Perhaps I have the dates wrong, but I was under the impression that Sony launched their first eInk reader in September 2006, two months after the iRex iLiad was launched (July 2006).
Or that there are more jobs than there are people to fill them. If everyone qualified already has a job, then you can offer more money/stability/whatever to fill your position, but only by poaching someone from another company. They're then in the same position as you, so there's still a skills shortage.
From the grandparent's post though, the key words are 'mid-career'. It sounds like they want another company to train people and then they'll poach them later. The problem is that lots of companies are no longer offering entry-level jobs and the ones that do are much better at retention. If you want mid-career people then you need to start training some...
Calling a politician honourable is highly oxymoronic and ironic. It makes no sense whatsoever for all definitions of honourable that I have been able to find.
In the first session of the Welsh Assembly Government, one of the members referred to another has 'my honourable colleague'. The speaker interrupted, saying 'There are no honourable members here'.
It's very unusual in the UK for a bachelors degree to be this specialised. There are some places that do a BSc in Game Design, but those subjects are a bit of a joke (ironically, many the course are typically not that bad, because they exist purely for marketing reasons and are 80% identical to the computer science degree, but with a few modules in things like 3D art). It's more common to do a BSc in a general field, like computer science or engineering and then a one-year MSc / MEng / MPhil in something a lot more specialised.
NT4 came out in 1994, but it was Microsoft's main server product until 2000. Kids who used Windows 95 in their late teens / university started to hit the job market while it was still being pushed.
If you get the kids using a platform, then you have a load of people entering the workforce who are familiar with it. It takes a lot of effort to train them to use something else. Some of those kids are going to end up making purchasing decisions. A lot of old UNIX vendors lost out to Windows NT for small business servers because the kids coming into the company that knew Windows meant that it was cheaper to use NT than train them to use UNIX. Before that, Apple's effort getting the Apple II into classrooms generated them a lot of sales to businesses later on. Don't underestimate the effects of getting kids to like your platform...
If you explain it like that, then it's far more confusing. ActiveX is a component architecture - an evolution of COM / OLE. It's used throughout Windows for embedding libraries as plugins in other applications. Pretty much every Windows application uses ActiveX, the web browser is probably among the ones that uses it the least.
The number one web browser is still Internet Explorer.
Wikipedia tells a different story. By three of their counters, Chrome has the largest market share (including 'people who visit wikimedia sites like wikipedia', which is probably quite representative), by one counter IE is the largest. Even taking the best number for IE, that still leaves it with under 60% market share. If we assume that all of the Safari users are on OS X (because, let's face it, Safari on Windows sucks beyond belief) then that means that around a third of Windows users have switched to a non-default web browser called either Chrome or Firefox. Given the inertia that prevents most people from switching, these two seem to be doing very well, yet neither Chrome nor Firefox is a name that immediately says 'web browser' to someone unfamiliar with the product (neither even has a logo that would imply it).
If you take the other statistics as being more realistic, then only about 12% of Windows users are still using IE, the rest have switched to something with a less descriptive name.
Visio, at least, is not a name that you can blame Microsoft for. It was named by Shapeware in 1992, Microsoft kept the name for the brand recognition when they bought it in 2000. And that's rather the original point: It doesn't matter that the name is stupid, it is a name that people have heard of. Lots of people have heard of XBMC and don't really know what it stands for, just that it's a media centre thing. Just go the LLVM or SRI route and keep the names, just remove the thing that they stand for. Rename the project from XBox Media Center to XBMC.
Doesn't handle unreliable networks well. I work on my laptop, which moves between home and work networks and no network at all. I can edit code using vim on remote machines when I'm attached to any network and I don't lose any state (as a result of autossh and tmux) when I'm disconnected. With sshfs, abrupt disconnections are very bad. With CODA (the AFS successor that never quite made it to production quality), I'd have been able to continue operating after disconnection and seamlessly push my changes back to the server on reconnection (CODA also tried to do merging, but I'd be happy with it just telling me that I had conflicts and giving me renamed versions of files).
Indeed. I consider it something of a failing of modern operating systems that it's easier for me to run an editor remotely in a tmux session than to export the remote filesystem to use locally. If only AFS had had a bit more effort invested in it...
Code duplication is not free either. Even if execution time is the only thing that you care about, on anything that's vaguely like a modern CPU (GPUs and microcontrollers are somewhat different), instruction cache space is the most scarce resource, with data cache the second. A function call will likely be branch predicted and in an out of order system the prolog and epilog are mostly handled by the register renaming infrastructure, so the function call is almost free, but the cost of an instruction cache miss from having too many copies of the same code is quite measurable.
The things that make vim fast are not so much the keyboard shortcuts (although the result you mention was largely debunked as it assumes unfamiliarity with the environment. More recent studies have shown that keyboard shortcuts are marginally faster when you are in the middle of text entry, but the difference is less than the thinking time required for either). It's the ability to easily script things. For example, if I'm doing the same sequence of edits in vim, I'll record a macro and then replay it a few dozen times. That is much faster than doing it without the macro and so for a GUI editor to be as fast it would have to have commands like 'skip one word to the right,' and 'delete to the end of the line' that were easily useable from its macro recording environment (remember, these are not programs that I write as code, they're just rote replay of a sequence of keyboard commands).
An aspect of Nazism managed to seep into the British Empire precisely because they were mortal enemies
I think you might have some of this the wrong way around. The British Empire had institutionalised racism and concentration camps in its colonies long before the Nazis existed.
Who whips up that fervor, the war on drugs wasn't started as a grass roots campaign, for sure, it came from the top
Most often, it's the people who either need A Cause to get elected, or want to use a particular mob cry to funnel money to businesses in their constituency and get kickbacks (sorry, campaign contributions). The old hereditary House of Lords (before they abolished most of them and stuffed the house with Labour cronies followed by Tory cronies) had the advantage that, aside from a few issues like inheritance tax and fox hunting, the members didn't really have much of a vested interest in anything. If you watched the debates, the contrast between the two houses was astonishing. The Commons was full of people trying to score points against the other party, the Lords was almost empty, but those there were having an intelligent debate on the issues in the legislation.
Really, the only way of fixing this is to have time-outs for politicians. If you propose something completely obnoxious, then you just have to go and sit in a corner and have no part in legislative discussions for the next year.
OpenVMS has run on Itanium since Itanium was launched. This isn't a port to a new OS, it's just updating the existing support for the newer chips.
The x86 port story is quite funny though. The 80386 launched with four protection rings specifically to make porting VMS from VAX easy. DEC never did the port (or, if they did, never released it publicly) and instead designed their own chip, the Alpha as the successor to the VAX. The Alpha just had two protection rings, which required a little bit of restructuring of the VMS design. Now, x86-64 has only two protection rings (unless you count HVM and SMC modes as rings), and is being considered as a porting target for VMS...
Are you really that obtuse? A marketplace that someone is saying is large is significantly smaller than a single company that sells products in that market. Your argument is equivalent to saying 'this big shop has a huge profit and sells thousands of products!' and then mocking people who point out that there are individual suppliers of single products in that shop that have an order of magnitude higher profit nationwide than the total profit from all sales in the shop.
Communications of the ACM has changed a lot over the last few years. They're trying to make it a lot more relevant and also raise the impact. This means that the Practitioners section is now managed by the team behind ACM Queue and contains stuff that people doing exciting things in industry are doing and the rest has a higher standard of peer review. The Research Highlights section often points to papers that I want to read. Most of the top-tier conferences and journals for computer science are ACM-sponsored.
The ACM is pretty good about open access. Every author can use their 'author-izer' service to create links that check the referrer but give free access to the papers, so if you can't get free access to an ACM-published paper from the author's web site, then complain to them, not to the ACM.
They do pay developers, but they pay them quite a lot less than the purchase price. The logic is that they'll get a load more downloads. That makes sense, as I've downloaded several things for free that I'd never pay for and a few that I've only run for 5-10 minutes and never touched again.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps I have the dates wrong, but I was under the impression that Sony launched their first eInk reader in September 2006, two months after the iRex iLiad was launched (July 2006).
Don't worry, they have an article for that too.
Or that there are more jobs than there are people to fill them. If everyone qualified already has a job, then you can offer more money/stability/whatever to fill your position, but only by poaching someone from another company. They're then in the same position as you, so there's still a skills shortage.
From the grandparent's post though, the key words are 'mid-career'. It sounds like they want another company to train people and then they'll poach them later. The problem is that lots of companies are no longer offering entry-level jobs and the ones that do are much better at retention. If you want mid-career people then you need to start training some...
Calling a politician honourable is highly oxymoronic and ironic. It makes no sense whatsoever for all definitions of honourable that I have been able to find.
In the first session of the Welsh Assembly Government, one of the members referred to another has 'my honourable colleague'. The speaker interrupted, saying 'There are no honourable members here'.
It's very unusual in the UK for a bachelors degree to be this specialised. There are some places that do a BSc in Game Design, but those subjects are a bit of a joke (ironically, many the course are typically not that bad, because they exist purely for marketing reasons and are 80% identical to the computer science degree, but with a few modules in things like 3D art). It's more common to do a BSc in a general field, like computer science or engineering and then a one-year MSc / MEng / MPhil in something a lot more specialised.
NT4 came out in 1994, but it was Microsoft's main server product until 2000. Kids who used Windows 95 in their late teens / university started to hit the job market while it was still being pushed.
If you get the kids using a platform, then you have a load of people entering the workforce who are familiar with it. It takes a lot of effort to train them to use something else. Some of those kids are going to end up making purchasing decisions. A lot of old UNIX vendors lost out to Windows NT for small business servers because the kids coming into the company that knew Windows meant that it was cheaper to use NT than train them to use UNIX. Before that, Apple's effort getting the Apple II into classrooms generated them a lot of sales to businesses later on. Don't underestimate the effects of getting kids to like your platform...
ActiveX becomes "Microsoft In-Browser Native Code API".
If you explain it like that, then it's far more confusing. ActiveX is a component architecture - an evolution of COM / OLE. It's used throughout Windows for embedding libraries as plugins in other applications. Pretty much every Windows application uses ActiveX, the web browser is probably among the ones that uses it the least.
The number one web browser is still Internet Explorer.
Wikipedia tells a different story. By three of their counters, Chrome has the largest market share (including 'people who visit wikimedia sites like wikipedia', which is probably quite representative), by one counter IE is the largest. Even taking the best number for IE, that still leaves it with under 60% market share. If we assume that all of the Safari users are on OS X (because, let's face it, Safari on Windows sucks beyond belief) then that means that around a third of Windows users have switched to a non-default web browser called either Chrome or Firefox. Given the inertia that prevents most people from switching, these two seem to be doing very well, yet neither Chrome nor Firefox is a name that immediately says 'web browser' to someone unfamiliar with the product (neither even has a logo that would imply it).
If you take the other statistics as being more realistic, then only about 12% of Windows users are still using IE, the rest have switched to something with a less descriptive name.
Visio, at least, is not a name that you can blame Microsoft for. It was named by Shapeware in 1992, Microsoft kept the name for the brand recognition when they bought it in 2000. And that's rather the original point: It doesn't matter that the name is stupid, it is a name that people have heard of. Lots of people have heard of XBMC and don't really know what it stands for, just that it's a media centre thing. Just go the LLVM or SRI route and keep the names, just remove the thing that they stand for. Rename the project from XBox Media Center to XBMC.
Doesn't handle unreliable networks well. I work on my laptop, which moves between home and work networks and no network at all. I can edit code using vim on remote machines when I'm attached to any network and I don't lose any state (as a result of autossh and tmux) when I'm disconnected. With sshfs, abrupt disconnections are very bad. With CODA (the AFS successor that never quite made it to production quality), I'd have been able to continue operating after disconnection and seamlessly push my changes back to the server on reconnection (CODA also tried to do merging, but I'd be happy with it just telling me that I had conflicts and giving me renamed versions of files).
Indeed. I consider it something of a failing of modern operating systems that it's easier for me to run an editor remotely in a tmux session than to export the remote filesystem to use locally. If only AFS had had a bit more effort invested in it...
Code duplication is not free either. Even if execution time is the only thing that you care about, on anything that's vaguely like a modern CPU (GPUs and microcontrollers are somewhat different), instruction cache space is the most scarce resource, with data cache the second. A function call will likely be branch predicted and in an out of order system the prolog and epilog are mostly handled by the register renaming infrastructure, so the function call is almost free, but the cost of an instruction cache miss from having too many copies of the same code is quite measurable.
Nobody needs to use VIM or Emac's anymore unless that's what they are comfortable using.
So, no one uses vim or emacs except for the people who do? I'm glad we've clarified that, thanks!
The things that make vim fast are not so much the keyboard shortcuts (although the result you mention was largely debunked as it assumes unfamiliarity with the environment. More recent studies have shown that keyboard shortcuts are marginally faster when you are in the middle of text entry, but the difference is less than the thinking time required for either). It's the ability to easily script things. For example, if I'm doing the same sequence of edits in vim, I'll record a macro and then replay it a few dozen times. That is much faster than doing it without the macro and so for a GUI editor to be as fast it would have to have commands like 'skip one word to the right,' and 'delete to the end of the line' that were easily useable from its macro recording environment (remember, these are not programs that I write as code, they're just rote replay of a sequence of keyboard commands).
An aspect of Nazism managed to seep into the British Empire precisely because they were mortal enemies
I think you might have some of this the wrong way around. The British Empire had institutionalised racism and concentration camps in its colonies long before the Nazis existed.
Who whips up that fervor, the war on drugs wasn't started as a grass roots campaign, for sure, it came from the top
Most often, it's the people who either need A Cause to get elected, or want to use a particular mob cry to funnel money to businesses in their constituency and get kickbacks (sorry, campaign contributions). The old hereditary House of Lords (before they abolished most of them and stuffed the house with Labour cronies followed by Tory cronies) had the advantage that, aside from a few issues like inheritance tax and fox hunting, the members didn't really have much of a vested interest in anything. If you watched the debates, the contrast between the two houses was astonishing. The Commons was full of people trying to score points against the other party, the Lords was almost empty, but those there were having an intelligent debate on the issues in the legislation.
I think it's unfair to characterise UKIP as racist. Racism is an opinion, and opinions lead to policies. As such, it has no place in the UKIP agenda.
Really, the only way of fixing this is to have time-outs for politicians. If you propose something completely obnoxious, then you just have to go and sit in a corner and have no part in legislative discussions for the next year.
OpenVMS has run on Itanium since Itanium was launched. This isn't a port to a new OS, it's just updating the existing support for the newer chips.
The x86 port story is quite funny though. The 80386 launched with four protection rings specifically to make porting VMS from VAX easy. DEC never did the port (or, if they did, never released it publicly) and instead designed their own chip, the Alpha as the successor to the VAX. The Alpha just had two protection rings, which required a little bit of restructuring of the VMS design. Now, x86-64 has only two protection rings (unless you count HVM and SMC modes as rings), and is being considered as a porting target for VMS...
The authors write an article, pay the ACM to host it, and don't retain copyright on something the ACM hasn't helped them write
The authors don't pay ACM to host it and generally do retain copyright.
Are you really that obtuse? A marketplace that someone is saying is large is significantly smaller than a single company that sells products in that market. Your argument is equivalent to saying 'this big shop has a huge profit and sells thousands of products!' and then mocking people who point out that there are individual suppliers of single products in that shop that have an order of magnitude higher profit nationwide than the total profit from all sales in the shop.
Communications of the ACM has changed a lot over the last few years. They're trying to make it a lot more relevant and also raise the impact. This means that the Practitioners section is now managed by the team behind ACM Queue and contains stuff that people doing exciting things in industry are doing and the rest has a higher standard of peer review. The Research Highlights section often points to papers that I want to read. Most of the top-tier conferences and journals for computer science are ACM-sponsored.
The ACM is pretty good about open access. Every author can use their 'author-izer' service to create links that check the referrer but give free access to the papers, so if you can't get free access to an ACM-published paper from the author's web site, then complain to them, not to the ACM.
They do pay developers, but they pay them quite a lot less than the purchase price. The logic is that they'll get a load more downloads. That makes sense, as I've downloaded several things for free that I'd never pay for and a few that I've only run for 5-10 minutes and never touched again.