Abouth language it is like about sex, there might not be right or wrong, but there certainly is good or bad.
"Boxen" was an intelligent play on its similarity to the word "ox" and its Anglo-Saxon plural form, "oxen". So is Unices, putting the latin inflection to work on the acronym "UNIX". Which is even more hilarious because it only works on "Unix", not on "Multics", which doesn't look latin. It's just playing with language. I am very glad, not to say proud, that computer geeks can do it so well.
"Elvii", as in Peggy Bundy's "Look, Elvii" when coming to Las Vegas, was a great one-liner, though it's grammatically wrong (the plural of the -is declination would -es, but "Elvis" is not even latin).
"Virii", I think, isn't even used as a pun, is it? It's basically wrong, "viri" being the correct form and "viruses" the usual one. Doesn't it even sound a bit stuffy, like "Let's put in another '-i' so it sounds more latin".
I am surprised nobody has pointed that out before, but isn't "Sapphire" (besides being a gem stone) a popular gin from Bombay? At least around Boston you used to be able to order Sapphire 'n' Tonic in bars...
They probably wanted to call it Martini Dry but management knew this one...
T-Mobile is already offering [link in German] something like this in Germany - for about $1.20/mth you can choose a song that replaces the ringing tone on the caller's side.
This service is implemented in the exchange, not in the cellphone, so its completely independent of the cellphone brand.
Would be nice if one could get a sound that scares away telemarketers...
Back in school our physics teachers had a Tesla generator (or Tesla coil), a simple device that creates an electromagnetic signal which can jam a large part of the frequency spectrum. It uses electrical sparks to achieve that.
The field of these thingies is powerful enough to light up a lightbulb over a few feet (if you wire the lighbulb to a reception coil). The story I heard was that the local equivalent of the FCC came in and shut the Tesla generators down. And that was long before cell phones and wireless can openers... I mean car openers.
Would be more fun to have a strong emitter send out all possible code sequences so all the cars in Vegas would unlock...
Unfortunately, they even had a project called "Lothar" (another character from the Mandrake comic strip).
I guess this did them in - it was clear they were using the Mandrake the Magician theme, even if by today they are avoiding it. Similar to merchandising, King features would have charged them for using the theme, so I guess they were able to argue in court that financial damage has occurred even if Linux Mandrake did not compete directly with their trademark.
Somebody should call a distribution Donaldux and get sued by Disney, Les Editions Albert Rene, and Trump alike. Then the law suits could cancel each other out.
What Linus means is that if you use 'x' twice in a macro, you are in for a nasty surprise when you do something like 'isdigit(*p++)' - because the '++' gets evaluated twice.
It's not exactly against the C standard (i.e. the program will still compile and behave predictably), but violates good programming practice.
That's one reasons why macros are frowned upon by modern programming languages.
Harvard Square, one of the richest and wealtiest areas of the country,...
...Harvard (where a few people just got paid $40 million a year!)
Harvard is paying anyone $40M?? Certainly not its faculty. Are they buying a football team from a real University?
Aren't the rich parts more in the suburbs like Newton or Lincoln (funny combination of names there, btw) and wouldn't care about subway access?
Harvard square is full of grad students and postdocs, and a lot of areas in Cambridge are still working class.
There was a plan in the 1960s to extend the Central Artery over the Charles River - it was supposed to cross over in Cambridgeport, then run over Central Square and along Prospect into Somerville. "Run over" here meant like flattening a several-block wide swathe. Luckily, at this time there was already substantial civic resistance, and the plan never caught on.
I just figured out why I never seem to be able to click on these download links to Microsoft sites: If you block the user agent-header, it responds with a weird file of content type 'text/html', half of which is a "...". Aargh!
Do these people break anything they touch?
Of course, I was only blocking the user agent-header because some crappy sites block Mozilla.
There is an interesting article by Dan Bricklin, one of the inventors of VisiCalc (the first spreadsheet programs), on why they didn't patent VisiCalc. It's simple - patenting software was only possible after 1981. Think what the industry would look like if people had been able to patent spreadsheets (VisiCalc), full-screen word processing (WordStar and many others before), and windowing systems (Xerox PARC and Apple Lisa).
The bad news is that Bricklin thinks software patents are bad, but since they are here, you have to try to patent as much as possible. I guess soon we will have to take out patent-infringement insurance with premiums as high as our salaries.
Ads in Norway is 5 min.,which reach the annoying state pretty fast.
I don't know about Norway, but German private channels are only allowed one commercial break inside a 30-minute show so it will always be almost evactly seven minutes (Remember "This hour has 22 minutes"?) - that makes it very easy to skip on my trusty VCR that is taping the Simpsons every night.
But a single commercial break in the show usually is not enough for me to get more coffee, check my email, go to the john, check the other channels, have dinner, or s*x etc etc. There is so much to do during a commercial break! The best shows consist of a single long commercial break, so I can actually get some stuff done!
I concur - I used to be in lattice gauge theory and moved into computational biology:-). You have to follow the money, and IBM is very good at this. Also, biology is more fun, they are just starting to solve problems seriously on a computer.
Beowulf-style cluster are a big waste in terms of additional circuitry and hardware that you do not need in a supercomputer, from I/O busses to the power supply. Of course, since off-the-shelf components are so cheap, it is still cheaper to buy the stuff than to design your own tailor-made circuitry - up to a certain scale.
That is where IBM tries to go: BlueGene's design is based on a system-on-a-chip - everything (except memory) is integrated on a single chip. In the long run, this allows them to build systems much larger than you could with a Beowulf. They are basically aiming for a system where you can easily add computing power by simply putting in a few more chips, and the thing will scale. They are doing the same thing for storage with this brick
BlueGene is a also the first supercomputer marketed to the life sciences. It's interesting to see that it developed from a project at Columbia University called QCDOC for "Quantum Chromodynamics on-a-chip" which did research in computational high-energy physics, and QCDSP before, which used DSP processors to build a supercomputer about ten years ago. Both an instructive example how academic research in the long run becomes industrially relevant, and how science changes.
What will happen to virtualization with trusted-computing software?
VMWARE and others are making a great product for people who are forced to use desktop products that run on Windows but like to have server OS underneath. With computers getting more powerful, I can easily imagine Windows becoming just another process running in your computer. It's this way on my desktop box already.
Even today that means that you can circumvent DRM. You don't even to have to write something like QTFairUse - just run your DRM-protected audio player in a virtual machine and capture the digital audio bitstream in the server OS. Of course, DMCA might make virtualization illegal.:-)
The interesting question is how many systems will run in a virtualized environment - it could get interesting if some companies decide to run all desktops in virtualization because to make
managing them easier.
That tells you they are running an ftp, ssh, rsync and a web server - hardly surprising.
'Filtered' means that the port is blocked by the firewall, as opposed to closed ports which can be reached through the firewall but have nothing listening on it.
Gee, is "parent/child" still politically correct?
I thought it would be something like
"generator/generated in a
genetically-challenged relationship" or so...
In fact, I think they should require the disks to take turns in their positions. That would only be fair.
If so, then 50% - 1 of their board (Aufsichtsrat) members are elected by employees,
This only applies to companies with more than 500 employees, and then it is only 1/3 of the board - only from 2000 employees on there is parity on the board.
SuSE isn't publicly listed yet, but Novell of course has a German subsidiary, Novell Gmbh (LLC), and I am sure they could deal with the minor nuisance of employee representation.
I just think the whole issue of Novell/SuSe/the German government/$120m is bogus.
I grant that SuSE might have some government-backed loan, but I think this wouldn't make much difference to them - and government subsidies, alas, rarely end up in successful companies...
I for one, do NOT want any U.S. Company taking over SuSE (or any non-U.S. controlled distro).
It's hard to say as SuSE has not yet gone public, but it seems that IBM has quite an influence there - there are several former IBMers on the board, in particular the CEO, and IBM and SAP are the only companies named as investors that have a strong tech presence in Germany.
IBM has some Linux and open-source work going on in Europe, so it could be natural for them to use a European company as their Linux vehicle.
For example, Linux for the/370 (well, whatever they call it now) originated at IBM Germany, and their OTI company develops the open-source Eclipse development environment in Zurich.
Also, in 2000 IBM announced investments of the order of $300M into Linux in Europe, and I would not be surprised if part of that went to SuSE. In fact, maybe this is one reason (except for the obvious ones) that SuSE is not yet going public - they probably have enough money. The IBM/SuSe hardware/software association plays extremely well here. In fact, whenever I hear Linux here, IBM and SuSE seem to pop up.
If SuSE went public, I would be in. And we all remember Digital Research and what difference IBM can make to an OS company...
Of course, Microsoft can't buy out IBM. On the other side, after cashing in lots of government subsidies for developing an independent German IT industry, Siemens sold its computer business to Fujitsu, so I do not see any reason why a non-US company should put up more resistance to Microsoft.
Again, there is no indication that the German government owns any part of SuSE. Maybe they have some government-backed loans, but I doubt it. From the management team and the board members, IBM and the venture capitalists dominate.
Maybe the author of the original article was thinking about the eMillennium fund - partly owned by Deutsche Bank, which is not by any means a government entity. It only sounds so (the government bank is called the Deutsche Bundesbank, and it does not do investments).
For one thing, SuSE has nothing to do with the
German government - they list their investors on their
factsheet (in German, unfortunately). It's IBM, SGI, Intel, Compaq, and some venture capitalists.
Also, $120M sounds a very cheap for a company of this size. Red Hat, not quite twice the size by employees, is valued at over 2$ billion.
There would have to be a way to invalidate the card, which means that these card readers would have to be updated on some semi-frequent basis.
No, that's not a problem: The terrorists we are concerned about are mostly suicide bombers, so they are usually dead after becoming a terrorist.
[OK, the INS tried to issue visas to some of the 9/11 terrorists half a year after the attack...]
And terrorism is not like inner-city gang crime, terrorists won't have a string of prior convictions. Most suicide bombers are not repeat offenders.
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"Boxen" was an intelligent play on its similarity to the word "ox" and its Anglo-Saxon plural form, "oxen". So is Unices, putting the latin inflection to work on the acronym "UNIX". Which is even more hilarious because it only works on "Unix", not on "Multics", which doesn't look latin. It's just playing with language. I am very glad, not to say proud, that computer geeks can do it so well.
"Elvii", as in Peggy Bundy's "Look, Elvii" when coming to Las Vegas, was a great one-liner, though it's grammatically wrong (the plural of the -is declination would -es, but "Elvis" is not even latin).
"Virii", I think, isn't even used as a pun, is it? It's basically wrong, "viri" being the correct form and "viruses" the usual one. Doesn't it even sound a bit stuffy, like "Let's put in another '-i' so it sounds more latin".
They probably wanted to call it Martini Dry but management knew this one...
This service is implemented in the exchange, not in the cellphone, so its completely independent of the cellphone brand.
Would be nice if one could get a sound that scares away telemarketers...
it's just that:
1 imperial MB = 1024*1024 bytes
1 metric MB = 1000*1000 bytes
oops :-)
The field of these thingies is powerful enough to light up a lightbulb over a few feet (if you wire the lighbulb to a reception coil). The story I heard was that the local equivalent of the FCC came in and shut the Tesla generators down. And that was long before cell phones and wireless can openers... I mean car openers.
Would be more fun to have a strong emitter send out all possible code sequences so all the cars in Vegas would unlock...
I guess this did them in - it was clear they were using the Mandrake the Magician theme, even if by today they are avoiding it. Similar to merchandising, King features would have charged them for using the theme, so I guess they were able to argue in court that financial damage has occurred even if Linux Mandrake did not compete directly with their trademark.
Somebody should call a distribution Donaldux and get sued by Disney, Les Editions Albert Rene, and Trump alike. Then the law suits could cancel each other out.
Bisexuality immediately doubles your chances for a date Saturday night.
It's not exactly against the C standard (i.e. the program will still compile and behave predictably), but violates good programming practice.
That's one reasons why macros are frowned upon by modern programming languages.
Aren't the rich parts more in the suburbs like Newton or Lincoln (funny combination of names there, btw) and wouldn't care about subway access? Harvard square is full of grad students and postdocs, and a lot of areas in Cambridge are still working class.
There was a plan in the 1960s to extend the Central Artery over the Charles River - it was supposed to cross over in Cambridgeport, then run over Central Square and along Prospect into Somerville. "Run over" here meant like flattening a several-block wide swathe. Luckily, at this time there was already substantial civic resistance, and the plan never caught on.
Do these people break anything they touch?
Of course, I was only blocking the user agent-header because some crappy sites block Mozilla.
He couldn't - hyperlinking had been patented (slashdot article) by British Telecom in 1976.
The bad news is that Bricklin thinks software patents are bad, but since they are here, you have to try to patent as much as possible. I guess soon we will have to take out patent-infringement insurance with premiums as high as our salaries.
But a single commercial break in the show usually is not enough for me to get more coffee, check my email, go to the john, check the other channels, have dinner, or s*x etc etc. There is so much to do during a commercial break! The best shows consist of a single long commercial break, so I can actually get some stuff done!
That is where IBM tries to go: BlueGene's design is based on a system-on-a-chip - everything (except memory) is integrated on a single chip. In the long run, this allows them to build systems much larger than you could with a Beowulf. They are basically aiming for a system where you can easily add computing power by simply putting in a few more chips, and the thing will scale. They are doing the same thing for storage with this brick
BlueGene is a also the first supercomputer marketed to the life sciences. It's interesting to see that it developed from a project at Columbia University called QCDOC for "Quantum Chromodynamics on-a-chip" which did research in computational high-energy physics, and QCDSP before, which used DSP processors to build a supercomputer about ten years ago. Both an instructive example how academic research in the long run becomes industrially relevant, and how science changes.
VMWARE and others are making a great product for people who are forced to use desktop products that run on Windows but like to have server OS underneath. With computers getting more powerful, I can easily imagine Windows becoming just another process running in your computer. It's this way on my desktop box already.
Even today that means that you can circumvent DRM. You don't even to have to write something like QTFairUse - just run your DRM-protected audio player in a virtual machine and capture the digital audio bitstream in the server OS. Of course, DMCA might make virtualization illegal. :-)
The interesting question is how many systems will run in a virtualized environment - it could get interesting if some companies decide to run all desktops in virtualization because to make managing them easier.
'Filtered' means that the port is blocked by the firewall, as opposed to closed ports which can be reached through the firewall but have nothing listening on it.
In fact, I think they should require the disks to take turns in their positions. That would only be fair.
SuSE isn't publicly listed yet, but Novell of course has a German subsidiary, Novell Gmbh (LLC), and I am sure they could deal with the minor nuisance of employee representation.
I just think the whole issue of Novell/SuSe/the German government/$120m is bogus.
I grant that SuSE might have some government-backed loan, but I think this wouldn't make much difference to them - and government subsidies, alas, rarely end up in successful companies...
IBM has some Linux and open-source work going on in Europe, so it could be natural for them to use a European company as their Linux vehicle. For example, Linux for the /370 (well, whatever they call it now) originated at IBM Germany, and their OTI company develops the open-source Eclipse development environment in Zurich.
Also, in 2000 IBM announced investments of the order of $300M into Linux in Europe, and I would not be surprised if part of that went to SuSE. In fact, maybe this is one reason (except for the obvious ones) that SuSE is not yet going public - they probably have enough money. The IBM/SuSe hardware/software association plays extremely well here. In fact, whenever I hear Linux here, IBM and SuSE seem to pop up.
If SuSE went public, I would be in. And we all remember Digital Research and what difference IBM can make to an OS company...
Of course, Microsoft can't buy out IBM. On the other side, after cashing in lots of government subsidies for developing an independent German IT industry, Siemens sold its computer business to Fujitsu, so I do not see any reason why a non-US company should put up more resistance to Microsoft.
Maybe the author of the original article was thinking about the eMillennium fund - partly owned by Deutsche Bank, which is not by any means a government entity. It only sounds so (the government bank is called the Deutsche Bundesbank, and it does not do investments).
Also, $120M sounds a very cheap for a company of this size. Red Hat, not quite twice the size by employees, is valued at over 2$ billion.
And terrorism is not like inner-city gang crime, terrorists won't have a string of prior convictions. Most suicide bombers are not repeat offenders.