In the old days (1970s, 1980s and maybe 90s), HP -- that's the real pre-Carly HP -- had a publication called HP Digest. This had a column showing hough tough HP kit was. People would send in stories/photos about how they had backed a truck over their spectum analyzer or an oscilloscope getting burnt in a fire etc etc. Tough kit!
Flipping, charring, till operating, cleaning and eating the shit from customers while keeping a smile on your face. All jobs require multiple skills.
Silly whining poster probably just got out of college and is used to mommy and daddy telling him he's the greatest. Now in the real world he's just another bottom-of-the-pile programmer. Life: get one!
Having been involved in the design of robotic control systems using both accelerometers and gyros, I can tell you a difference. An accelerometer can only measure acceleration. An accelerometer cannot tell the difference between a tilt and other accelerations. Think of the acceleration you feel that pushes you back into your car seat: you can't tell if thats due to the car accelerating or tilting (going up hill). A gyro, on the other hand, is immune to accelerations. A gyro tells you the attitude of the device. Generally you'd use both gyros and accelerometers together to give both attitude and acceleration info. Kalman filters are your firends. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter
Even when a technology becomes shippable it tends to take quite a while for it to catch on. It is easy to make small lab batches, but reliable low-cost high-volume production takes a lot longer. NAND flash was invented in 1988 but only really got going in around 2003 - 15 years later.
You mean like a big company like MS? Just imagine Windows Roads. After 5 years heavy work they close Road XP and open up a new freeway called Road Vista. Road Vista has many more holes in it. Road Vista has a very rough surface and needs twice the engine power to get the same speed. Changing lanes sometimes takes 27 minutes for no reason at all. All drivers need to be recertified to run on Road Vista. You have to buy a new car because old cars won't work with Road Vista.
You can see where this is going... I think I'd rather pay tax and leave it to the state.
You've pretty much answered it yourself. For the spaces that MS plays in, or would like to play in, the actual OS kernel is becoming less and less important (though deep OS stuff is still very important for other parts of the industry). Increaingly, the kernel is hidden under some middleware or other that hides the kernel.
But.... MS have screwed up just about every attempt to diversify, even though they would love to. Gate's "visionary" keynotes of the last few years have all been about services etc that had very litle to do with MS core products (Windows and Office). Other people (Google et al) are doing a great job of realising that vision, but MS aren't.
So why are MS FUDding about the OS when it matters less and less? Well whether they like it or not, apart from Office, that's all they really have.
Google are diversifying faster, wider and with more innovation than yahoo. What new services/products/programs has yahoo introduced in the last 2 years? Anything that has the wow factor of, say, Google Earth, maps, Android?
I'd argue that you're completely right, not because those are historical but because they are current and very important to the OS designers aned computer designers of today. All CPUs(well except for some funky Forth/Java processors) still use some sort of assembler. I'd teach ARM or x86 but I would not teach PDP11 assembler. I'd teach about hard disks and flash memory, not magnetic drum drives and punch cards.
My point is that the idea that you should learn history because that tells you where you are going is bullshit contrived by historians to try pump up their value in society.
Learn how life is constructed (DNA, cells, proteins...) is valuable, finding out whether it first happened in a volcano, comet or icecube is largely irrelevant.
Nobody goes to Google to view pages. When Google is working really well, you find what you're looking for on the first page of hits and you get redirected else elsewhere. That's a big thing about Google is that its value piggy-backs on other sites and thus its value and usage don't get well represented by traffic and hits. Most people's perception of info is "I read it on Google" or "I found it on Google", when Google actually just handled the first order search and they found the info they were looking for on some other site. By comparison, yahoo does far less redirecting. On yahoo you're far more likely to read news etc while staying on yahoo.
Don't look at historical data (3 months to a year old), look at the trend since then. Yahoo is flatline and Google is on the up.
Google and yahoo are neck and neck (with google slightly ahead for the last while). That gives google 1 & 3, or 50% vs 30% if you combine youtube + google.
Sure, Google could buy Yahoo for a quick rush, but in the longer term (1-2 years) yahoo will just fade by themselves unless they do something very interesting (which they have not done in a long time).
Android is not really a seperate venture. It mainly facilitates extending their core business into mobile space so that your whole Google existance can fit in your pocket meaning more searches and uses of Google services --> more Google business.
This is very different from MS doing, say, Zune or MSN. In both the MS cases these are independent strategies that have no synergy with Windows or Office (ie. Windows and Office don't really benefit from Xbox and MSN).
Google has 4 times the search hits of yahoo and is growing. Why spend 45bn on a sinking enemy? Just wait a year or two and yahoo will be no more anyway. MS + yahoo are individually sinking in the service space and together they'll just sink faster. Sure Google must make some anti-trust grumblings, but in reality they must love the sight of their worst competitors sinking eachother.
Google can use the 45bn in far better ways by cutting into new markets & technologies (eg. Android).
Therefore all computer science students should spend a few months hammering out code on punch cards and paper tape. That will give them great insight into what computers will be like in ten years time.
so friggin what? Let's ask and answer some questions that matter **here** and **now**.
Does it really matter how life evolved 200 million or 6000 years ago (depending to which KoolAid you drink)? Answering these questions do nothing to change the important issues of today and the future. We're here so let's make the most of it.
The users of MS products are like a herd of cows standing around to be milked. Micrososfts considers these its assests, not its customers.
The only places MS actually conducts meaningful profitable business are in Office and Windows. All the other attempts to diversify (mobile, services, gaming, music) have failed and such the company. In these areas they are far from competing.
The knowledge obtained by deep space reasearch might be interesting of itself, but that's just infotainment.... pretty thin in terms of actual applicability or importance to people or this planet.
Let's face it folks: going to the moon in the 1960s was more about politics than it was about science. Had to get one over the commies. Now that the political motive is no longer there it is very hard to justify spending up on a 1960s scale space effort.
No wonder NASA still has a shuttle fleet that is 25 years old - or half as old as the whole US space effort.
"Falling behind the rest of the world". What crap!
Keeping up to date with the cutting edge is far too complicated and expensive, which is why telecom has always happened in stages. Once installed, you're pretty much stuck in a time warp until there is a huge motivation for the next big upgrade.
Take a look at the telecom in Germany. They got bombed to crap during WW2 and then installed the latest telecom during the war recovery. Pulse dial phones. Cool!. The USA big upgrade happened later (1960s/70s) and was all tone based. In the late 1980s/early 1990s computer telephony really struggled in Germany because pulse dialling is far less reliable (it's very reliable at the exchange, but not at all reliable at the listening party) but DTMF worked pretty well.
This is the reason why Kenya has better cell phone coverage than USA.
A very significant factor for the slow uptake of TCP/IP was that most early networks were slow and point-to-point (head office to branches for realtime links and uucp etc for emial). IP wrapping is relatively expensive in terms of extra bytes etc, but that wrapping gives flexibility. When you only had 1200 baud point-to-point connections then you didn't need the flexibility of IP nor the extra wrapping cost.
IP only started to shine once significant numbers of networks got interconnected.
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For modern kit, I'd put some money on The TDS Recon http://www.tdsway.com/products/recon. I have seen one thrown off a building and they keep one in a fish tank in their lobby http://www.tdsway.com/products/nomad/fish_tank2
It shocks me to the corps!
Of course it does not really matter to GNU/Linux. Don't let fact get in the way of a good story!
Silly whining poster probably just got out of college and is used to mommy and daddy telling him he's the greatest. Now in the real world he's just another bottom-of-the-pile programmer. Life: get one!
Having been involved in the design of robotic control systems using both accelerometers and gyros, I can tell you a difference.
An accelerometer can only measure acceleration. An accelerometer cannot tell the difference between a tilt and other accelerations. Think of the acceleration you feel that pushes you back into your car seat: you can't tell if thats due to the car accelerating or tilting (going up hill).
A gyro, on the other hand, is immune to accelerations. A gyro tells you the attitude of the device. Generally you'd use both gyros and accelerometers together to give both attitude and acceleration info. Kalman filters are your firends. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter
Even when a technology becomes shippable it tends to take quite a while for it to catch on. It is easy to make small lab batches, but reliable low-cost high-volume production takes a lot longer. NAND flash was invented in 1988 but only really got going in around 2003 - 15 years later.
After 5 years heavy work they close Road XP and open up a new freeway called Road Vista.
Road Vista has many more holes in it.
Road Vista has a very rough surface and needs twice the engine power to get the same speed.
Changing lanes sometimes takes 27 minutes for no reason at all.
All drivers need to be recertified to run on Road Vista.
You have to buy a new car because old cars won't work with Road Vista.
You can see where this is going... I think I'd rather pay tax and leave it to the state.
But.... MS have screwed up just about every attempt to diversify, even though they would love to. Gate's "visionary" keynotes of the last few years have all been about services etc that had very litle to do with MS core products (Windows and Office). Other people (Google et al) are doing a great job of realising that vision, but MS aren't.
So why are MS FUDding about the OS when it matters less and less? Well whether they like it or not, apart from Office, that's all they really have.
Google are diversifying faster, wider and with more innovation than yahoo. What new services/products/programs has yahoo introduced in the last 2 years? Anything that has the wow factor of, say, Google Earth, maps, Android?
Remember that statement next time you drive along a road. Where TF did that road come from?
My point is that the idea that you should learn history because that tells you where you are going is bullshit contrived by historians to try pump up their value in society.
Learn how life is constructed (DNA, cells, proteins...) is valuable, finding out whether it first happened in a volcano, comet or icecube is largely irrelevant.
Don't look at historical data (3 months to a year old), look at the trend since then. Yahoo is flatline and Google is on the up.
Google and yahoo are neck and neck (with google slightly ahead for the last while). That gives google 1 & 3, or 50% vs 30% if you combine youtube + google.
Now look at http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=YHOO&t=2y&l=on&z=m&q=l&c=GOOG
Yahoo on the way down and Google (relatively) up.
Sure, Google could buy Yahoo for a quick rush, but in the longer term (1-2 years) yahoo will just fade by themselves unless they do something very interesting (which they have not done in a long time).
This is very different from MS doing, say, Zune or MSN. In both the MS cases these are independent strategies that have no synergy with Windows or Office (ie. Windows and Office don't really benefit from Xbox and MSN).
Google can use the 45bn in far better ways by cutting into new markets & technologies (eg. Android).
To paraphrase: bullshit.
Does it really matter how life evolved 200 million or 6000 years ago (depending to which KoolAid you drink)? Answering these questions do nothing to change the important issues of today and the future. We're here so let's make the most of it.
They get a better deal than you do!
The users of MS products are like a herd of cows standing around to be milked. Micrososfts considers these its assests, not its customers.
The only places MS actually conducts meaningful profitable business are in Office and Windows. All the other attempts to diversify (mobile, services, gaming, music) have failed and such the company. In these areas they are far from competing.
they just wonder about different things. Sure, most of it is consumer bullshit and Britney-watching but it is still wonder.
Let's face it folks: going to the moon in the 1960s was more about politics than it was about science. Had to get one over the commies. Now that the political motive is no longer there it is very hard to justify spending up on a 1960s scale space effort.
No wonder NASA still has a shuttle fleet that is 25 years old - or half as old as the whole US space effort.
Keeping up to date with the cutting edge is far too complicated and expensive, which is why telecom has always happened in stages. Once installed, you're pretty much stuck in a time warp until there is a huge motivation for the next big upgrade.
Take a look at the telecom in Germany. They got bombed to crap during WW2 and then installed the latest telecom during the war recovery. Pulse dial phones. Cool!. The USA big upgrade happened later (1960s/70s) and was all tone based. In the late 1980s/early 1990s computer telephony really struggled in Germany because pulse dialling is far less reliable (it's very reliable at the exchange, but not at all reliable at the listening party) but DTMF worked pretty well.
This is the reason why Kenya has better cell phone coverage than USA.
I find I lose more than half my memory when I load Vista.
Only a mug would pay for it!
IP only started to shine once significant numbers of networks got interconnected.