Here are legal reforms needed to regulate noncompetes:
Actually, what you describe are more or less the European rules for non-competition clauses.
It has to be written in the employment contract (no oral agreement).
It cannot be invoked when the employee is fired.
When the amployee resigns, the company either has to pay the employee their salary for the period of the non-compete period, or provide a written notice that they will not invoke the clause.
Maximum time is 12 months, and it is only valid within the same country.
The new company must be in the same industry as the old one. Doing the same work for a non-related business doesn't count.
The law specifies a minimum salary.
My current employee contract has a non-competition clause, and it simply states that there is a non-competion period according to the legal conditions.
Disclaimer: IANAL, I just followed a course in business law.
Wasn't SunOS at something like 5.3, then Solaris 2.4 through 2.7?
AFAIK: SunOS went to version 4.x, then came Solaris, which was SunOS 5.x. (If you telnet to a Solaris box, it will tell you it's SunOS 5.x.)
I'm not sure where the 2.x came from. I suppose it's a marketing-inspired number to differenciate from the old SunOS.
By the time they reached Solaris 2.7 (a.k.a. SunOS 5.7), they decided there would not be a Solaris 3.x, and they dropped the major number, so the next version was Solaris 8.
(I guess the next version would be X...assuming there's a next version)
That would be Solaris 10. It was announced a few months ago.
One of the clients I worked for, had a dedicated PC for some security-related stuff. The machine was on a dedicated network, connected only to the main server.
That PC ran DOS, with an application written in Pascal and assembler.
As the hardware was aging (and because the system load increased), they looked for a replacement. After testing, they discovered that:
The software only worked with a specific model of network card
The disk image would not boot on a motherboard with a PCI bus.
Finally, they decided to buy a Sun machine, and rewrite the whole application in C.
Some (very old) BASIC interpreters used to parse each source line each time it was executed.
One time (around 1985 IIRC), I read an article in the local computer club's magazine. The author had written a BASIC program (GW-BASIC I think) to "shorten" BASIC programs. It would:
Shorten all variable names to 1 or 2 characters
Remove whitespace
Renumber all lines so that all GOTO n became shorter
The source code that went along with the article looked like it was used on itself (very terse).
With the machines you had back then, it probably made a difference.
The boot loader spends most of its time waiting for the user to press a key, so they can enter custom boot parameters. If you set the timeout to 0 in LILO or GRUB, loading the kernel happens almost instantly.
The BIOS startup routine is longer, especially if you have a SCSI card. (I have 2 of those in my machine, and they account for most of the wait during startup.)
One time, I had a disk corruption in the swap partition. When I booted the machine, everything went well, until I started opening applications. The machine swapped out more and more data, until it reached the first bad sector in the swap. It crashed quite spectacular.
Once I figured out what happened, I replaced the disk.
That was in the days of the 2.0 kernel. My machine had 16 MB RAM IIRC.
Most of the time, my laptop handles things quite well. Even with several (rather large) applications open. (Including WSAD, FireFox.) The system has 1GB of memory, so I'm not really stressing it.
Once a week, when the virus scanner pops up, things are different. As mentioned above, XP starts swapping things out to make room for disk cache - rather useless, since the virus scanner will read each file only once, and pass on to the next one. (Admitted, the OS has no way of knowing that.)
Do developers out there voice the need to store binaries?
There are definitely reasons for storing binary (non-text) files in a version control system:
Images: quite obvious. You want to version all your artwork. For web-based projects, this can be a large part of your system.
External libraries: if you use third-party libraries, it makes sense to store them in the version control system. If you need a particular build, you check out the correct revision. This allows you to build the exact same binary as it was delivered before. (Of course, if you have the sources to the library, you might want to import them into your project. But if you don't change the sources, that might be overkill.)
Compiled files: some people like to store all object files into version control. Again, this allows you to retrieve a specific version faster (no need to recompile). Personally, I would do this only if the compilation takes too much time.
Documentation: whether you use MS Office or OpenOffice.org, documentation will be in a binary format. (OOo uses compressed XML.)
Test data: you might want to version your test cases, and those will consist of binary data.
how on earth can a Dutch judge restrict my ability (I'm Belgian citizen) to visit a particular website
From a fellow Belgian (not a lawyer though): trademarks are common in all three Benelux countries. This means that any judgment in one country might affect the other two.
Yes. I still remember when they shipped Windows and IE with only 56 bits encryption, while the US version had 128 bit.
Re:EJB For Scientific Computing
on
Bitter EJB
·
· Score: 1
Let's see: roughly speaking, an EJB container provides three services: transaction management, remote calls and security.
For scientific computing, you don't want the security layer: it will just slow you down.
You also don't need the transaction management: you perform a calculation, and you store the result. Why would you want a rollback for that?
Remote calls might seem interesting at first (think clusters), until you realise that EJB has no support for parallel tasks. (Except for message driven beans.)
In short: EJBs weren't designed for scientific computing, and they don't offer anything a scientist might want. They were intended to address a specific class of problems, typically found in (large) enterprises.
During the 1980s, it seemed like every programmer wrote his own version of Tetris. It still is quite popular on children sites. Each of those sites has a version of Tetris and Pairs, either a Java applet or a Flash version.
My 8 year old stepdaughter doesn't have problems understanding Tetris. Given a choice, she'd rather look around to find a Flash game she likes.
Some points from the article (loosely translated):
"Purely" computing programs are not patentable, "inventions created by a computer" are.
Something is not an invention just because it uses a computer. The program needs to demonstrate a scientific innovation independent of its execution.
An implementation would not infringe on a patent if it is necessary to assure the communication between different programs or networks.
1 and 2 seem to prevent most of the abuses of software patents. Taking a normal business practice and adding "over the Internet" (wait, that's old fashoned. Nowadays it's "using XML") would not be accepted.
With number 3, it would be useless to patent file formats or communication protocols (if they even are patentable), since anyone would be permitted to write their own implementation.
At work, we used to have a SUN E250 [1]. One day, the power went away. (Turned out to be a problem with the airco.) After the power came back, I checked the logs, and I saw that the machine had been writing messages like "Power lost, running on backup power", and when the power came back "Switching to AC". (The monitor wasn't protected, so there was no way to check the machine during the blackout.)
The PC in the same room didn't have backup power and shut down. It came back with no ill effects.
The RS/6000 in your story probably had a power monitor and a large voltage protector, or maybe it had its own UPS as well.
[1] We still have it somewhere, but I'm no longer using it.
Home users typically don't care about VB macros. For companies, it's different.
There must be thousands of little "business applications" that are Word or Excel macros. Each of those might contain only a few lines of code, but in a large organization, there are a lot of those.
Does anyone still use Active X on a web site? I can't remember any site asking for it in a long time. Granted, I use Mozilla, which ignores Active X, but I would expect to see empty spots on the page.
Let's see what plugins I'd have to miss:
Acrobat: I prefer to read the document in a separate window anyway.
Flash: My stepdaughter will not like that, since all her favorite sites use it.
The only problem is that you're only telling the micro-processor that controls it "up or down".
Last year, I was in a building, and they had a more advanced system: outside of the elevator, there were buttons to select each floor. Then, you waited until the system indicated your lift has arrived. Inside the cabin, there was only one button, to ackowledge entering.
Partimage makes an "intelligent" copy of a partition. I.e., it only copies the sectors that actually contain data. This gives a smaller backup than a full copy of the disk.
It can read NTFS partitions, and it can connect to a remote server to store the file.
They even provide bootable disk images, so you can use it without installing Linux on the NT machine.
This question was asked on the Linux kernel mailing list a while ago. The response was (from memory):
Yes, you can have 2 keyboards, mice and video cards in a single PC. And you can run 2 instances of X on different virtual consoles. But, there can be only one active VC at any time, and it's hard to change that limit.
The conclusion was that it would probably be easier and cheaper to set up an X terminal.
16 bit adressing was mostly done with the HL register
Yes, HL was the main address pointer in the Z80. (BC and DE being the other ones.)
IX and IY were index registers: you had special instructions to access memory at (IX + n). You couldn't use them as general purpose registers, while you could perform arithmetics on HL.
Stow has no concept of dependencies. There is no way you could use it to build a distribution on top of it.
I use stow on my (Debian) Linux PC at home, to manage the software I build from source. If I want to upgrade a program, I can just delete the directory and install the new version in the same location. If a Debian packages becomes available, I remove the directory and have stow remove the links in/usr/local/*.
Until now, I have been able to get all the libraries from Debian, so I never needed to work with dependencies.
Slashdot Mirror
Here are legal reforms needed to regulate noncompetes:
Actually, what you describe are more or less the European rules for non-competition clauses.
My current employee contract has a non-competition clause, and it simply states that there is a non-competion period according to the legal conditions.
Disclaimer: IANAL, I just followed a course in business law.
Wasn't SunOS at something like 5.3, then Solaris 2.4 through 2.7?
AFAIK: SunOS went to version 4.x, then came Solaris, which was SunOS 5.x. (If you telnet to a Solaris box, it will tell you it's SunOS 5.x.)
I'm not sure where the 2.x came from. I suppose it's a marketing-inspired number to differenciate from the old SunOS.
By the time they reached Solaris 2.7 (a.k.a. SunOS 5.7), they decided there would not be a Solaris 3.x, and they dropped the major number, so the next version was Solaris 8.
(I guess the next version would be X...assuming there's a next version)
That would be Solaris 10. It was announced a few months ago.
One of the clients I worked for, had a dedicated PC for some security-related stuff. The machine was on a dedicated network, connected only to the main server.
That PC ran DOS, with an application written in Pascal and assembler.
As the hardware was aging (and because the system load increased), they looked for a replacement. After testing, they discovered that:
Finally, they decided to buy a Sun machine, and rewrite the whole application in C.
Some (very old) BASIC interpreters used to parse each source line each time it was executed.
One time (around 1985 IIRC), I read an article in the local computer club's magazine. The author had written a BASIC program (GW-BASIC I think) to "shorten" BASIC programs. It would:
The source code that went along with the article looked like it was used on itself (very terse).
With the machines you had back then, it probably made a difference.
The boot loader spends most of its time waiting for the user to press a key, so they can enter custom boot parameters. If you set the timeout to 0 in LILO or GRUB, loading the kernel happens almost instantly.
The BIOS startup routine is longer, especially if you have a SCSI card. (I have 2 of those in my machine, and they account for most of the wait during startup.)
One time, I had a disk corruption in the swap partition. When I booted the machine, everything went well, until I started opening applications. The machine swapped out more and more data, until it reached the first bad sector in the swap. It crashed quite spectacular.
Once I figured out what happened, I replaced the disk.
That was in the days of the 2.0 kernel. My machine had 16 MB RAM IIRC.
Most of the time, my laptop handles things quite well. Even with several (rather large) applications open. (Including WSAD, FireFox.) The system has 1GB of memory, so I'm not really stressing it.
Once a week, when the virus scanner pops up, things are different. As mentioned above, XP starts swapping things out to make room for disk cache - rather useless, since the virus scanner will read each file only once, and pass on to the next one. (Admitted, the OS has no way of knowing that.)
Do developers out there voice the need to store binaries?
There are definitely reasons for storing binary (non-text) files in a version control system:
how on earth can a Dutch judge restrict my ability (I'm Belgian citizen) to visit a particular website
From a fellow Belgian (not a lawyer though): trademarks are common in all three Benelux countries. This means that any judgment in one country might affect the other two.
I never tried it, but DataDino Database Explorer should do the trick.
Is there a win32 ext2/3 filesystem driver out there anywhere?
Searching for "win32 ext2" yields this as the first link.
Yes. I still remember when they shipped Windows and IE with only 56 bits encryption, while the US version had 128 bit.
Let's see: roughly speaking, an EJB container provides three services: transaction management, remote calls and security.
For scientific computing, you don't want the security layer: it will just slow you down.
You also don't need the transaction management: you perform a calculation, and you store the result. Why would you want a rollback for that?
Remote calls might seem interesting at first (think clusters), until you realise that EJB has no support for parallel tasks. (Except for message driven beans.)
In short: EJBs weren't designed for scientific computing, and they don't offer anything a scientist might want. They were intended to address a specific class of problems, typically found in (large) enterprises.
During the 1980s, it seemed like every programmer wrote his own version of Tetris. It still is quite popular on children sites. Each of those sites has a version of Tetris and Pairs, either a Java applet or a Flash version.
My 8 year old stepdaughter doesn't have problems understanding Tetris. Given a choice, she'd rather look around to find a Flash game she likes.
Some points from the article (loosely translated):
1 and 2 seem to prevent most of the abuses of software patents. Taking a normal business practice and adding "over the Internet" (wait, that's old fashoned. Nowadays it's "using XML") would not be accepted.
With number 3, it would be useless to patent file formats or communication protocols (if they even are patentable), since anyone would be permitted to write their own implementation.
(But anyway, IANAL.)
At work, we used to have a SUN E250 [1]. One day, the power went away. (Turned out to be a problem with the airco.) After the power came back, I checked the logs, and I saw that the machine had been writing messages like "Power lost, running on backup power", and when the power came back "Switching to AC". (The monitor wasn't protected, so there was no way to check the machine during the blackout.)
The PC in the same room didn't have backup power and shut down. It came back with no ill effects.
The RS/6000 in your story probably had a power monitor and a large voltage protector, or maybe it had its own UPS as well.
[1] We still have it somewhere, but I'm no longer using it.
Home users typically don't care about VB macros. For companies, it's different.
There must be thousands of little "business applications" that are Word or Excel macros. Each of those might contain only a few lines of code, but in a large organization, there are a lot of those.
Does anyone still use Active X on a web site? I can't remember any site asking for it in a long time. Granted, I use Mozilla, which ignores Active X, but I would expect to see empty spots on the page.
Let's see what plugins I'd have to miss:
The only problem is that you're only telling the micro-processor that controls it "up or down".
Last year, I was in a building, and they had a more advanced system: outside of the elevator, there were buttons to select each floor. Then, you waited until the system indicated your lift has arrived. Inside the cabin, there was only one button, to ackowledge entering.
[IBM and Apple Java are based on SUN's code] As is microsft java implementation.
No, Microsoft made a clean-room implementation of the Java specification (except for the things they made incompatible).
Partimage makes an "intelligent" copy of a partition. I.e., it only copies the sectors that actually contain data. This gives a smaller backup than a full copy of the disk.
It can read NTFS partitions, and it can connect to a remote server to store the file.
They even provide bootable disk images, so you can use it without installing Linux on the NT machine.
Spambayes was mentioned a few months ago in .
It supports Windows, and has a plugin for Outlook. Besides the plugin, there is a web interface that is accessible from any browser.
Setting it up seems a bit difficult, but after that it should be mom-friendly.
This question was asked on the Linux kernel mailing list a while ago. The response was (from memory):
Yes, you can have 2 keyboards, mice and video cards in a single PC. And you can run 2 instances of X on different virtual consoles. But, there can be only one active VC at any time, and it's hard to change that limit.
The conclusion was that it would probably be easier and cheaper to set up an X terminal.
16 bit adressing was mostly done with the HL register
Yes, HL was the main address pointer in the Z80. (BC and DE being the other ones.)
IX and IY were index registers: you had special instructions to access memory at (IX + n). You couldn't use them as general purpose registers, while you could perform arithmetics on HL.
Stow has no concept of dependencies. There is no way you could use it to build a distribution on top of it.
I use stow on my (Debian) Linux PC at home, to manage the software I build from source. If I want to upgrade a program, I can just delete the directory and install the new version in the same location. If a Debian packages becomes available, I remove the directory and have stow remove the links in /usr/local/*.
Until now, I have been able to get all the libraries from Debian, so I never needed to work with dependencies.