So to be brief about it, Vista is good for people who want to learn to do more multitasking, because the interface so easily supports jumping from one application to another, while the increased slowness of each single application encourages the user to make those jumps. You can probably easily work on three or four different projects at once, AND keep up on Slashdot, since you will no longer be able to focus all your attention on any one thing, like those cavemen of 1960s who put a man on the Moon.
It may have been a good idea back in Ben Franklin's day when people used candles and oil lamps, but now people leave the lights and electronics on whether it's day or night.
Too true!
Which is why I would personally prefer that we change the global economy to predominantly graveyard shifts so I can get more quality time in the sun.
Shoot, we had to make do with Fortran on Feet. And we had to hand carry our Holloriths, too. Seventeen flights of stairs from the punchcard stations to the cardreader, through waist deep snow, and uphill both ways.
Hee, hee... I remember when Crazy Dave started saving all the chad from the bitbuckets of the cardpunch machines. After about a month he had this huge bag of microconfetti, and one afternoon when the Admin had his back to us (rethreading the backup highspeed tape machine, he was), Crazy Dave dumped all that chad into the input buffer of that old woodburning computer. Sparks went flying out every which-way from the grating, and the fluepipe turned cherry red from the heat, but that's got to have been the first ever attempt at overclocking! w00t!
That afternoon Crazy Dave prolly would of solved that puzzle Fermat left behind if the a/c had been able to keep up with the overclocking. But core overheated and the itty-bitty little wires of the outer 16K frame melted, and there were suddenly 147,456 tiny little ferrous donuts rolling around the floor (those frames used 8 bit bytes with a parity bit: pretty good stuff in the day). That's when Crazy Dave and I decided that physically removing ourselves from the presence of the Admin would be a prudent alteration in our plan.
Microsoft's business depends on Windows and Office in such a way that if either of them were to fail, they would be in huge trouble.
True enough.
But to re-iterate,
if Microsoft cannot survive the failure of Vista or MS Office 2007, the cause would not due to those failures but due to a failure in its approach to managing corporate assets;
and such a failure would not be that big a deal: with its awesomely ridiculous cash reserves, MS would probably weather the storm with nothing worse than a stockholder revolt. Everyone else would simply stick with WinXP and earlier MS Office versions until we figured out how to best devide the enterprize's workload between Google Apps and OpenOffice, and between Macs and Ubuntus.
The main thing to remember is that there are lots of candidates to replace either of MS's only significant offerings. This kind of thing happens all the time in business, and life as we know it will continue, with or without Microsoft's current corporate structure.
I think there's still some time we need to wait before jumping to these apocalyptical conclusions.
I fail to see why Vista's possible failure should be seen as "apocalyptical". Ford survived the Edsel and the Pinto fiascos, IBM survived the PS2 insanity and OS/2. Big companies sometimes make big mistakes. If Vista proves to be a mistake, then if Microsoft has been managing its resources properly, it will be able to pick itself up and tag along after whoever emerges as the new market leader. Nothing particularly apocalyptic, or even catastrophic, about that. Merely a normal change from industry leader to trailing the pack, that every corporation that has any history has experienced from time to time.
If the reader thinks that a failure by Microsoft would somehow mean the collapse of cyberspace, then the reader should take a look at Unix and Ubuntu. Those two OSs bracket everything Microsoft has ever produced: one on the high end, the other on the low end. Both do what they do extremely well. If some kind of void begins to open where Microsoft products used to be, it will be filled quite rapidly from above and below. No worries there.
The only thing approaching disaster is the economic well being of people who have invested too heavily in Microsoft stock. But that would not be the fault of Vista failing to catch on. That would mostly be the fault of a management style characterized by chair-throwing, monkey-dancing, potty-mouthed threats of using lethal force against people Microsoft management doesn't like. Microsoft would probably be better off if it had a businessman at the helm.
If Vista proves to be a failure, it won't be apocalyptic, nor catastrophic, nor even particularly harmful. We'll all just continue to use Win XP until we're ready to hop over to Ubuntu and Wine, or IBM resurrects OS/2, or Apple decides to market to just plain folks instead of concentrating on the rich snobs.
when she talks, she sounds calculated; it sounds like her words are the result of intensive polling, long hours of drafting in a committee, and several rounds of focus groups. There's no passion, no idealism, no belief.
So, in short, her reliance on rational thought is enough to assure that she will not be elected?
I fear that you are right. As an englishman once said, "If God wanted America to have Presidents, He would have provided candidates."
I just watched the video. It was imaginative AND original. The part that was imaginative was not original. The part that was original was not imaginative.
I don't see any evidence that Microsoft "gets it".
I think the suits responsible for managing the development of ASP.NET JAVA have confused "bizarre" with "bazaar", and precisely aimed for, and hit, the wrong target. This is a truly bizarre thing that MS is attempting to foist on the world.
We can expect more weirdness like this coming from Redmond. As a corporate organism, Microsoft was never endowed with very much of the higher cortical functions that are needed to work the top levels of the Maslow pyramid. It is not surprising that as it begins to die, the the small amount of high level cognition needed to maintain an integrated world view has disappeared before the lower level capabilities that allow formulation of clever word constructions has gone. We can expect different parts of Microsoft to express increasingly different world views with a confusing lack of over-all integration of vision, and with an increasing amount of openly expressed conflict between various strategies and tactics.
At worst, Microsoft is a dinosaur entering its death throes, and anybody who has teamed up with that beast needs to break harness and back away to a safe distance. At best, Microsoft is undergoing a massive mid-life crisis, and there is no telling what it will strip off and throw away, or how it will transform the portions of the old Microsoft that it will keep. Mid-life crises are damn hard on relationships. Just as the smart manager realizes that he needs to relieve an employee in mid-life crisis of any mission-crtical responsibilities, companies who have been working with Microsoft need to evaluate whether they should put more distance between themselves and Microsoft's uncertain future.
This is an unusual post for me, because I've been talking about Microsoft, yet I have managed to refrain from making any mention of its monkey dancing, chair throwing, potty-mouthed CEO.
So I keep talking to people, and I show them my nifty looking Linux systems, and I convert the occasional rookie Windows sysadmin who hasn't yet had a chance to be burned by the Redmond flame, but average home users?
Just keep doing what you're doing, and have a bit of patience.
We can expect the Win XP / Office 2003 experience to go into a progressively worsening spiral of deterioration starting in 3 to 6 months. One reason is because Microsoft's large but finite resources will be increasingly devoted to Vista / Office 2007 problems as these surface. And they will surface. A strongly related reason is because it will be in Microsoft's best interest to encourage Win XP / Office 2003 users to move on, since these old versions are rapidly becoming cost centers rather than profit centers. So Redmond will have neither the resources nor the incentive to fight Win XP malware any more. It will become evident to more and more users that Win XP and Office 2003 are circling the drain.
When users who had been satisfied for years with their old Windows boxes start thinking that it might be time to pay to upgrade, then they will be receptive to the idea of maybe taking a couple of weeks to see if Ubuntu or Kubuntu might do everything they want. The key to this will be an easy dual boot installation that will allow them to explore the 'buntu without letting go of their old ways.
So start letting people know that when they start to run into problems with their current Windows, you've got an alternative they might want to look at before they shell out the big bucks for a full system upgrade.
But I wonder why they bothered compiling and executing only a line at a time -- was it a matter of keeping memory utilization low?
Yes, the strategies of time sharing and line by line execution were attempts to make optimal use of very small memory. Typically the combined "OS" and resident compiler used up about 12 KB of core, leaving only 4 KB free. I think the Dartmouth computer was a big one: I think it had 2 16 KB frames in its core, so it may have had 20 KB of free space for running users' programs. But Dartmouth BASIC was designed to run on a standard single frame 16 KB minicomputer, AIR.
In contrast, the computer I learned FORTRAN on in 1972 used batch processing: the cardreading software was loaded, and read all the programs in the card hopper onto tape. Then the FORTRAN precompiler was loaded and serially read blocks from that tape, and wrote its output to a second tape. Then the FORTRAN compiler itself was loaded and did its thing, and wrote the actual executable to yet another tape. When the executable was actually run, it had the use of all but about 4 KB of core to work with: a whopping 12 KB of free memory for its exclusive use! It had to fit itself and all its variables and such into that space.
There was a huge amount of wasted CPU cycles as things were written to and read from tape. Probably around 80% wastage when our smallish student programs were run as a batch.
But when the combined size of the FORTRAN precompiler and compiler was much greater than the 16 KB of core memory most of the old minicomputers had, this is the way programming was done.
BASIC and time-sharing were major breakthrough advantages. And it turned out that the constraints of early PCs were similar enough to the constraints of a resident compiler on a minicomputer that it was possible to rewrite BASIC into a ROM based interpreter.
Yes, thanks for bringing back some of those memories... IIRC, the computer I learned FORTRAN on was an IBM 1130 that had been donated to the community college when a local manufacturer upgraded to one of the newfangled minicomputers that used transitors for core. The college's sysadmin worked a lot of interesting deals, getting additional tape drives and cardreaders, punchcard stations, and even core frames donated from other businesses that were upgrading from the technology that had been new some 8 years earlier. I got to watch (through the glass wall) when core was increased from a whopping 32 KB to an incredible 48 KB by sliding a frame about 18 inches square into a slot in a sheet metal box. That made that old computer one of the dozen most powerful computers south of Portland Oregon and north of San Francisco.
The government branches/organizations should have been doing this all along, that is making every effort to ensure that their computing platforms are secure, AND comparing one vendor against another.
Many if not all of the US Federal agencies HAVE been doing this all along. Look back over slashdot for the last 2 - 4 weeks, and you'll see stories that several government agencies have declared moratoriums on updating to Vista. Other agencies are certainly doing the same thing, but managing their moratoriums more quietly.
I left USGOV service several years ago, but I can attest that the VA and other big agencies began actively managing update strategies as early as Win98. When Directors of VA hospitals suddenly found that their memos could not be read by the staff because they had been given the first of the fancy new computers with MS Office 97, and the staff were still using MS Office 4.3, IT departments across the country caught holy hell.
I laud the White House for issuing this directive. (This is the first time I can actually support a decision from the White House since Jan of 2001.) But it also reminds me of a wall plaque I once saw in Department Manager's office:
I must hurry and catch up with the others
for I am the Leader.
Aw, shoot. I left out the other part of Dartmouth BASIC that was also part of its breakthrough. I only gave half the story— no wonder I've confused some people.
Dartmouth BASIC was also the first high level time-share computer language. Which is the reason why it was designed as an interpreted language: each timeslice involved loading what we would now call the state into core, compiling the current line, executing that line, and saving state to a drum storage. It had to be done this way so that multiple programs could be interleaved. We're talking about teletype I/O at something like 100 baud or less, and tape storage systems of comparable slowness, so just about everything was I/O bound. Under these conditions, time-sharing made a heck of a lot of sense, but FORTRAN and COBOL both needed to be extensively reworked to allow it. BASIC was a proof of concept as much as anything else.
The line-at-a-time compilation gave Dartmouth BASIC the classic qualities of an interpreted language: a program would run until it encountered a fatal error; error reporting was very poor compared to that available from a FORTRAN or COBOL compiler; there was no optimization; it was difficult to impossible to write recursive routines; etc.
Later, by around 1980, "interpreted" began to mean burning a library of routines into ROM when the computer was built, then at run time, tokenizing each line of BASIC and using the tokens as accesses to the ROM routines. It was sort of an elegant kludge to get around the limitations of 32 or 48 KB ram and cassette tape storage. That was in a day where we'd do all kinds of weird things, like POKEing ML routines into the keyboard buffer to take advantage of its reusable 0.25 KB ram...
I also want to point out that the automotive industry went through a similar period about 35 years ago, when new cars were required to have pre-installed seat belts. It is now generally accepted that seatbelts, airbags, and less visible things like collapsing steering columns and controlled crumpling are GOOD THINGS TO HAVE IN A CAR. But at the time these were introduced, the sometimes strong argument against them was that none of these things were necessary for a well trained driver. Whatever your opinion about that, the truth of that time was that driving had become a necessary daily activity for a lot of people who had no real desire to do the training: they just wanted to get the kids to the soccer game; do the shopping; get to and from work without having to sit among the coughers and hackers in a germbox (bus)...
Computing is at this same place now. The number of people who have to use a computer to get things done, but who have zero interest in the computers themselves, now far outnumbers the number who are willing to do any training.
It is time to use some legal enforcement to make the network environment safe for the computing public. I think this could be done by applying existing laws regarding reckless endangerment, indiscriminate distribution of attractive nuisances, and so forth to the software industry.
Where is Ralph Nader when we need him? Preparing to run for President again?
You would think the legal case could also be made to hold Microsoft liable for stolen personal information, illegal charges to credit cards, raided bank accounts, etc., when known but unpatched (i.e. no patch available) exploits to their software allow people's computers to be compromised.
I wonder if passing new laws would be necessary? Maybe we already have laws that could be used to get us to the goal of a reasonably safe internet:
Most municipalities have ordinances against "attractive nuisances", and I think the case could be made that Windows is an attractive nuisance and the owner of Windows software (not the licensee, but the actual owner) could be fined for each day of violation until he brings his property into compliance with generally accepted community standards and makes it reasonably safe against becoming zombified.
There are also laws on the books in most jurisdictions regarding reckless endangerment (of 3rd party personal property or safety) that could be brought to bear. Someone who has a habit of leaving their keys in their car in a neighborhood of unruly preteens is recklessly endangering the general public by inviting some 10 year old who would be a menace on the road to steal the car. A company that markets fast motorized scooters to little kids to race up and down the sidewalks is recklessly endangering the general public. Perhaps a company that sells an OS to noobies that isn't safe until someone with a few years of experience configures it, loads appropriate antimalware packages, and configures those, is recklessly endangering all other computer users in the community.
There isn't a need to wait until someone gets hurt; these laws are intended to be used proactively to encourage reckless people and companies from engaging in bad habits.
Maybe all that is needed is the recognition that computing is no longer an esoteric activity, but has now become a necessary part of everybody's daily life. And that the laws we already have in place to protect us in our daily activities now need to applied to this part of our lives.
Beg to differ, but Dartmouth's original BASIC was designed to be an "interpreted" language, in the way that term was used at the time. There was no separate compile stage and IIRC (I was but a high schooler at the time) the teletype would chatter through output until it hit a line that didn't parse, then deliver the heartbreaking ERROR LINE 120: GOTO WITHOUT TARGET (or something like that).
The breakthrough with Dartmouth BASIC was being able to interact with it directly through the teletype terminals, rather than dealing with stacks of punchcards.
It wouldn't surprise me if there were compiled Basics back in the late 1960s. It is an easy language to develop a compiler for, and places that had few or no teletype terminals would have been looking for a compiled version.
But the original Dartmouth BASIC was definitely interactive and interpreted line by line.
This was particularly a problem for girl programmers that just sounds very misogynistic and crass to me. Does that mean a programmer or an admiral is automatically a boy unless explicitly stated to be a girl?
It mostly means that I have recently re-read
Girl Genius
from start to current page, which is temporarily mind-warping. Possibly permanently so.
As with other work in the steampunk genre, persons with a damaged or congenitally lacking sense of humor should avoid looking at this online comic. Persons who are prone to spewing coffee, milk, or other beverages from their nasal passages onto their keyboards and monitors should avoid drinking while clicking from page to page. Do not read this comic while landing a Boeing 747 in manual mode. Do not read this comic while driving. Do not think about any of the scenes in this comic during your marriage ceremony, or during anyone else's funeral. Steampunk has been associated with psychotic breaks and states of episodic manic euphoria, and also with the District of Columbia. Discontinue use if you ever see more than one blimp or dirigible in the sky at the same time. Consult your doctor or mechanic if you begin to see steam powered robots, or pocketwatch wind-up robots, or persons of strange color, odd hats, and many pointed teeth.
I am inclined to blame him for Basic as well, because it started out as a kind of simplified Fortran.
FORTRAN was the first working high level compiler language; BASIC was the first working interpreter language. Very different underlying structures.
Now COBOL was the second major high level compiler language, and it was very much a reaction to FORTRAN, so I suppose using parent post's logic, we can blame Backus for COBOL. But then that cheapens the contributions of the Girl Admiral (Grace Hopper) who gave us such wonders as the nanosecond wire, and MULTIPLY 2 BY 2 GIVING FOUR.
For the youngsters out there:
FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) was the break-through from machine language and assembly to a higher level language with a compiler. Everything we do now is based on this; I believe that many mission critical engineering libraries are still in Fortran (they were a few years ago)
COBOL (COmmon Business Oriented Language, Compiles Only By Odd Luck) was the second successful high level language. Its major improvement over Fortran was getting rid of triphasic logic (branch on <0, or =0, or >0) in favor of boolean logic (branch on !0 or 0). Its most noteworthy failing was the requirement to use the period punctuation mark (full stop) to end sections. This was particularly a problem for girl programmers, since at the time getting into trouble because you missed a period had serious consequences. Cobol simply put too much emphasis on a nearly invisible and easily missed period.
BASIC (Beginners All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code) made two big advances: first, it attempted to span both engineering and business computing (doing each with the same degree of imprecision); second and more important, it introduced the concept of using an interpreter rather than a compiler. Good stuff, that. Yet another baby step toward tomorrow's virtual machines. Most noteworthy program ever written in Basic: Eliza. Most significant long term contribution: the reaction to its spaghetti coding style, from which Pascal and modern procedure based programming arose.
</drivel>
It is hard for some of us graybeards to poke fun at Backus. His vision was the inspiration that has taken us all down this road.
As are additional indexes in an ISAM database, that clearly fit the description of this patent, with no argument at all. Using external indexes in RDBMSs goes back to the late 1970s, and is almost certainly based on techniques that predated relational database implementations.
*WHY* in hell would someone want to have their site excluded from search engines, and archive.org?
I can think of a broad category of web usages where it would be beneficial to block offsite archives and caches. I can't think of any reason to block search engine spiders from public parts of websites.
Here is the prototypical example: A politician who wants to be able to publicly support a view that is currently highly popular, while being able to remove all traces of that support if it might become a political liability in his future.
Here is the broader case (that more people are likely to be sympathetic to): A young adult whose views have changed radically as they matured may very much want there to be no permanent record of views they published when they were 15 years old.
By extension, any person or organization that wants to be able to rewrite the history of their opinions would want to be able to do this.
There is also a strong technical case for websites serving dynamic content that might change as new information comes in. If you are publishing economic statistics, you want your website to reflect the latest revised statistics for the previous quarter as those revisions are made, and you would not want 3rd party caches or archives to be publishing stale stats under your name.
Note that I'm talking only of excluding archives and 3rd party caches. I cannot see any reason to publish openly on the web yet want to exclude search engine spiders.
There are mechanisms for doing this kind of thing now: they require some web expertise and some forethought. That suggests that these are available for the technical websites, but are not really available to the 15 year old who is spouting off without thinking. And for the same reason they are not really available to that subgroup of aspiring politicians who develop their platforms with all the skills of a clever 15 year old kid. (Politicians who actually develop considered opinions do not need to protect their future career from their past follies.)
why the fuck didn't she use a ROBOTS.TXT file? Isn't that what it's for?
That is what robots.txt is all about, and who the hell knows why she didn't fucking use it. Maybe she was hoping for a chance to sue someone big and rich.
I hope she loses big time, with the case revolving around merit and not some obscure technicality. And I hope the loss is highly publicized. In my view, the World Wide Web was conceived as a global village bulletin board where anything posted on it was available to anyone for any purpose.
Google could not exist without collecting this information. This data is central to its business model, and key to its differentiation from other search engines. Its history of growth (of individuals choosing to use Google over similar products) validates this approach and also demonstrates that the methodology is generally accepted. The great majority of web uers see nothing wrong with the method even though concerns about it are getting a fair amount of publicity.
many aspects of the human condition are not amenable to any scientific approach. Could you list a few? I can't think of any.
Well, today is Pi Day, so let's start with that. If you can demonstrate why Pi is 3.14159... and is an irrational number, then I'd be most delighted and would very likely become a convert to your belief. If you could demonstrate a way to test whether it might be possible to construct a non-Euclidian geometry that was self-consistent and used a rational value for Pi, then that would do it for me, too. I'm not talking necessarily about building such a geometry, though that would meet the test (like, say, a Geometry of Engineers, where Pi was exactly 3 and everything still worked-- at least on paper). I'm just talking about some way of determining whether or not such a geometry could be built in this universe. Actually, I'm just talking about whether it would be possible to show that the universe could or could not contain a geometric system where Pi was rational. Or any other value than what it is.
But enough about Squaring the Circle. That became old and boring several hundred years ago. Who wants to beat their head against one of the really difficult New York Times crossword puzzles when everybody else is having so much fun with this new fangled Sudoku? Let's go play with some black holes and such, instead.
I was speaking of the universe a moment ago. What goes on outside of our shared lightcone is forever unknowable. And there are parts of your personal lightcone that I can never experience directly, and the other way around, too. But while the personal lightcone of your existence is different from mine, we are interacting with each other, and some of what we each bring to that interaction arises from experiences that are totally outside the lightcone of the other. By extrapolation, events outside the observable universe do affect the part of the universe we can know... but since they are unobservable by any of us, it will be impossible to apply the scientific method to them.
Time to wrap this up: our ability to do science stops on this side of the edge of the lightcone, this side of the event horizons, and this side of the quantum foam that is an integral part of every synapse in your brain. Yet there are things that happen on the other side of all these veils that definitely affect our world. The universe is not only larger and stranger than we percieve it to be, it is larger and stranger than we can possibly percieve, and this is not just true Out There, but it is also true in the most intimate corners of our minds.
There really is more going on around us and in us that is not amenable to the scientific approach than there are things that we can use science on. To my mind, that makes science more special, and we should indeed use it everywhere we can. It is a bright candle, but a tiny candle, and we are in a very large and dark place.
It seems to me that accepting anything on blind faith is pretty much the antithesis of science.
There needs to be a recognition that many aspects of the human condition are not amenable to any scientific approach. To deny that is to deny music and the arts, and the whole realm of imagination from which such things as hypotheses arise.
Slashdot Mirror
So to be brief about it, Vista is good for people who want to learn to do more multitasking, because the interface so easily supports jumping from one application to another, while the increased slowness of each single application encourages the user to make those jumps. You can probably easily work on three or four different projects at once, AND keep up on Slashdot, since you will no longer be able to focus all your attention on any one thing, like those cavemen of 1960s who put a man on the Moon.
Too true!
Which is why I would personally prefer that we change the global economy to predominantly graveyard shifts so I can get more quality time in the sun.
You had Cobble Stones???
Shoot, we had to make do with Fortran on Feet. And we had to hand carry our Holloriths, too. Seventeen flights of stairs from the punchcard stations to the cardreader, through waist deep snow, and uphill both ways.
Hee, hee... I remember when Crazy Dave started saving all the chad from the bitbuckets of the cardpunch machines. After about a month he had this huge bag of microconfetti, and one afternoon when the Admin had his back to us (rethreading the backup highspeed tape machine, he was), Crazy Dave dumped all that chad into the input buffer of that old woodburning computer. Sparks went flying out every which-way from the grating, and the fluepipe turned cherry red from the heat, but that's got to have been the first ever attempt at overclocking! w00t!
That afternoon Crazy Dave prolly would of solved that puzzle Fermat left behind if the a/c had been able to keep up with the overclocking. But core overheated and the itty-bitty little wires of the outer 16K frame melted, and there were suddenly 147,456 tiny little ferrous donuts rolling around the floor (those frames used 8 bit bytes with a parity bit: pretty good stuff in the day). That's when Crazy Dave and I decided that physically removing ourselves from the presence of the Admin would be a prudent alteration in our plan.
True enough.
But to re-iterate,
The main thing to remember is that there are lots of candidates to replace either of MS's only significant offerings. This kind of thing happens all the time in business, and life as we know it will continue, with or without Microsoft's current corporate structure.
I fail to see why Vista's possible failure should be seen as "apocalyptical". Ford survived the Edsel and the Pinto fiascos, IBM survived the PS2 insanity and OS/2. Big companies sometimes make big mistakes. If Vista proves to be a mistake, then if Microsoft has been managing its resources properly, it will be able to pick itself up and tag along after whoever emerges as the new market leader. Nothing particularly apocalyptic, or even catastrophic, about that. Merely a normal change from industry leader to trailing the pack, that every corporation that has any history has experienced from time to time.
If the reader thinks that a failure by Microsoft would somehow mean the collapse of cyberspace, then the reader should take a look at Unix and Ubuntu. Those two OSs bracket everything Microsoft has ever produced: one on the high end, the other on the low end. Both do what they do extremely well. If some kind of void begins to open where Microsoft products used to be, it will be filled quite rapidly from above and below. No worries there.
The only thing approaching disaster is the economic well being of people who have invested too heavily in Microsoft stock. But that would not be the fault of Vista failing to catch on. That would mostly be the fault of a management style characterized by chair-throwing, monkey-dancing, potty-mouthed threats of using lethal force against people Microsoft management doesn't like. Microsoft would probably be better off if it had a businessman at the helm.
If Vista proves to be a failure, it won't be apocalyptic, nor catastrophic, nor even particularly harmful. We'll all just continue to use Win XP until we're ready to hop over to Ubuntu and Wine, or IBM resurrects OS/2, or Apple decides to market to just plain folks instead of concentrating on the rich snobs.
So, in short, her reliance on rational thought is enough to assure that she will not be elected?
I fear that you are right. As an englishman once said, "If God wanted America to have Presidents, He would have provided candidates."
I just watched the video. It was imaginative AND original. The part that was imaginative was not original. The part that was original was not imaginative.
Paraphrase of Groucho Marx, I think
I don't see any evidence that Microsoft "gets it".
I think the suits responsible for managing the development of ASP.NET JAVA have confused "bizarre" with "bazaar", and precisely aimed for, and hit, the wrong target. This is a truly bizarre thing that MS is attempting to foist on the world.
We can expect more weirdness like this coming from Redmond. As a corporate organism, Microsoft was never endowed with very much of the higher cortical functions that are needed to work the top levels of the Maslow pyramid. It is not surprising that as it begins to die, the the small amount of high level cognition needed to maintain an integrated world view has disappeared before the lower level capabilities that allow formulation of clever word constructions has gone. We can expect different parts of Microsoft to express increasingly different world views with a confusing lack of over-all integration of vision, and with an increasing amount of openly expressed conflict between various strategies and tactics.
At worst, Microsoft is a dinosaur entering its death throes, and anybody who has teamed up with that beast needs to break harness and back away to a safe distance. At best, Microsoft is undergoing a massive mid-life crisis, and there is no telling what it will strip off and throw away, or how it will transform the portions of the old Microsoft that it will keep. Mid-life crises are damn hard on relationships. Just as the smart manager realizes that he needs to relieve an employee in mid-life crisis of any mission-crtical responsibilities, companies who have been working with Microsoft need to evaluate whether they should put more distance between themselves and Microsoft's uncertain future.
This is an unusual post for me, because I've been talking about Microsoft, yet I have managed to refrain from making any mention of its monkey dancing, chair throwing, potty-mouthed CEO.
Oops...
Just keep doing what you're doing, and have a bit of patience.
We can expect the Win XP / Office 2003 experience to go into a progressively worsening spiral of deterioration starting in 3 to 6 months. One reason is because Microsoft's large but finite resources will be increasingly devoted to Vista / Office 2007 problems as these surface. And they will surface. A strongly related reason is because it will be in Microsoft's best interest to encourage Win XP / Office 2003 users to move on, since these old versions are rapidly becoming cost centers rather than profit centers. So Redmond will have neither the resources nor the incentive to fight Win XP malware any more. It will become evident to more and more users that Win XP and Office 2003 are circling the drain.
When users who had been satisfied for years with their old Windows boxes start thinking that it might be time to pay to upgrade, then they will be receptive to the idea of maybe taking a couple of weeks to see if Ubuntu or Kubuntu might do everything they want. The key to this will be an easy dual boot installation that will allow them to explore the 'buntu without letting go of their old ways.
So start letting people know that when they start to run into problems with their current Windows, you've got an alternative they might want to look at before they shell out the big bucks for a full system upgrade.
Yes, the strategies of time sharing and line by line execution were attempts to make optimal use of very small memory. Typically the combined "OS" and resident compiler used up about 12 KB of core, leaving only 4 KB free. I think the Dartmouth computer was a big one: I think it had 2 16 KB frames in its core, so it may have had 20 KB of free space for running users' programs. But Dartmouth BASIC was designed to run on a standard single frame 16 KB minicomputer, AIR.
In contrast, the computer I learned FORTRAN on in 1972 used batch processing: the cardreading software was loaded, and read all the programs in the card hopper onto tape. Then the FORTRAN precompiler was loaded and serially read blocks from that tape, and wrote its output to a second tape. Then the FORTRAN compiler itself was loaded and did its thing, and wrote the actual executable to yet another tape. When the executable was actually run, it had the use of all but about 4 KB of core to work with: a whopping 12 KB of free memory for its exclusive use! It had to fit itself and all its variables and such into that space.
There was a huge amount of wasted CPU cycles as things were written to and read from tape. Probably around 80% wastage when our smallish student programs were run as a batch.
But when the combined size of the FORTRAN precompiler and compiler was much greater than the 16 KB of core memory most of the old minicomputers had, this is the way programming was done.
BASIC and time-sharing were major breakthrough advantages. And it turned out that the constraints of early PCs were similar enough to the constraints of a resident compiler on a minicomputer that it was possible to rewrite BASIC into a ROM based interpreter.
Yes, thanks for bringing back some of those memories... IIRC, the computer I learned FORTRAN on was an IBM 1130 that had been donated to the community college when a local manufacturer upgraded to one of the newfangled minicomputers that used transitors for core. The college's sysadmin worked a lot of interesting deals, getting additional tape drives and cardreaders, punchcard stations, and even core frames donated from other businesses that were upgrading from the technology that had been new some 8 years earlier. I got to watch (through the glass wall) when core was increased from a whopping 32 KB to an incredible 48 KB by sliding a frame about 18 inches square into a slot in a sheet metal box. That made that old computer one of the dozen most powerful computers south of Portland Oregon and north of San Francisco.
Many if not all of the US Federal agencies HAVE been doing this all along. Look back over slashdot for the last 2 - 4 weeks, and you'll see stories that several government agencies have declared moratoriums on updating to Vista. Other agencies are certainly doing the same thing, but managing their moratoriums more quietly.
I left USGOV service several years ago, but I can attest that the VA and other big agencies began actively managing update strategies as early as Win98. When Directors of VA hospitals suddenly found that their memos could not be read by the staff because they had been given the first of the fancy new computers with MS Office 97, and the staff were still using MS Office 4.3, IT departments across the country caught holy hell.
I laud the White House for issuing this directive. (This is the first time I can actually support a decision from the White House since Jan of 2001.) But it also reminds me of a wall plaque I once saw in Department Manager's office:
I must hurry and catch up with the others
for I am the Leader.
So extending Wine such that it meets the same specifications assures that any software that can be sold to the Feds will also run under Linux.
I think I like this idea.
Aw, shoot. I left out the other part of Dartmouth BASIC that was also part of its breakthrough. I only gave half the story— no wonder I've confused some people.
Dartmouth BASIC was also the first high level time-share computer language. Which is the reason why it was designed as an interpreted language: each timeslice involved loading what we would now call the state into core, compiling the current line, executing that line, and saving state to a drum storage. It had to be done this way so that multiple programs could be interleaved. We're talking about teletype I/O at something like 100 baud or less, and tape storage systems of comparable slowness, so just about everything was I/O bound. Under these conditions, time-sharing made a heck of a lot of sense, but FORTRAN and COBOL both needed to be extensively reworked to allow it. BASIC was a proof of concept as much as anything else.
The line-at-a-time compilation gave Dartmouth BASIC the classic qualities of an interpreted language: a program would run until it encountered a fatal error; error reporting was very poor compared to that available from a FORTRAN or COBOL compiler; there was no optimization; it was difficult to impossible to write recursive routines; etc.
Later, by around 1980, "interpreted" began to mean burning a library of routines into ROM when the computer was built, then at run time, tokenizing each line of BASIC and using the tokens as accesses to the ROM routines. It was sort of an elegant kludge to get around the limitations of 32 or 48 KB ram and cassette tape storage. That was in a day where we'd do all kinds of weird things, like POKEing ML routines into the keyboard buffer to take advantage of its reusable 0.25 KB ram...
I agree with parent.
I also want to point out that the automotive industry went through a similar period about 35 years ago, when new cars were required to have pre-installed seat belts. It is now generally accepted that seatbelts, airbags, and less visible things like collapsing steering columns and controlled crumpling are GOOD THINGS TO HAVE IN A CAR. But at the time these were introduced, the sometimes strong argument against them was that none of these things were necessary for a well trained driver. Whatever your opinion about that, the truth of that time was that driving had become a necessary daily activity for a lot of people who had no real desire to do the training: they just wanted to get the kids to the soccer game; do the shopping; get to and from work without having to sit among the coughers and hackers in a germbox (bus)...
Computing is at this same place now. The number of people who have to use a computer to get things done, but who have zero interest in the computers themselves, now far outnumbers the number who are willing to do any training.
It is time to use some legal enforcement to make the network environment safe for the computing public. I think this could be done by applying existing laws regarding reckless endangerment, indiscriminate distribution of attractive nuisances, and so forth to the software industry.
Where is Ralph Nader when we need him? Preparing to run for President again?
I wonder if passing new laws would be necessary? Maybe we already have laws that could be used to get us to the goal of a reasonably safe internet:
Most municipalities have ordinances against "attractive nuisances", and I think the case could be made that Windows is an attractive nuisance and the owner of Windows software (not the licensee, but the actual owner) could be fined for each day of violation until he brings his property into compliance with generally accepted community standards and makes it reasonably safe against becoming zombified.
There are also laws on the books in most jurisdictions regarding reckless endangerment (of 3rd party personal property or safety) that could be brought to bear. Someone who has a habit of leaving their keys in their car in a neighborhood of unruly preteens is recklessly endangering the general public by inviting some 10 year old who would be a menace on the road to steal the car. A company that markets fast motorized scooters to little kids to race up and down the sidewalks is recklessly endangering the general public. Perhaps a company that sells an OS to noobies that isn't safe until someone with a few years of experience configures it, loads appropriate antimalware packages, and configures those, is recklessly endangering all other computer users in the community.
There isn't a need to wait until someone gets hurt; these laws are intended to be used proactively to encourage reckless people and companies from engaging in bad habits.
Maybe all that is needed is the recognition that computing is no longer an esoteric activity, but has now become a necessary part of everybody's daily life. And that the laws we already have in place to protect us in our daily activities now need to applied to this part of our lives.
Beg to differ, but Dartmouth's original BASIC was designed to be an "interpreted" language, in the way that term was used at the time. There was no separate compile stage and IIRC (I was but a high schooler at the time) the teletype would chatter through output until it hit a line that didn't parse, then deliver the heartbreaking ERROR LINE 120: GOTO WITHOUT TARGET (or something like that).
The breakthrough with Dartmouth BASIC was being able to interact with it directly through the teletype terminals, rather than dealing with stacks of punchcards.
It wouldn't surprise me if there were compiled Basics back in the late 1960s. It is an easy language to develop a compiler for, and places that had few or no teletype terminals would have been looking for a compiled version.
But the original Dartmouth BASIC was definitely interactive and interpreted line by line.
It mostly means that I have recently re-read Girl Genius from start to current page, which is temporarily mind-warping. Possibly permanently so.
As with other work in the steampunk genre, persons with a damaged or congenitally lacking sense of humor should avoid looking at this online comic. Persons who are prone to spewing coffee, milk, or other beverages from their nasal passages onto their keyboards and monitors should avoid drinking while clicking from page to page. Do not read this comic while landing a Boeing 747 in manual mode. Do not read this comic while driving. Do not think about any of the scenes in this comic during your marriage ceremony, or during anyone else's funeral. Steampunk has been associated with psychotic breaks and states of episodic manic euphoria, and also with the District of Columbia. Discontinue use if you ever see more than one blimp or dirigible in the sky at the same time. Consult your doctor or mechanic if you begin to see steam powered robots, or pocketwatch wind-up robots, or persons of strange color, odd hats, and many pointed teeth.
FORTRAN was the first working high level compiler language; BASIC was the first working interpreter language. Very different underlying structures.
Now COBOL was the second major high level compiler language, and it was very much a reaction to FORTRAN, so I suppose using parent post's logic, we can blame Backus for COBOL. But then that cheapens the contributions of the Girl Admiral (Grace Hopper) who gave us such wonders as the nanosecond wire, and MULTIPLY 2 BY 2 GIVING FOUR.
For the youngsters out there:
</drivel>
It is hard for some of us graybeards to poke fun at Backus. His vision was the inspiration that has taken us all down this road.
As are additional indexes in an ISAM database, that clearly fit the description of this patent, with no argument at all. Using external indexes in RDBMSs goes back to the late 1970s, and is almost certainly based on techniques that predated relational database implementations.
There is no enforcement. But the desire to avoid lawsuits is a good inducement to comply with robots.txt directives.
I can think of a broad category of web usages where it would be beneficial to block offsite archives and caches. I can't think of any reason to block search engine spiders from public parts of websites.
Here is the prototypical example: A politician who wants to be able to publicly support a view that is currently highly popular, while being able to remove all traces of that support if it might become a political liability in his future.
Here is the broader case (that more people are likely to be sympathetic to): A young adult whose views have changed radically as they matured may very much want there to be no permanent record of views they published when they were 15 years old.
By extension, any person or organization that wants to be able to rewrite the history of their opinions would want to be able to do this.
There is also a strong technical case for websites serving dynamic content that might change as new information comes in. If you are publishing economic statistics, you want your website to reflect the latest revised statistics for the previous quarter as those revisions are made, and you would not want 3rd party caches or archives to be publishing stale stats under your name.
Note that I'm talking only of excluding archives and 3rd party caches. I cannot see any reason to publish openly on the web yet want to exclude search engine spiders.
There are mechanisms for doing this kind of thing now: they require some web expertise and some forethought. That suggests that these are available for the technical websites, but are not really available to the 15 year old who is spouting off without thinking. And for the same reason they are not really available to that subgroup of aspiring politicians who develop their platforms with all the skills of a clever 15 year old kid. (Politicians who actually develop considered opinions do not need to protect their future career from their past follies.)
why the fuck didn't she use a ROBOTS.TXT file? Isn't that what it's for?That is what robots.txt is all about, and who the hell knows why she didn't fucking use it. Maybe she was hoping for a chance to sue someone big and rich.
I hope she loses big time, with the case revolving around merit and not some obscure technicality. And I hope the loss is highly publicized. In my view, the World Wide Web was conceived as a global village bulletin board where anything posted on it was available to anyone for any purpose.
Google could not exist without collecting this information. This data is central to its business model, and key to its differentiation from other search engines. Its history of growth (of individuals choosing to use Google over similar products) validates this approach and also demonstrates that the methodology is generally accepted. The great majority of web uers see nothing wrong with the method even though concerns about it are getting a fair amount of publicity.
Mod parent up for funny and for insightful!
(E'en tho 'twere but a flash of insight...)
Well, today is Pi Day, so let's start with that. If you can demonstrate why Pi is 3.14159... and is an irrational number, then I'd be most delighted and would very likely become a convert to your belief. If you could demonstrate a way to test whether it might be possible to construct a non-Euclidian geometry that was self-consistent and used a rational value for Pi, then that would do it for me, too. I'm not talking necessarily about building such a geometry, though that would meet the test (like, say, a Geometry of Engineers, where Pi was exactly 3 and everything still worked-- at least on paper). I'm just talking about some way of determining whether or not such a geometry could be built in this universe. Actually, I'm just talking about whether it would be possible to show that the universe could or could not contain a geometric system where Pi was rational. Or any other value than what it is.
But enough about Squaring the Circle. That became old and boring several hundred years ago. Who wants to beat their head against one of the really difficult New York Times crossword puzzles when everybody else is having so much fun with this new fangled Sudoku? Let's go play with some black holes and such, instead.
I was speaking of the universe a moment ago. What goes on outside of our shared lightcone is forever unknowable. And there are parts of your personal lightcone that I can never experience directly, and the other way around, too. But while the personal lightcone of your existence is different from mine, we are interacting with each other, and some of what we each bring to that interaction arises from experiences that are totally outside the lightcone of the other. By extrapolation, events outside the observable universe do affect the part of the universe we can know... but since they are unobservable by any of us, it will be impossible to apply the scientific method to them.
Time to wrap this up: our ability to do science stops on this side of the edge of the lightcone, this side of the event horizons, and this side of the quantum foam that is an integral part of every synapse in your brain. Yet there are things that happen on the other side of all these veils that definitely affect our world. The universe is not only larger and stranger than we percieve it to be, it is larger and stranger than we can possibly percieve, and this is not just true Out There, but it is also true in the most intimate corners of our minds.
There really is more going on around us and in us that is not amenable to the scientific approach than there are things that we can use science on. To my mind, that makes science more special, and we should indeed use it everywhere we can. It is a bright candle, but a tiny candle, and we are in a very large and dark place.
There needs to be a recognition that many aspects of the human condition are not amenable to any scientific approach. To deny that is to deny music and the arts, and the whole realm of imagination from which such things as hypotheses arise.