Can they still be considered an American company? If MIT outsourced its football team (they do need to), would that team still be considered an MIT football team?
is an IQ tester before you can drive the car. Something like those sobriety testers. Sample question "Driving faster is safer. True|False?".
Scariest ride in my life was in a taxi going down Broadway in NYC. After mentioning that he hadn't slept in 48 hrs, driver says that when you drive faster than everyone else you don't have to look when changing lanes. No wait! The scariest ride was in the army hitching a ride on the mail truck back to the field. The driver was a speed freak (methamphetamine) who called himself "Kowalski" and was always trying to beat his personal best time. I had seen the movie Vanishing Point. Now, I was in it!
I've been thinking of creating some sort of virtual post-it that I can stick over the annoying animations. That takes care of the problem with plug-in specific blocking and that is it is plug-in specific. Plus some sites put their animation in javascript and make the whole site unnavigable unless javascript is enabled.
Filing completely groundless lawsuits is an excellent way of getting rich. All you have to have is a complete lack of morals and common decency. But you already know that. You're a lawyer.
This is not that producer/consumer with circular buffer that compsci profs are inordinately fond of using? That just screws up more people. They're always wandering into c.p.t. asking for help. It's usually too late by that time. They are hopelessly confused beyond redemption.
Well, you could use patent 4,809,168 which AFAIK is in the public domain unless IBM convinced the Patent Office to allow IBM to retroactively pay the the maintenance fees. It's the patent referenced as HOS89 in this RCU performance paper. But I'd ask IBM for permission first because, one, Paul McKenney was gracious enough to cite that patent, and, two, because it doesn't hurt to ask the don for permission and show a little respect.
coming out this spring or summer. You can see a picture of it here. Nothing about it at victorinox.com which is pretty lame for info on their own products. Nothing on swissarmy.com even though they have the the SwissTool Spirit in a printed brochure. The nice thing about SwissTool is the bit tool. The attached tools in a multi-tool are pretty much useless as far as I am concerned due to the awkwardness of using them. The bit tool, which uses standard 6mm or 1/4" bits, pretty much solves that. The redesigned bit tool for the Spirit not only looks like it could take more torque on the right angle socket but you could use a short bit of hex stock to make it a T handled socket tool. Sweet.
Well, according the article, they're in the process of figuring out who owes use tax. They're starting on people who buy cigarettes over the internet with the help of shipping companies. See this additional article. The shipping companies can give them info by vendor and value of shipment. No reason they can't go after everybody, not just people buying cigarettes.
In my admittedly non-legal opinion, just because a certain OS technique was discovered and perfected on a UNIX-derived platform, that shouldn't mean that IBM loses the right to bring the same technology to any other platform they're interested in.
That part of what the lawsuit is about, what the contractual meaning of "derivative work" is. Except one of the techniques, RCU, was actually first developed on a mainframe operating system, VM/XA in the mid 80's. I've pointed this out before on Slashdot. What's really spooky is that the VM/XA functions are virtually identical to the independently redeveloped Linux RCU functions. HCPMPDFR was to schedule an asynchronous piece of work after every processor has gone through a checkpoint at least once. The Linux function is call_rcu() and uses the term quiesce state instead of checkpoint. HCPMPDLY was to delay a thread of execution until every processor has gone through a check point at least once. The Linux function for this is synchronize_kernel(). The mainframe patent is 4,809,168. The Sequent/IBM RCU patents are 5,442,758, 5,608,893, and 6,219,690. I'm writing authoritatively here as I was the original developer of the VM/XA code and one of the inventors on the mainframe patent.
I'm not sure why IBM doesn't have the RCU claim knocked off the lawsuit since it is clearly not a Unix method. It could be it's not worth the effort since they still have to deal with JFS, NUMA, and SMP kernel stuff in the suit. It's also possible that IBM doesn't want to diminish the value of their RCU patents since the mainframe patent was allowed to expire and is in the public domain AFAIK. McKenney and Slingwine know about the mainframe prior art since I've informed them of it a while back. I will say that they were remarkably gracious and good sported about it. Also, I have to commend them on their publicizing and promotion of RCU without which we wouldn't be discussing it now.
And what bugs me is that despite all this publicity that RCU has gotten, when I mention it while looking for programming work, no one has a clue what it is and thinks I am babbling total nonsense. Which it probably is. It certainly doesn't help in finding work.
The PC places will charge you about a dollar for a few screws of questionable quality. You are better off going places that specialize in them and buy in quantities of about a hundred. It doesn't cost that much more and you will always have spares.
Try here, here, or here. Also here for torx screws as well as regular machine screws if you can figure out how to navigate the site. Has every type, size and style imaginable. You can even get black oxide coated for your black cases. A little patience with this guy, he's not the fastest shipper there is. And Ebay of course.
For hard drives you want 6-32 screws. I recomment getting them in 3/16", 1/4", and 5/16" lengths so you can deal with any mounting situation without having the the screw too short or too long to screw in without hitting the drive's pc board. Case screws are 6-32 except Lian Li cases which take M3-6 (metric, 3mm dia. 0.5 thread pitch, 6mm long). Floppy drives and CD/DVD drives take M3-6 also. Basically these two sizes will take care of everything though you might find the odd disk enclosures taking 4-40 screws which might look like M3-6 if you aren't familiar with them so be careful. You don't want to cross thread some expensive piece of hardware. Fans will take a 8-32 screw and nut, or a 10-32 thread cutting screw if you don't want to use those cheap fan screws the pc places sell.
There are different styles of screw heads. Hex flanged w/ phillips which is the case screw most of you are familiar with. Other head styles are button head which is rounded, pan head which is wider, and truss head which is even wider. Truss head screws look nicer and the wider head deals with mounting slot opening better. There are other styles as well. Check the sites I listed for illustrations of styles.
There are different drive types. There's slotted which is the worst since it's easy for the screw driver to slip out and jab some other component in you pc. Phillips which is a cross tip, tends to cam out at high torques but you shouldn't be using high torque on anything in a pc. Hex which is hex shaped naturally. Socket which takes a hex (allen) wrench. And torx which is hexalobular (that's what the ISO standard calls it). Torx has the best feel for torque control which lets you snug up those screws without over torquing them. Plus it looks cool.
Typecasting is pretty horrific. I've been trying for 10 years to get out of sysadmin back into software development. The sysadmin job was just supposed to be temporary to learn unix. When you point out to a prospective employer that you used to work as a developer on a multi-processing kernel, they look at you as if you were speaking Martian because that wasn't your last job.
One is the fatigue factor. If you are sleep deprived, you just cannot concentrate enough to effectively solve the problem. More experienced programmers recognise this and just take a break at that point.
Another is the learning/forming memories problem which has been discussed here before. 8 hours seems to be the magic number here.
The last is the most interesting. It's where those solutions come from. What part of the mind is involved. It's not the logical train of thought part of the mind, and it does not communicate verbally. It's rather subtle and where the idle/sleep part comes in. If you're in deep concentration you may miss that flash of intuition. But you need that intense concentration up front to communicate the problem to that non-linear part of your mind as far as I can tell. You don't get so many intuitive flashes for problems you don't obsess on.
The other interesting thing is since that communication from the non-linear part is non-verbal, the solution may be misinterpreted. Or it could be it was just wrong, it's hard to tell the difference. This has happend to me at least once, got it completely backwards. I find it helps to apply formal methods to your idea to sanity check it. A form of error correction I guess. It will also help you understand it later on when your intuitive hunch wears off and you revisit the idea and have no idea what you were thinking of when you had it.
I imagine that stores would already know what rfid's they had in inventory. So, it's not clear why they would need a EPC root server or who actually would be using this service. I'm more worried about the stores forgetting what they have in inventory vs. what they sold, given how good companies are at correctly maintaining databases and backing them up. Could make for some interesting store exit scenes. Make sure that you have all your receipts for everything that you are wearing.
Threads using hyperthreading or SMT share the cache. This can be a problem if the threads are from different processes and not sharing memory. Your cache is effectively halved (with 2 hyperthreads). On the other hand, it could be a real benefit if your threads were from the same process sharing the same memory. You don't have the cache thrashing which could occur on a multi-cpu system. Since cache hits can really kill performance, this could be quite a performance boost.
To really exploit this, you'd need gang scheduling in the operating system. But it's unlikely that SMT would remain around long enough for any efforts to exploit it to be feasible. CMP with separate cache would likely take over before then since it would behave more like separate cpu's from a performance standpoint and thus offer more consistent behavior.
A lot of places are going to "No Return" policies, even if the unit is DOA, as a way of keeping their overhead down. You're stuck with the original mfgr's or distributer's warranty and the hassle of dealing with that. Unless of course you want to pay for one of those overpriced "extended" warranties.
Because of the expense and time lost of shipping the return, and inconvenience of doing without a dvd player for a while, the cheaper players look more attractive.
See this recent article. Also, a lot of local and state goverments are looking into getting prescription drugs offshore. I wouldn't be suprised if they start looking at moving major medical offshore also.
There isn't too much that cannot be moved offshore. My last job was all remote sysadmin. So, if you're one of those types who thinks that their job is secure because somebody has to be there to take care of the hardware, think again.
Actually more like 16, and then switched to sysadmin (which was supposed to be temporary dammit! WTF is it with the only last job counts as far as skills go). Most progammers have no idea what is involved in system support. It's a major pain, which is why I've been trying to get back into development. Trying to explain to a user why something isn't as simple as when they just fool with their own machine is equivalent to a programmer trying to explain to a non-programmer why a quick and dirty script isn't generally applicable. You have to do error checking, make sure it applies generally not just specific cases, and is thoroughly tested. Same thing with system administration. You have to figure out how to make something work for all users, and above all else test the hell out of it before rolling out the change. Last bit is important because unlike programmers, sysadmin customers know who you are and how to find you if something goes wrong.
And yeah, there are BOFHs. Even sysadmin run into them themselves if the organization is large enough.
I should have mentioned on my other post that, AFAIK, all "non PATA" CD/DVD drives use bridge chips/boards for USB2, Firewire, and SCSI. So, again, you can get your own bridge board and provide your own solution. You can try here for a selection that might suit your needs. They even have USB/Firewire combo and Firewire2 (1394b) bridgeboards. I got my Oxford 911 chip based firewire bride for an external case w/ mobile rack for hot pluggable hard drives. SATA is supposed to be hot pluggable but I have concerns about the SATA connector duty cycle rating. It seems to be a little low to be using it for removable drives.
I don't think there's enough of a market to justify making them from the OEM's perspective. When they do, they will probably just tack on a bridge chip which is what some of the hard drive OEMs are doing. You can get a SATA/PATA bridge board now for about $20~$25 which will be less than the premium charged by the drive makers when they eventually do come out with them. If you do that, make sure the SATA/PATA bridge chip supports ATAPI as some of the early bridge chips only supported SATA for hard drives. The Silicon Image SiI 3611 supports ATAPI. Make sure your SATA controller also supports ATAPI, same issue there.
Addonics makes such a bridge board here. Note their comment about compatibility. Also, AMS makes two styles here that use the 3611 chip according to their data sheets.
I noticed on my last telephone bill they stopped charging for touch tone. That was a boondoggle. If you didn't have touch tone they had to have special hardware to convert pulse dialing to touch tones.
Skipping commercials is nothing new. What's new is that suddenly the advertizers "noticed" that commercials weren't always being viewed. To fix this "problem" the following will have to occur during commercials: disabling fast forward/skip on DVRs, disabling the remote control, locking the doors on bathrooms and refrigerators, etc...
What's actually changing is that advertizers are becoming aware of the impact of technology. Their initial reaction is negative but will become positive when they realize the control it will give them, particularly interactive TV. You will have to have viewed the commercial in order to supply the correct prompts to view the rest of the program. Welcome to the future. Welcome to hell.
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Can they still be considered an American company? If MIT outsourced its football team (they do need to), would that team still be considered an MIT football team?
Scariest ride in my life was in a taxi going down Broadway in NYC. After mentioning that he hadn't slept in 48 hrs, driver says that when you drive faster than everyone else you don't have to look when changing lanes. No wait! The scariest ride was in the army hitching a ride on the mail truck back to the field. The driver was a speed freak (methamphetamine) who called himself "Kowalski" and was always trying to beat his personal best time. I had seen the movie Vanishing Point. Now, I was in it!
You insensitive clod! I live in Massachusetts.
I've been thinking of creating some sort of virtual post-it that I can stick over the annoying animations. That takes care of the problem with plug-in specific blocking and that is it is plug-in specific. Plus some sites put their animation in javascript and make the whole site unnavigable unless javascript is enabled.
Filing completely groundless lawsuits is an excellent way of getting rich. All you have to have is a complete lack of morals and common decency. But you already know that. You're a lawyer.
This is not that producer/consumer with circular buffer that compsci profs are inordinately fond of using? That just screws up more people. They're always wandering into c.p.t. asking for help. It's usually too late by that time. They are hopelessly confused beyond redemption.
Well, you could use patent 4,809,168 which AFAIK is in the public domain unless IBM convinced the Patent Office to allow IBM to retroactively pay the the maintenance fees. It's the patent referenced as HOS89 in this RCU performance paper. But I'd ask IBM for permission first because, one, Paul McKenney was gracious enough to cite that patent, and, two, because it doesn't hurt to ask the don for permission and show a little respect.
coming out this spring or summer. You can see a picture of it here. Nothing about it at victorinox.com which is pretty lame for info on their own products. Nothing on swissarmy.com even though they have the the SwissTool Spirit in a printed brochure. The nice thing about SwissTool is the bit tool. The attached tools in a multi-tool are pretty much useless as far as I am concerned due to the awkwardness of using them. The bit tool, which uses standard 6mm or 1/4" bits, pretty much solves that. The redesigned bit tool for the Spirit not only looks like it could take more torque on the right angle socket but you could use a short bit of hex stock to make it a T handled socket tool. Sweet.
Well, according the article, they're in the process of figuring out who owes use tax. They're starting on people who buy cigarettes over the internet with the help of shipping companies. See this additional article. The shipping companies can give them info by vendor and value of shipment. No reason they can't go after everybody, not just people buying cigarettes.
Edwin Black even reviews his own book. What a talented guy.
In my admittedly non-legal opinion, just because a certain OS technique was discovered and perfected on a UNIX-derived platform, that shouldn't mean that IBM loses the right to bring the same technology to any other platform they're interested in.
That part of what the lawsuit is about, what the contractual meaning of "derivative work" is. Except one of the techniques, RCU, was actually first developed on a mainframe operating system, VM/XA in the mid 80's. I've pointed this out before on Slashdot. What's really spooky is that the VM/XA functions are virtually identical to the independently redeveloped Linux RCU functions. HCPMPDFR was to schedule an asynchronous piece
of work after every processor has gone through a checkpoint at least once. The Linux function is call_rcu() and uses the term quiesce state instead of checkpoint. HCPMPDLY was to delay a thread of execution until every processor has gone through a check point at least once. The Linux function for this is synchronize_kernel(). The mainframe patent is 4,809,168. The Sequent/IBM RCU patents are 5,442,758, 5,608,893, and 6,219,690. I'm writing authoritatively here as I was the original developer of the VM/XA code and one of the inventors on the mainframe patent.
I'm not sure why IBM doesn't have the RCU claim knocked off the lawsuit since it is clearly not a Unix method. It could be it's not worth the effort since they still have to deal with JFS, NUMA, and SMP kernel stuff in the suit. It's also possible that IBM doesn't want to diminish the value of their RCU patents since the mainframe patent was allowed to expire and is in the public domain AFAIK. McKenney and Slingwine know about the
mainframe prior art since I've informed them of it a while back. I will say that they were remarkably gracious and good sported about it. Also, I have to commend them on their publicizing and promotion of RCU without which we wouldn't be discussing it now.
And what bugs me is that despite all this publicity that RCU has gotten, when I mention it while looking for programming work, no one has a clue what it is and thinks I am babbling total nonsense. Which it probably is. It certainly doesn't help in finding work.
They just show up somewhere else in the supply chain. Thanks to the grey market this stuff will be around for years.
Try here, here, or here. Also here for torx screws as well as regular machine screws if you can figure out how to navigate the site. Has every type, size and style imaginable. You can even get black oxide coated for your black cases. A little patience with this guy, he's not the fastest shipper there is. And Ebay of course.
For hard drives you want 6-32 screws. I recomment getting them in 3/16", 1/4", and 5/16" lengths so you can deal with any mounting situation without having the the screw too short or too long to screw in without hitting the drive's pc board. Case screws are 6-32 except Lian Li cases which take M3-6 (metric, 3mm dia. 0.5 thread pitch, 6mm long). Floppy drives and CD/DVD drives take M3-6 also. Basically these two sizes will take care of everything though you might find the odd disk enclosures taking 4-40 screws which might look like M3-6 if you aren't familiar with them so be careful. You don't want to cross thread some expensive piece of hardware. Fans will take a 8-32 screw and nut, or a 10-32 thread cutting screw if you don't want to use those cheap fan screws the pc places sell.
There are different styles of screw heads. Hex flanged w/ phillips which is the case screw most of you are familiar with. Other head styles are button head which is rounded, pan head which is wider, and truss head which is even wider. Truss head screws look nicer and the wider head deals with mounting slot opening better. There are other styles as well. Check the sites I listed for illustrations of styles.
There are different drive types. There's slotted which is the worst since it's easy for the screw driver to slip out and jab some other component in you pc. Phillips which is a cross tip, tends to cam out at high torques but you shouldn't be using high torque on anything in a pc. Hex which is hex shaped naturally. Socket which takes a hex (allen) wrench. And torx which is hexalobular (that's what the ISO standard calls it). Torx has the best feel for torque control which lets you snug up those screws without over torquing them. Plus it looks cool.
Typecasting is pretty horrific. I've been trying for 10 years to get out of sysadmin back into software development. The sysadmin job was just supposed to be temporary to learn unix. When you point out to a prospective employer that you used to work as a developer on a multi-processing kernel, they look at you as if you were speaking Martian because that wasn't your last job.
Another is the learning/forming memories problem which has been discussed here before. 8 hours seems to be the magic number here.
The last is the most interesting. It's where those solutions come from. What part of the mind is involved. It's not the logical train of thought part of the mind, and it does not communicate verbally. It's rather subtle and where the idle/sleep part comes in. If you're in deep concentration you may miss that flash of intuition. But you need that intense concentration up front to communicate the problem to that non-linear part of your mind as far as I can tell. You don't get so many intuitive flashes for problems you don't obsess on.
The other interesting thing is since that communication from the non-linear part is non-verbal, the solution may be misinterpreted. Or it could be it was just wrong, it's hard to tell the difference. This has happend to me at least once, got it completely backwards. I find it helps to apply formal methods to your idea to sanity check it. A form of error correction I guess. It will also help you understand it later on when your intuitive hunch wears off and you revisit the idea and have no idea what you were thinking of when you had it.
I imagine that stores would already know what rfid's they had in inventory. So, it's not clear why they would need a EPC root server or who actually would be using this service. I'm more worried about the stores forgetting what they have in inventory vs. what they sold, given how good companies are at correctly maintaining databases and backing them up. Could make for some interesting store exit scenes. Make sure that you have all your receipts for everything that you are wearing.
To really exploit this, you'd need gang scheduling in the operating system. But it's unlikely that SMT would remain around long enough for any efforts to exploit it to be feasible. CMP with separate cache would likely take over before then since it would behave more like separate cpu's from a performance standpoint and thus offer more consistent behavior.
Because of the expense and time lost of shipping the return, and inconvenience of doing without a dvd player for a while, the cheaper players look more attractive.
There isn't too much that cannot be moved offshore. My last job was all remote sysadmin. So, if you're one of those types who thinks that their job is secure because somebody has to be there to take care of the hardware, think again.
Actually, don't do either. Some of those colored inks are quite toxic.
And yeah, there are BOFHs. Even sysadmin run into them themselves if the organization is large enough.
I should have mentioned on my other post that, AFAIK, all "non PATA" CD/DVD drives use bridge chips/boards for USB2, Firewire, and SCSI. So, again, you can get your own bridge board and provide your own solution. You can try here for a selection that might suit your needs. They even have USB/Firewire combo and Firewire2 (1394b) bridgeboards. I got my Oxford 911 chip based firewire bride for an external case w/ mobile rack for hot pluggable hard drives. SATA is supposed to be hot pluggable but I have concerns about the SATA connector duty cycle rating. It seems to be a little low to be using it for removable drives.
Addonics makes such a bridge board here. Note their comment about compatibility. Also, AMS makes two styles here that use the 3611 chip according to their data sheets.
I noticed on my last telephone bill they stopped charging for touch tone. That was a boondoggle. If you didn't have touch tone they had to have special hardware to convert pulse dialing to touch tones.
What's actually changing is that advertizers are becoming aware of the impact of technology. Their initial reaction is negative but will become positive when they realize the control it will give them, particularly interactive TV. You will have to have viewed the commercial in order to supply the correct prompts to view the rest of the program. Welcome to the future. Welcome to hell.