Yeah, I had him for Physics 11 at El Camino in '68. Got a C in the class and was hated by the rest of the class, who got D's and F's. Guy gave out 3 A's in his life.
But for having someone split a stump with an axe on his chest while shouting "Faith in Physics!" he coudn't be beat. He was a popularist, a highly dramatic basic physics teacher. Brought in experts to discuss relativity in terms of meter sticks and clocks. A complete bastard, we loved him utterly.
The guy sounds like a national treasure, guys -- please make sure he has enough dirty cast-off hot dogs to eat* and somebody record everything he says. We have no modern counterpart to James Joyce.
*or whatever the politically correct thing to say here would be
IBM may be the new cool, but it wasn't always so, and in comparison to their early practices Microsoft has been a pale saint in the market. I remember hearing a rumour about Memorex a decade or so ago, why they filed for bankruptcy -- seems their 3rd party DASD was perceived as a threat to IBM's own monopoly-priced units. IBM identified a key component in the Memorex unit, then bought out the entire market on that component -- several years production of it, all vendors, even though they had no use for it. Memorex couldn't continue manufacturing the disks, and had to file for protection via Chapter 11. Whether or not this was true, it does show that patents aren't the only way you can abuse power in a water economy.
Please note than in an egregious attempt at covering my tail, I declare that all of the above is a patent falsehood. Besides, I live in a foreign country. Neenur neenur neenur!
Re:Statistical Lies...
on
Newsy Numbers
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Excellent book. I also recommend "Mathematics Made Difficult" by Carl Linderholm (may be out of print).
Embedded systems have their own rules. If you're running a 25-year old military aircraft and it's onboard systems fail, you might want a new model AN/YUK computer, but you wouldn't replace the software without a bloody good reason. The BGR would be a major change in system context, and the costs could well run to billions (as in "Update Orion" for you folks who remember FASOTRAGRABRUPAC). You wouldn't upgrade simply because the vendor released a new product.
In enterprise systems though, the context is rapidly shifting and the machines involved are way more general-purpose. In that context a cheap (read "free") software upgrade would make sense, as you're leveraging statistics for a set of fixes that are likely to help you in many scenarios. That's the sort of atmospheric-pressure marketing a company can use. Embedded systems aren't upgraded without the hardware context as a rule.
I don't know though -- there may be elevator engineers who download a software update everytime someone presses the ground floor button.
Um, whoops. Financial institutions do and must keep copies of email, both inbound and outbound in many instances, for 7 years. IM too. Failure to comply (whether such compliance is practical or not) can result in fines up to the $millions. I'm doing an architecture for this for a major investment bank. The rules are pretty clear, and the bank is spending big to comply. You can't be sued for what you don't keep, but you can certainly be prosecuted and fined for it.
Companies EOLing stuff after 9 - 10 years scares me
Companies refusing to EOL stuff after 10 years scares me too. I visited a firm I'd worked for long ago on a presales junket and saw they were still running a piece of code I'd written in a couple of days to shut some people up about 15 years ago. They asked me a question about its code dependencies. Brrr!
Also good news for Microsoft, they can finally pull some of those developers off that project and put them to work getting XP and Longhorn more bulletproof.
A very good point. And anyone who adds a security hole to Longhorn should be punished by forcing them to work on the patch team for IE.
Just out of curiosity, what other major software vendors are still providing security (or other) hotfixes for platforms two or three generations back? Do Oracle, SAP etc. and other major commercial vendors do the same?
Let's exclude IBM Mainframes here -- despite the hardware changes and market drift over the last few decades, it's still IEBGENR & CORGZ under the skin. And they haven't dusted the o/s since the 70's...
Microsoft has the problem, that the not even the OS group is using the OS."
Sorry, did you really mean that? Whups *Ding* Thank you for playing!
In my brief time at The Borg it was pretty clear they had to eat their own dog food. There's a lot of features they have in the OS, a lot of code to wade through. But trust or no trust, they still had to use the bloody thing they wrote.
A joke I heard when working at Apple: Q: Why did creation only take six days? A: Because there was no pre-existing software base.
If we found out about it early enough -- mind you this would need to be a couple of orbits ahead -- we could conceivably mount a mass driver of some type -- an ion engine comes to mind -- and slowly change course over time. If it was ice or some other low-temp volatile, it could possibly be ablated and the vapour moved away by managing relative charges between the ionised vapour and the orbiting body (which might be an interesting problem in itself).
If the Armed Forces wanted such a thing, they could simply subsidise the guy by getting him an assistant, Lord High Everything Else, who asked him what he needed, and got it for him -- no paperwork, no meetings, just did it and didn't bother him with questions on why he needed it or what it cost. The guy needs stuff, but he doesn't need to be organised or worry about the hassles of staff or logistics.
Read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" or "The Mythical Man-Month (Brooks)" for references.
They always have. Even very early on in the piece -- first couple years of Apple's existence -- the company would reward your existance in any way they could. Loan-to-own Apple ]['s (still have ours in the garage somewhere) - credit-card thin solar calculators with Apple branding for Christmas one year (such things were very expensive). How many old Apple folk out there still have the frosted glass with the Apple logo on the bottom? This stuff was coming out when Apple rainbow decals were already scarce treasures to the outside world. We were making history, and we bloody well knew it. It wasn't branding so much as it was a flag. Things have changed, but a few cultural memes that came out had very strong RNA codes. I'm not surprised they're still active -- the knot follows the string like it always did.
I remember Heatkit used to have a 7-foot digital grandfather clock -- full timber-ish case, 2 inch red 7 segment display. It was either that or the ADM-3A terminal kit.
I bought the dumb terminal kit, got a lot of use out of it. But in retrospect, I wish I'd bought the clock.
Slashdot Mirror
But for having someone split a stump with an axe on his chest while shouting "Faith in Physics!" he coudn't be beat. He was a popularist, a highly dramatic basic physics teacher. Brought in experts to discuss relativity in terms of meter sticks and clocks. A complete bastard, we loved him utterly.
*or whatever the politically correct thing to say here would be
Please note than in an egregious attempt at covering my tail, I declare that all of the above is a patent falsehood. Besides, I live in a foreign country. Neenur neenur neenur!
Excellent book. I also recommend "Mathematics Made Difficult" by Carl Linderholm (may be out of print).
Sorry for the misspelling ... Wiki has an article on the venerable AN/UYK-8 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AN/UYK-8
In enterprise systems though, the context is rapidly shifting and the machines involved are way more general-purpose. In that context a cheap (read "free") software upgrade would make sense, as you're leveraging statistics for a set of fixes that are likely to help you in many scenarios. That's the sort of atmospheric-pressure marketing a company can use. Embedded systems aren't upgraded without the hardware context as a rule.
I don't know though -- there may be elevator engineers who download a software update everytime someone presses the ground floor button.
If there's a conflict with the First Amendment, it could go all the way to the Supreme Court, couldn't it?
Oh, wait...
Um, whoops. Financial institutions do and must keep copies of email, both inbound and outbound in many instances, for 7 years. IM too. Failure to comply (whether such compliance is practical or not) can result in fines up to the $millions. I'm doing an architecture for this for a major investment bank. The rules are pretty clear, and the bank is spending big to comply. You can't be sued for what you don't keep, but you can certainly be prosecuted and fined for it.
Very often, it's for the same reason people bought '57 Chevy's. Larger tail fins.
Companies refusing to EOL stuff after 10 years scares me too. I visited a firm I'd worked for long ago on a presales junket and saw they were still running a piece of code I'd written in a couple of days to shut some people up about 15 years ago. They asked me a question about its code dependencies. Brrr!
A very good point. And anyone who adds a security hole to Longhorn should be punished by forcing them to work on the patch team for IE.
Let's exclude IBM Mainframes here -- despite the hardware changes and market drift over the last few decades, it's still IEBGENR & CORGZ under the skin. And they haven't dusted the o/s since the 70's...
Does it remove LOP? Please tell me it removes Lop...
Sorry, did you really mean that? Whups *Ding* Thank you for playing!
In my brief time at The Borg it was pretty clear they had to eat their own dog food. There's a lot of features they have in the OS, a lot of code to wade through. But trust or no trust, they still had to use the bloody thing they wrote.
A joke I heard when working at Apple: Q: Why did creation only take six days? A: Because there was no pre-existing software base.
Although it worked better on the Apple ///...
Scripting language? What it really needs is DCL...
If we found out about it early enough -- mind you this would need to be a couple of orbits ahead -- we could conceivably mount a mass driver of some type -- an ion engine comes to mind -- and slowly change course over time. If it was ice or some other low-temp volatile, it could possibly be ablated and the vapour moved away by managing relative charges between the ionised vapour and the orbiting body (which might be an interesting problem in itself).
Read "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" or "The Mythical Man-Month (Brooks)" for references.
Someone set up us the blog.
Damn I'm feeling old.
Geez .. maybe they could just add the information to your DNA as you walk through the door. Save the hangovers.
Hang on, didn't Einstein get his Nobel Prize for studies on Brownian motion?
I bought the dumb terminal kit, got a lot of use out of it. But in retrospect, I wish I'd bought the clock.
Yes, save all your data on DVD's. Then burn the DVD's.
...IBM.