There are usually some unreasonably high fees associated with bank transfers like that. Checks are virtually free. Should it cost $20-$30 to make every transaction in the future when you could have wrote a check for free?
In (Continental) Europe, this is different. Money transfers are (nearly) free, while banks charge a substantial amount to process a cheque.
And when was the last time anyone under the age of 90 actually used one of those ?
Do they even still exist ?
Postal orders still exist, AFAIK. Don't remember when I last used one. The only reason to use those is to make an international payment to someone who doesn't accept credit card or money transfers. (Those people are extremely rare.)
I shudder to think how the coversation would go for anything more
The post office makes you fill out the form completely (writing down the same information 3 or 4 times, including the amount in text). Then, they take your money and give you one part of the form.
Itanium is not unsuccessful for VMS machines (you cannot put VMS on an x86 based chip, 64bit or no)
Since the Alpha processor has been discontinued, Itanium is pretty much the only choise left for VMS users. HP will still support Alpha machines for several years, but you can't buy them anymore. All VMS installations will gradually migrate to Itanium as the servers are replaced.
I believe they [Windows] also have a successor that will be compatible with Itanium as well, I'm not sure though.
There are Windows Server versions for Itanium, but they're not very popular AFAIK. Itanium only offers a big performance gain over x86/x64 systems, at a substantially higher price.
Seriously though, I think part of the problem is my complete lack of ability to understand why anyone would have a launch party for an operating system. Yes, Windows 7 is very nice, but a launch party? Really? A launch party is for things like movies and video games. You get a group together and have fun with some brand new entertainment you all enjoy and looked forward to being released. The excitement at an OS launch party? "Ooh, look! I can get work done on my computer more efficiently now! You guys have to try this!"
Well, there have been Ubuntu launch parties, and some people throw a party when a new version of OS X comes out.
I wouldn't go to either, but I can
understand those.
Attending an Ubuntu party gets you geek points. Plus, you get a chance to meet people you might know from a mailing list. You discover that people
you see every day on the subway are also Ubuntu users.
An OS X party is the closest thing to a Mac religion you can get. People go there because they want to belong with the "in crowd" of Mac users.
Going to a Windows party? That's about as cool as being the guy who got beaten up by the nerds in high school. The whole thing just screams "astroturf".
It comes from the brain of a marketing droid, who gave it to a lawyer who tacked on an EULA.
When it comes to Ubuntu parties, at least it appears like someone on the mailing list said: "let's have a party!".
A couple of months ago, I became aware of the concept of single-tasking. Back then, the presenter claimed the philosophy was so recent that it didn't even have a Wikipedia page. (It still doesn't.)
The idea behind single-tasking is the same as in this article: multi-tasking gives us the feeling we're doing a lot of work, but actually we lose a lot of time mentally switching between different "contexts". Working on a single task until the end, and then taking on the next one is better.
Land lines are indeed powered by the grid, but there are some limits. The phone companies don't want people to use too much of their power, so they restrict the power drawn by a handset. If a handset needs more power, it needs to draw from a regular power outlet. (This is one reason why every handset you buy has to be approved by the phone company.)
In particular, cordless phones will be useless during a blackout. The base station would not have enough power to communicate with the handset, even if the base station can draw power from the phone line. Any somewhat sophisticated phone (e.g., integrated answering machine, fax...) will have the same problem. (It's quite simple: if your phone has a separate power connection, it won't work during a blackout.) Currently, every phone in my house falls in this category.
Base stations for cell phones have emergency power, so they will continue to work. As long as your battery is charged, of course.
AFAIK, most of the cell network's backbone runs over wired connections (often lines leased from the company that provides the land line service).
Forget version numbers. How did you pick that user name?
At a guess, it has something to do with a common programming exercise in which you try to find the largest possible integer with a square that takes a certain form; in his case, that form must've been 1_2_3_4_5_6_7_7_8_9_.
No, there was a Windows NT 4.0, and it wasn't just in name... it had
some major architectural changes over NT 3.5.
Windows NT started with 3.0 (to keep up with the DOS-based Windows 3.0). There
were several revisions up to NT 3.51 (Including a lot of ports to new architectures).
NT 4.0 included a major revision of the kernel, as well as the Win95 look and feel.
(Technically, there is only a 4.0 release, but the service packs are in fact revisions to
the OS.)
After that,
brother, I'm with you. Windows 2000 was NT 4.something with tweaks to match the
look and feel of Windows 98SE/ME/MOUSE/whatever.
I've worked quite a lot with both NT4.0 and 2000. There is quite a lot of difference
between them.
XP didn't at the time seem like much more than Win2K with
additional surface tweaks.
XP is really a minor update from 2000 (apart from the GUI stuff). It introduces a lot
of compatibility stuff for the Windows 95 series. (This allowed Microsoft to end the 95/98/ME
line.
Vista.. better
forgotten. They changes the look of it again.. I'm not convinced there's all
that much new under the hood, much less anything good.
Vista is a major rewrite from XP. Most of the problems with Vista are actually caused
by this.
When it comes to generics in Java, the most annoying are the warnings you get when mixing with bare types. (Converting between List and List<T>).
Value types/structs: never really saw the advantage over objects. The JDK team refuses to implement them and I believe they are right.
I consider the fact that.NET people always bring up the native code as a weakness of the CLR: if it is possible in the VM, you should do it there and only call native code if you can't.
Re:What about MySQL?
on
Oracle Buys Sun
·
· Score: 2, Informative
I don't think JDeveloper is based on Eclipse though.
JDeveloper is based on an older version of JBuilder AFAIK.
Most of Europe uses a proportional voting system. (Each voting district elects several representatives at once.) As far as I can see, Finland has one too.
A difference of just a few percent can shift a seat from one party to another.
Kinda difficult to boot Linux on a filesystem with only 8.3 filenames available.
Well, there used to be UMSDOS. According to Wikipedia, it has been discontinued in kernel 2.6.11. Even before that, most people considered it an ugly hack that never worked very well.
(Looking at the Wikipedia entry, I wonder if it could be used as prior art for the LFN patents?)
If IBM drops SPARC, Fujitsu will probably become the only supplier of Solaris systems. Both the SPARC architecture and Solaris are available as open source, so IBM cannot easily prevent that.
Being open source, it is possible that other companies emerge using those technologies. Don't count on it: if anyone believed in that, this would already have happened.
I'm also unsure about how much traction Solaris will have without SUN.
FAT12 has long filenames all right. You still see small SD cards formatted as FAT12 these days. FAT12/16/32 is typically chosen based on the device size.
All FAT "sizes" use the same directory structure. Each entry holds an 8.3 file name. VFAT uses a set of extra entries containing the long name (hidden so a non-VFAT driver doesn't see them).
Windows 95 introduced VFAT and it could write long file names to floppies (FAT12) as well as hard discs (FAT16). FAT32 was introduced later with OSR2.
Seriously, Java plug-ins are still around for some reason?
Every once in a while, I come across an applet. They are still used, mostly for specific business applications. (Meaning, you only see it when you're logged in into a specific client/partner area of the web site. Or on an intranet.) But even then, they are pretty rare.
It is important to distinguish between these 2 things:
(Strong) anthropic principle: If you change the parameters of the universe just a little, life couldn't exist. Therefore, the universe has been fine-tuned for us.
Weak anthropic principle: If the universe could not contain life, we would not be there.
The "strong" principle is often cited whenever one tries to prove the existence of God.
The "weak" version was created in order to counter these proofs. (Note that it does not disprove a creator. It just cancels the cosmological proof.)
But still the original error message was not uncommon in A4 countries...
In Europe, "PC Load Letter" is (or used to be) a fairly common error message. It means that the printer is still full of A4 paper, but someone has forgotten to switch their printer driver to A4.
Which only means "connect a keyboard to continue"... duh...
On some PCs, connecting a keyboard doesn't help: BIOS has decided there is no keyboard, and it doesn't bother to check again. The only remedy is to connect the keyboard and press the power button.
Slashdot Mirror
They offer Internet Explorer for free adopting Netscape's business model.
No. At the time they started giving away IE, you still had to pay for Netscape. Netscape only became free when it was too late to make a difference.
There are usually some unreasonably high fees associated with bank transfers like that. Checks are virtually free. Should it cost $20-$30 to make every transaction in the future when you could have wrote a check for free?
In (Continental) Europe, this is different. Money transfers are (nearly) free, while banks charge a substantial amount to process a cheque.
With a postal order.
And when was the last time anyone under the age of 90 actually used one of those ?
Do they even still exist ?
Postal orders still exist, AFAIK. Don't remember when I last used one. The only reason to use those is to make an international payment to someone who doesn't accept credit card or money transfers. (Those people are extremely rare.)
I shudder to think how the coversation would go for anything more
The post office makes you fill out the form completely (writing down the same information 3 or 4 times, including the amount in text). Then, they take your money and give you one part of the form.
Itanium is not unsuccessful for VMS machines (you cannot put VMS on an x86 based chip, 64bit or no)
Since the Alpha processor has been discontinued, Itanium is pretty much the only choise left for VMS users. HP will still support Alpha machines for several years, but you can't buy them anymore. All VMS installations will gradually migrate to Itanium as the servers are replaced.
I believe they [Windows] also have a successor that will be compatible with Itanium as well, I'm not sure though.
There are Windows Server versions for Itanium, but they're not very popular AFAIK. Itanium only offers a big performance gain over x86/x64 systems, at a substantially higher price.
Seriously though, I think part of the problem is my complete lack of ability to understand why anyone would have a launch party for an operating system. Yes, Windows 7 is very nice, but a launch party? Really? A launch party is for things like movies and video games. You get a group together and have fun with some brand new entertainment you all enjoy and looked forward to being released. The excitement at an OS launch party? "Ooh, look! I can get work done on my computer more efficiently now! You guys have to try this!"
Well, there have been Ubuntu launch parties, and some people throw a party when a new version of OS X comes out.
I wouldn't go to either, but I can understand those.
Attending an Ubuntu party gets you geek points. Plus, you get a chance to meet people you might know from a mailing list. You discover that people you see every day on the subway are also Ubuntu users.
An OS X party is the closest thing to a Mac religion you can get. People go there because they want to belong with the "in crowd" of Mac users.
Going to a Windows party? That's about as cool as being the guy who got beaten up by the nerds in high school. The whole thing just screams "astroturf". It comes from the brain of a marketing droid, who gave it to a lawyer who tacked on an EULA.
When it comes to Ubuntu parties, at least it appears like someone on the mailing list said: "let's have a party!".
And Microsoft has an OS for these platforms: Windows CE.
Indeed. And that's what these Netbooks will be running when (if?) they arrive in the stores.
FWIW, I have already seen advertisements for mini-laptops running WinCE. I didn't check the CPU type but I assume it would be x86.
A couple of months ago, I became aware of the concept of single-tasking. Back then, the presenter claimed the philosophy was so recent that it didn't even have a Wikipedia page. (It still doesn't.)
The idea behind single-tasking is the same as in this article: multi-tasking gives us the feeling we're doing a lot of work, but actually we lose a lot of time mentally switching between different "contexts". Working on a single task until the end, and then taking on the next one is better.
Land lines are indeed powered by the grid, but there are some limits. The phone companies don't want people to use too much of their power, so they restrict the power drawn by a handset. If a handset needs more power, it needs to draw from a regular power outlet. (This is one reason why every handset you buy has to be approved by the phone company.)
In particular, cordless phones will be useless during a blackout. The base station would not have enough power to communicate with the handset, even if the base station can draw power from the phone line. Any somewhat sophisticated phone (e.g., integrated answering machine, fax...) will have the same problem. (It's quite simple: if your phone has a separate power connection, it won't work during a blackout.) Currently, every phone in my house falls in this category.
Base stations for cell phones have emergency power, so they will continue to work. As long as your battery is charged, of course.
AFAIK, most of the cell network's backbone runs over wired connections (often lines leased from the company that provides the land line service).
Which name are they going with?
Microsoft. Don't say you expected anything else.
(Not sure where I first saw it. Either UserFriendly or Groklaw.)
Forget version numbers. How did you pick that user name?
At a guess, it has something to do with a common programming exercise in which you try to find the largest possible integer with a square that takes a certain form; in his case, that form must've been 1_2_3_4_5_6_7_7_8_9_.
My guess: 1 nine, 2 nines, 3 nines...
Basically, Solaris = SunOS 2.x. (Changing the underlying kernel from BSD to SYSV justifies a new version.) That explains Solaris up to 2.7.
After that, SUN realized they would never have a version 3.0, and they dropped the major version. Hence Solaris 8 and so on.
No, there was a Windows NT 4.0, and it wasn't just in name... it had some major architectural changes over NT 3.5.
Windows NT started with 3.0 (to keep up with the DOS-based Windows 3.0). There were several revisions up to NT 3.51 (Including a lot of ports to new architectures).
NT 4.0 included a major revision of the kernel, as well as the Win95 look and feel. (Technically, there is only a 4.0 release, but the service packs are in fact revisions to the OS.)
After that, brother, I'm with you. Windows 2000 was NT 4.something with tweaks to match the look and feel of Windows 98SE/ME/MOUSE/whatever.
I've worked quite a lot with both NT4.0 and 2000. There is quite a lot of difference between them.
XP didn't at the time seem like much more than Win2K with additional surface tweaks.
XP is really a minor update from 2000 (apart from the GUI stuff). It introduces a lot of compatibility stuff for the Windows 95 series. (This allowed Microsoft to end the 95/98/ME line.
Vista.. better forgotten. They changes the look of it again.. I'm not convinced there's all that much new under the hood, much less anything good.
Vista is a major rewrite from XP. Most of the problems with Vista are actually caused by this.
Good post. I wish I had mod points right now.
When it comes to generics in Java, the most annoying are the warnings you get when mixing with bare types. (Converting between List and List<T>).
Value types/structs: never really saw the advantage over objects. The JDK team refuses to implement them and I believe they are right.
I consider the fact that .NET people always bring up the native code as a weakness of the CLR: if it is possible in the VM, you should do it there and only call native code if you can't.
I don't think JDeveloper is based on Eclipse though.
JDeveloper is based on an older version of JBuilder AFAIK.
Most of Europe uses a proportional voting system. (Each voting district elects several representatives at once.) As far as I can see, Finland has one too.
A difference of just a few percent can shift a seat from one party to another.
Kinda difficult to boot Linux on a filesystem with only 8.3 filenames available.
Well, there used to be UMSDOS. According to Wikipedia, it has been discontinued in kernel 2.6.11. Even before that, most people considered it an ugly hack that never worked very well.
(Looking at the Wikipedia entry, I wonder if it could be used as prior art for the LFN patents?)
If IBM drops SPARC, Fujitsu will probably become the only supplier of Solaris systems. Both the SPARC architecture and Solaris are available as open source, so IBM cannot easily prevent that.
Being open source, it is possible that other companies emerge using those technologies. Don't count on it: if anyone believed in that, this would already have happened.
I'm also unsure about how much traction Solaris will have without SUN.
FAT12 has long filenames all right. You still see small SD cards formatted as FAT12 these days. FAT12/16/32 is typically chosen based on the device size.
All FAT "sizes" use the same directory structure. Each entry holds an 8.3 file name. VFAT uses a set of extra entries containing the long name (hidden so a non-VFAT driver doesn't see them).
Windows 95 introduced VFAT and it could write long file names to floppies (FAT12) as well as hard discs (FAT16). FAT32 was introduced later with OSR2.
Seriously, Java plug-ins are still around for some reason?
Every once in a while, I come across an applet. They are still used, mostly for specific business applications. (Meaning, you only see it when you're logged in into a specific client/partner area of the web site. Or on an intranet.) But even then, they are pretty rare.
Recently, I came across this book: Hello World!
It's geared towards kids with no programming experience and it uses Python.
(I haven't read it, but I am considering buying it for when my daughter is old enough.)
It is important to distinguish between these 2 things:
The "strong" principle is often cited whenever one tries to prove the existence of God.
The "weak" version was created in order to counter these proofs. (Note that it does not disprove a creator. It just cancels the cosmological proof.)
One guy I know once installed the BSOD screensaver on a server. The next day, he went on holiday for a week.
When he came back, the sysadmins had gone insane...
But still the original error message was not uncommon in A4 countries...
In Europe, "PC Load Letter" is (or used to be) a fairly common error message. It means that the printer is still full of A4 paper, but someone has forgotten to switch their printer driver to A4.
Which only means "connect a keyboard to continue"... duh...
On some PCs, connecting a keyboard doesn't help: BIOS has decided there is no keyboard, and it doesn't bother to check again. The only remedy is to connect the keyboard and press the power button.
It exists: the P-Mate. I still have one somewhere.