of using VP, C++, Java or Snail for this.
In the UK, Patents are only valid for 13 years, unless it is clear that
The patent has not recovered the outlay in developing the technology
Extension to 17 years (the maximum) would recover the outlay.
Society would benefit form the patent being profitable
Generally, patents are only extended where the government has held up the patent for its own benefit, or, for example, with a drug which took ten years of development/trial before the government granted a licence.
Which means the patent may be valid in the US, but expire in the EC, see my previous comment about patents respecting national boundaries, and the rest of the world not being required to respect US law.
I fully support this kind of use of intellectual property. If I create something and someone else is making money directly from my creation, I should profit as well.
So do I. Its preferable in every way to how M$ do business. Furthermore, you are welcome to photocopy every single one of those patents, and if they are all worthless, you can keep on making PCs. When IBM sue you, they lose, and get to pay your legal expenses and compensation for the aggro they caused you.
If the patents are granted in the US, then they MAY be valid in the US. Provided they meet the requirements of EC legislation, they will also be valid in the EC*. Only Korean patents are valid in Korea.
Patents in some third world countries are not worth a fig. If the police are illiterate, the courts are open to bribery, and the government is a bunch of gun-toting morons on dope, then enforcing patents may not be viable.
If the patents are not valid where you live, you can make as many PCs as you like, and IBM can kiss your butt.
* EG: Patents on ways of doing business are valid in the US, but not on the EC.
Don't worry, this was well known technology long before 1990.
This patent is only good for toilet paper.
Patents are granted by the patent office. They are not Valid until tested in a law court. It is not the patent office's job to determine whether there is prior art. If they know there is, then they will not grant the patent. If they are not certain then they will grant and wait for someone else to challenge (no sense in wasting taxpayer's money).
As others have said, Apple have to maximise the shareholder value or the directors might go to jail. So even if they are certain that there is prior art, they will still file a patent - after all, it may be that no one bothers to challenge. Then, when it turns out Apple accidentally infringes some other, equally worthless, patent, they can do a mutual exchange. The shareholders will be impressed, and the potential for lawsuits reduced.
This is considered sound business practice in the USA.
It may be seen in a different light by the rest of the world, but WTF.
Seymour Cray designed an asynchronous (thats clockless to you) machine long before there was a PC, or even a Cray Research company. (He used to work for Control Data Corp).
Yes, Virginia, there IS a snag.
The things turn out to be untestable. (On second thoughts, I suppose that does not matter if you are only ever going to run M$ software).
They wont make much. Barely a hundred lemmings would subscribe to a scam like that.
The Internet only works cos its free.
Within hours of this being implemented, there'd be a rival Internet with no "penny per page"
It has been done, and can be done again. In the old days, there was a free amateur network technology called Fidonet. This offered most of the benefits of Internet without the high phone bills before we had unmetered access.
We also have free software.
There is any amount of incentive to deliver a free system, and none to subscribe. Hell, I'd pay to be on a network that did not have AOL and MS on it!
If there is anything in his head, its higly unlikely we need it.
The reason "intelligence" isn't working is cos you are dealing with deranged morons manipulated by crazed nutters.
The intelligence community is geared to handling complex military planning and organised outfits. The military mind is in trouble when dealing with ignorant, fanatical maniacs.
They probably don't communicate a lot, and have little in the way of plans.
The best way to deal with them is to conscrip a bunch of crackheads , dope them up, give them some humvees full of ammo, and drop them in the war zone. Then it will be a fair fight.
I heard one witness say the left engine fall off, and another say it was the right engine. Both said it was on fire first.
The Police/fire say that there are four fire sites, one definitely having only an engine in it.
To quote someone whose name I forget "To lose one engine is careless, to lose both is a disaster".
One way or another, Air traffic control MUST have a view on this: did the pilot say anything or not? We have not been told. Safe assumption - the pilot said something. If he did not, we'd have been told. If the pilot said something, and we've not been told: IT WAS TERRORISM.
As others have said - these planes are designed to fly with one engine fall off - once clear of the runway. They won't fly with no engines.
Last time I heard something like this, it was that the thrust was reversed in flight - like sticking your car in reverse at 70MPH - a bad idea.
One of two possibilities here:
Terrorist trained on 767 cant operated A300 controls - stuffs up (not very likely)
Terrorist attempting ot fly into large building - Pilot intentionally renders airplane non-functional in the shortest possible time.
Some martyrs will go to heaven - probably not many suicide bombers though!
While some people might think 1 in 400 is "a high probability". its not the odds you'd expect for a likely Derby winner.
When a new experiment is devised, and tests performed, we may know a lot more. This is just evidence that the present experiment is not up to the mark.
Nobody? You must be kidding. I worked for a software house at the time. For a whole year, no software house released ANY software, because they were all reserving every programmer for when they had to port their new products to the IBM PC.
Anybody who knew anything KNEW the PC would be HUGE. Go back and read Byte Magazine or Dr Dobbs Journal.
Before MS, you always got the source code when you paid for software. (Well from DEC or IBM, anyway.)
And there was a big free software community eg DECUS the DEC user group. I still have DECUS tapes with Free software on. Including the ORIGINAL COLOSSAL CAVE Adventure game. (I ported a later, better, version to FreeBSD.)
And a Pascal compiler.AFAICR, Even Richard Stallman was around.
MS Stuffed the industry, and shafted the customer.
Free Software, and mass machines were around before MS.The scale was smaller, but then, lots of us were smaller.
Sure, all of us want Alamo Car Rentals and Barnes and Noble, regardless of what we actually search for.
I recently tried to search for information on "Swiss Lace", in "Swiss German", in "Switzerland". (Using the Swiss German terms for these things). Somehow, the answer was still Barnes and Noble and Alamo Car Rentals.
I do not need ANY New York food outlets to respond to anything on my PC until such time as they have the technology to e-mail me a pizza.
We DO need regionality and, perhaps also global access. Above all, we want two new top level domains ".scam" and ".spam" then the responsible people can be in the appropriate domains.
Could the next great bank robbery movie's big scene be some guy driving by the bank in an old Cadillac with a laptop and 802.11b in his lap while hacking money into his account?
Not in London. There are no streets wide enough to get a Cadillac into!
You need to specify a fontsize for that to be useful... oh and all the docs should be on the docs leaf of the code tree, everything that you scribble on paper that makes a difference to project needs to be transcribed.
Probably not. If the font is smaller, you get more, but fewer people read it. "Yer pays yer money and takes yer choice"
I have used a tool which which allows you to embed the documentation in the source files. make then strips it out and builds a single manual for the project. Its quite cute, but not always what you want - you often end up with a lot of low level and no high level.
I've also used UML. You often end up with a ton on mindless dross, totally unconnected to the code.
The major factor in all this is having good guys on your team. Just like some footballers are worth $6,000,000 and some are not worth a toss, so it is with software engineers. Unfortunately, no one pays good software engineers $6,000,000 - so their teams are crap.
If there were as many OS writers as premier league football teams, M$ would be in the Scottish fourth division.
Slashdot Mirror
As for ADSL, it won't even work in the parts of England that can afford it, and the rest can't afford it :-( What chance have Africa or China got?
Modems have a long life - but anyone with half a brain would prefer to have a second-hand hardware modem than a new winmodem.
This poster must have a specific bee in his bonnet. (Maybe his employer has 20,000 winmodems, and is using them as an excuse not to switch to NetBSD.)
I think you should be applying elsewhere.
The customer is practically driven to buy the CD, copy it, and then return it. Under the "Sale of Goods Act" it is against the law to sell CDs like this in England - the legal term is "goods not of merchandiseable quality - unfit for the purpose for which it was sold"
As an aside: If you are making minority interest music, you probably depend on piracy to advertise your work! fans hear pirate copies, and then buy a legit copy Its only chronically commercial dross that is adversely affected by piracy.
I would not let Eminem kiss my butt
The application was taking data formatted by one, extremely lame, mainframe, and re-formatting it for another equally lame, but completely incompatible system (eg single quotes to double, commas to semicolons, expand tabs to column alignment).
Nowadays, I'd do it in Basic!
I have no intention of using VP, C++, Java or Snail for this.
They put a note through my letterbox explaining that they were unable to deliver the parcel because they could not find my house !!!!!!
I was in at the time, and the shipment had both my house phone and my mobile phone numbers on it.
The parcel was some CDs from IBM, and would have gone though the letterbox anyway!!!
(1) I claim [well known technique]
(2) I claim (1), but done in a new way
(2) I claim (1) but done in another new way
This is how it is done.
The language of patents uses this as a way of labling marked text, because patents are not written using emacs.
all your .sig are us.
The patent has not recovered the outlay in developing the technology
Extension to 17 years (the maximum) would recover the outlay.
Society would benefit form the patent being profitable
Generally, patents are only extended where the government has held up the patent for its own benefit, or, for example, with a drug which took ten years of development/trial before the government granted a licence.
Which means the patent may be valid in the US, but expire in the EC, see my previous comment about patents respecting national boundaries, and the rest of the world not being required to respect US law.
Unless subjected to a rain of cruise missiles.
So do I. Its preferable in every way to how M$ do business. Furthermore, you are welcome to photocopy every single one of those patents, and if they are all worthless, you can keep on making PCs. When IBM sue you, they lose, and get to pay your legal expenses and compensation for the aggro they caused you.
If the patents are granted in the US, then they MAY be valid in the US. Provided they meet the requirements of EC legislation, they will also be valid in the EC*. Only Korean patents are valid in Korea.
Patents in some third world countries are not worth a fig. If the police are illiterate, the courts are open to bribery, and the government is a bunch of gun-toting morons on dope, then enforcing patents may not be viable.
If the patents are not valid where you live, you can make as many PCs as you like, and IBM can kiss your butt.
* EG: Patents on ways of doing business are valid in the US, but not on the EC.
This patent is only good for toilet paper.
Patents are granted by the patent office. They are not Valid until tested in a law court. It is not the patent office's job to determine whether there is prior art. If they know there is, then they will not grant the patent. If they are not certain then they will grant and wait for someone else to challenge (no sense in wasting taxpayer's money).
As others have said, Apple have to maximise the shareholder value or the directors might go to jail. So even if they are certain that there is prior art, they will still file a patent - after all, it may be that no one bothers to challenge. Then, when it turns out Apple accidentally infringes some other, equally worthless, patent, they can do a mutual exchange. The shareholders will be impressed, and the potential for lawsuits reduced.
This is considered sound business practice in the USA.
It may be seen in a different light by the rest of the world, but WTF.
Seymour Cray designed an asynchronous (thats clockless to you) machine long before there was a PC, or even a Cray Research company. (He used to work for Control Data Corp).
Yes, Virginia, there IS a snag.
The things turn out to be untestable. (On second thoughts, I suppose that does not matter if you are only ever going to run M$ software).
Definitely unsuitable for Unix/Linux/Gnu/Shmoo
The Internet only works cos its free.
Within hours of this being implemented, there'd be a rival Internet with no "penny per page"
It has been done, and can be done again. In the old days, there was a free amateur network technology called Fidonet. This offered most of the benefits of Internet without the high phone bills before we had unmetered access.
We also have free software.
There is any amount of incentive to deliver a free system, and none to subscribe. Hell, I'd pay to be on a network that did not have AOL and MS on it!
Does it catch diseases?
I do not believe these laws have been enacted by any authority, not even in the EC (yet).
Write to your congressman demanding the laws are added to the US constitution before its too late.
Perhaps the Taliban can extend his battery life by grounding him?
The reason "intelligence" isn't working is cos you are dealing with deranged morons manipulated by crazed nutters.
The intelligence community is geared to handling complex military planning and organised outfits. The military mind is in trouble when dealing with ignorant, fanatical maniacs.
They probably don't communicate a lot, and have little in the way of plans.
The best way to deal with them is to conscrip a bunch of crackheads , dope them up, give them some humvees full of ammo, and drop them in the war zone. Then it will be a fair fight.
I heard one witness say the left engine fall off, and another say it was the right engine. Both said it was on fire first.
The Police/fire say that there are four fire sites, one definitely having only an engine in it.
To quote someone whose name I forget "To lose one engine is careless, to lose both is a disaster".
One way or another, Air traffic control MUST have a view on this: did the pilot say anything or not? We have not been told. Safe assumption - the pilot said something. If he did not, we'd have been told. If the pilot said something, and we've not been told: IT WAS TERRORISM.
As others have said - these planes are designed to fly with one engine fall off - once clear of the runway. They won't fly with no engines.
Last time I heard something like this, it was that the thrust was reversed in flight - like sticking your car in reverse at 70MPH - a bad idea.
One of two possibilities here:
Terrorist trained on 767 cant operated A300 controls - stuffs up (not very likely)
Terrorist attempting ot fly into large building - Pilot intentionally renders airplane non-functional in the shortest possible time.
Some martyrs will go to heaven - probably not many suicide bombers though!
When a new experiment is devised, and tests performed, we may know a lot more. This is just evidence that the present experiment is not up to the mark.
Anybody who knew anything KNEW the PC would be HUGE. Go back and read Byte Magazine or Dr Dobbs Journal.
Before MS, you always got the source code when you paid for software. (Well from DEC or IBM, anyway.)
And there was a big free software community eg DECUS the DEC user group. I still have DECUS tapes with Free software on. Including the ORIGINAL COLOSSAL CAVE Adventure game. (I ported a later, better, version to FreeBSD.)
And a Pascal compiler.AFAICR, Even Richard Stallman was around.
MS Stuffed the industry, and shafted the customer.
Free Software, and mass machines were around before MS. The scale was smaller, but then, lots of us were smaller.
I recently tried to search for information on "Swiss Lace", in "Swiss German", in "Switzerland". (Using the Swiss German terms for these things). Somehow, the answer was still Barnes and Noble and Alamo Car Rentals.
I do not need ANY New York food outlets to respond to anything on my PC until such time as they have the technology to e-mail me a pizza.
We DO need regionality and, perhaps also global access. Above all, we want two new top level domains ".scam" and ".spam" then the responsible people can be in the appropriate domains.
An umlaut a day keeps the keyboard at bay
I have been working with computers since 1972. Its not the computer that is fun, but what you can do with it.
When you do control software for 1,500 HP motors, a bug can be fun too!
Wait till you blow your first 8,000A fuse!
So DCHP stands for Donate Hackers Connection Privileges?
Not in London. There are no streets wide enough to get a Cadillac into!
Try a BMW or Honda.
Having someone else pay the bill is really good for the price tag :-)
Probably not. If the font is smaller, you get more, but fewer people read it. "Yer pays yer money and takes yer choice"
I have used a tool which which allows you to embed the documentation in the source files. make then strips it out and builds a single manual for the project. Its quite cute, but not always what you want - you often end up with a lot of low level and no high level.
I've also used UML. You often end up with a ton on mindless dross, totally unconnected to the code.
The major factor in all this is having good guys on your team. Just like some footballers are worth $6,000,000 and some are not worth a toss, so it is with software engineers. Unfortunately, no one pays good software engineers $6,000,000 - so their teams are crap.
If there were as many OS writers as premier league football teams, M$ would be in the Scottish fourth division.
So how much do I under-clock it so it runs cool?
I'd like to run with a passive heat-sink - ie no fan at all.