Understanding the benefits of a multi-architecture binary depend on first accepting the purpose of pre-compiled binaries.
And, they'd have to start designing the programs to have run-time portability rather than depending on the make process to discover and tailor the program for the target machine.
A key plot point was that the message sending machine was also the receiver, so the earliest time they could send messages to was when the machine was first turned on.
Which is why we must invent the time machine before turning on the earth destroying LHC! Otherwise, how are our future selves going to warn us not to do it?
Alien is the scariest movie I've ever seen, hands down.
When I saw it in the theater, there were scenes where I could not watch it -- I had to cover my eyes. Even when it was on TV, I still did that years later. (Specifically, the scene where Dallas is crawling through the ducts and the alien attacks.)
What made Alien so different from previous monster movies is the alien was so fast. Before Alien filmakers thought it heightened the suspense to show the monster slowly approaching the victims. Ridley Scott realized that if the alien moves quickly, the danger is increased because you are never safe; it can get you at any time.
That's not the only groundbreaking part of the movie. (Spoiler alert!)
Remember when Ripley set the Nostromo to self destruct, but then the alien is blocking her path to the escape pod, so she goes back to cancel the self destruct. How many times have we seen this before? It is such a cliche. So it was astounding when the timer ran down and she could not stop it! I've never seen that before. And I can't think of many movies that have done that since.
The post you are referring to was referring to mainframes years ago. And he is correct: the first computers (there were no such thing as microcomputers or minicomputers back then) could only run a single "job" at a time, and the data had to be fed in through punch cards, paper tape, etc.
But the fact is that System/360 mainframes were multitasked at least since the introduction of OS/360 in 1966.
However, let's talk about the most commonly used MVS transaction server: CICS. CICS was introduced in 1969, and is still in use today; it is much more popular than any other MVS transaction server. CICS is single tasking! It does use cooperative multitasking to switch between all of the applications running in one CICS region. It is amazing that CICS still has so much market share compared to IMS. CICS is to IMS as Windows 3.1 is to Windows Vista (or Mac OS 9 is to OS X).
In COBOL you would code it as:
compute total = units * cost
And you could define "total" as having 2 decimal places in binary coded decimal, "cost" was something like 1.30232 in binary, and "units" was a character. How do you do that in C?
Running off the external battery shouldn't attempt to charge the internal battery.
Consider running off of 15v aircraft adapters, which provide enough power to run the computer, but not enough to charge the battery.
Apple doesn't publish how the current MagSafe adapters are designed, but they do have a document that explains how power adapter sensing worked on the PowerBook. The power plug shell is used an "adapter sense" line to signal the adapter type to the computer's power management unit.
For some reason, many applications don't understand how to communicate with authenticating proxy servers. (Even Internet Explorer's system of downloading intermediate certificate authorities can't authenticate!).
Google Update is one such app.
The first problem is you can't install a program (such as Chrome) that is Google Update based.
So let's say you download the stand-alone Chrome installer.
Then what happens is the Google Updater tries to update. It can't. So it tries again. It can't.
The visible symptom as my machine was hitting the hard drive every second, forever. Tracing through the processes led to Google Update.
In my experience what happens is the opposite problem:
1. Corporate IT department decrees that all machines will only run WIndows, and will only use Internet Explorer, because that way there is only one client version to target.
2. Corporate IT develops (or buys from a vendor) a web based application. It becomes widely deployed.
Needless to say, said web application only works with IE. Why should it work with anything else? See item #1.
3. A new version of IE comes out. The widely deployed app won't operate with it, because it was designed to be dependent on ActiveX, and it is incompatible with IE version what-ever-we-have +1.
4. So, corporate IT decrees that no one using this application can upgrade IE until the app has been fixed and tested.
Which is why we are still using IE 6.
Now the interesting question is, what happens when we need to use two web apps, each of which has different (and mutually exclusive) browser version requirements?
The ironic thing is that if in step #1 they had said we can use any browser, on any O/S, then we wouldn't be in this mess, because the web apps wouldn't be browser version specific.
The SCO Group is a descendant company of the Santa Cruz Operation, an early Unix vendor. They also owned the rights to AT&T's version of Unix. (They had purchased the Unix rights from Novel in 1995).
In 2002, SCO had a new CEO, Darl McBride. SCO wasn't doing so well; their primary product was a version of Unix that ran on Intel machines, but they were competing with Linux for that same market. And Linux is free, and the new hotness in Unix-style operating systems.
Somehow Darl learned that SCO owned Unix, i.e. the copyrights to the source. And he was led to believe that the code in Unix had leaked into Linux. So he came up with a new money making plan:
Sue your own customers.
???
Profit!
This wouldn't work very well for most customers, since SCO's market was mostly small businesses.
But there was a big fish he could go after: IBM. You see, IBM was a licensee of the AT&T Unix that SCO owned. IBM derived its own versions of Unix from it. And as part of that, IBM enhanced its own Unix with new technologies. And IBM also contributed those same new technologies, which IBM had developed on its own, to Linux.
So Darl's theory was that SCO not only owned the rights to its own Unix, and to the AT&T Unix that it had acquired, but also to every version of Unix that was derived from them by a licensee. So, he could sue IBM for leaking SCO's property to Linux, and he could sue any company that used Linux (unless they paid SCO an extortion fee not to).
The SCO Group sued IBM for $1 billion dollars!
(A common theory is that SCO expected IBM to just buy SCO to make the problem go away, thus enabling Darl and the other SCO executives to cash in their SCOX shares at a profit.)
We'll skip all the counter lawsuits, ridiculous claims by SCO, Microsoft's part in it, the suits by SCO against other customers, and get to the best part:
Remember that it all started because the SCO Group's predecessor (The Santa Cruz Operation) had purchased the AT&T Unix copyrights from Novell. Well it turns out that they didn't. What they purchased was the right to market and license it. And to collect licensing fees, for which they had to pay Novell a portion. They did not actually own the copyrights or any substantial amount of intellectual property.
So Novell sued SCO, claiming that a) SCO didn't own anything, and b) SCO owed Novell money, because the SCO Group hadn't been paying Novell their share of the licensing fees.
It does generally work. But it has some rough edges. Some of these are OS X specific. YMMV.
No raw disk support on OS X.
Can't use a Boot Camp partition as the hard disk.
Can't run 64-bit guests.
No 3D graphics support.
No Host Interface Networking (virtual switch) on OS X.
Ctrl-left click is passed as right mouse button even on a two button mouse.
I couldn't get VBoxSDL to work because that command doesn't exist.
I couldn't get VRDP remote connection to work.
I couldn't get Windows XP to see VirtualBox shared folders.
Sometimes when it crashes it can get confused about what graphics mode it should be in and you can get into a situation where Seamless mode isn't working, but there is no way to escape it.
It crashes occasionally.
VirtualBox can't grab a USB device that is in use by the host. You have to create a "USB filter", start the guest before plugging in the USB device, so the guest will grab it before the host takes it.
I've run into one application (the Zone Labs integrity scanner run by the Checkpoint SSL VPN) that causes a freeze for several minutes when run in the guest.
Installation of XP had trouble reading the XP and the Windows 98 CD-ROMS (Win 98 is for upgrade verification). But it worked fine when given an.ISO of the same CD. I'm going to try it with VMware and see if it hits the same problem.
Installation of Guest Additions on Ubuntu Linux guests is kind of clunky, and you have to redo it every time you run a system update that rebuilds the kernel. *
* Maybe Ubuntu users are used to that kind of thing.
Is new guns and their "pop" mode. Basically it is an ultrafast start and shutdown mode for the gun. The reason is, of course, RADAR detectors. They've gotten quite good. They don't necessarily need the gun to be on and transmitting to pick it up. When the gun is in standby (with it's electronics operating but not transmitting a beam) they can still be picked up. Same sort of way RADAR counterdetectors work. Even though the detector itself isn't trying to emit anything, it does anyhow (as does any superheterodyne device).
In some states radar detectors are illegal. As you explained, they can use radar detector detectors to detect a radar detector.
But radar detector detectors are also superhetorodyne. So my radar detector has a radar detector detector detector function -- if it detects a radar detector detector, it can shut its interal oscillator down for a period of time, making it undetectable.
The problem is that when the radar detector detector detector function is on, it also detects other radar detectors.
Well, I wasn't thinking of me -- I only search for fuzzy bunnies and pink ponies.
But I have a friend (really) who was surfing through a company network. They claim that he was accessing inappropriate content and he was fired. He says that he was checking out vacation destinations for a trip, but one of the search results was fake (it used fake key words or something to boost its page rank) and let to a pr0n site.
So I'm thinking that the AVG LinkSearch can lead to cases where someone is accused of such activity, when really they didn't.
Let's say that your Google search returns some links that are NSFW, or could be considered illegal to view. As a far as anyone looking at server logs is concerned, you are choosing to view those links.
How long before someone gets fired or arrested, and tries to explain that it was their anti-virus software that was viewing the child pr0n?
Jeez, do guys you turn off lights by hitting the switch with a hammer?
Why not just use QuickTime's control panel to tell it you don't want an icon in the notification area? Then it will never return.
Right-click notification area icon, select Settings.
Select the Advanced tab.
Under Tray Icon, turn off the option "Install QuickTime icon in system tray".
I thought that the reason for granting exclusive rights to the patent owner was that society would benefit from disclosure of the details of the invention (so the invention or discovery wouldn't remain a secret forever.)
But how many of the patents discussed in/. reveal anything in the patent application that any programmer or engineer couldn't figure out just by hearing the idea of the patent?
For example, are developers of web commerce sites going to look to the Amazon patent to see how to develop a one-click purchase procedure?
My idea is that a patent should not prevent anyone else from developing the same thing, as long as they don't use the detailed implementation described in the patent to do it.
How do you tell that? Keep the patent details a secret.
That is, if someone wants to know the implementation details of a patent (before it expires), they should have to submit an application. The details won't be publicly available.
Of course, this proposal would never be allowed in the real world, because companies want to use patents to prevent other companies from having the same ideas, no matter if they are trivial to implement or not.
You didn't say which particular model of PowerBook G4 you have, but the display in my Titanium PowerBook G4 (1 GHz) is an AU Optronics B152EW01, which the spec sheet says supports "Native 256K colors (RGB 6-bit data driver)".
Yeah, you are correct, I was just thinking about how Iomega squandered the opportunity for Zip to be a ubiquitous standard.
Think back to 1998. The iMac has been introduced and shockingly has no floppy drive, because Steve Jobs said that 1.44 MB disks are too small to be of any use. Magazine articles were written about "What will replace the floppy disk"?
The candidates were Zip 100MB, SyQuest EZ135, magneto-optical discs and the 120 MB Super Floppy. The CD-R specification had just been published, but back then no one was thinking that it would replace the floppy disk.
Some machines did start coming with internal Zip drives as an option, but it never really reached critical mass... the point where it would be considered standard equipment. Probably because the price per disk was so high -- they still cost $9 per 100 MB disk today!
So where are we today? There still is no standard replacement for a floppy drive. Yes, CD-RW drives are standard now, but packet-writing software isn't a standard part of Windows or Mac OS operating systems.
(And even if you have packet-writing software from somewhere else, there are compatibility problems between vendors and versions. I have a CD that was written using IBM DLA that can't be read using Roxio DirectCD.)
Slashdot Mirror
Understanding the benefits of a multi-architecture binary depend on first accepting the purpose of pre-compiled binaries.
And, they'd have to start designing the programs to have run-time portability rather than depending on the make process to discover and tailor the program for the target machine.
Well, China is behind an all encompassing firewall.
And the French refuse to install malware written in English.
A key plot point was that the message sending machine was also the receiver, so the earliest time they could send messages to was when the machine was first turned on.
Which is why we must invent the time machine before turning on the earth destroying LHC! Otherwise, how are our future selves going to warn us not to do it?
Several posts suggested David Brin's Startide Rising. That's a great book, but if you want to provoke discussion, I'd pick Glory Season.
Also good would be anything by John Varley.
Try that with your new-fangled compact discs.
When I saw it in the theater, there were scenes where I could not watch it -- I had to cover my eyes. Even when it was on TV, I still did that years later. (Specifically, the scene where Dallas is crawling through the ducts and the alien attacks.)
What made Alien so different from previous monster movies is the alien was so fast. Before Alien filmakers thought it heightened the suspense to show the monster slowly approaching the victims. Ridley Scott realized that if the alien moves quickly, the danger is increased because you are never safe; it can get you at any time.
That's not the only groundbreaking part of the movie. (Spoiler alert!)
Remember when Ripley set the Nostromo to self destruct, but then the alien is blocking her path to the escape pod, so she goes back to cancel the self destruct. How many times have we seen this before? It is such a cliche. So it was astounding when the timer ran down and she could not stop it! I've never seen that before. And I can't think of many movies that have done that since.
But the fact is that System/360 mainframes were multitasked at least since the introduction of OS/360 in 1966.
However, let's talk about the most commonly used MVS transaction server: CICS. CICS was introduced in 1969, and is still in use today; it is much more popular than any other MVS transaction server. CICS is single tasking! It does use cooperative multitasking to switch between all of the applications running in one CICS region. It is amazing that CICS still has so much market share compared to IMS. CICS is to IMS as Windows 3.1 is to Windows Vista (or Mac OS 9 is to OS X).
However, it is try that IBM is still releasing updates to the mainframe operating systems.
In COBOL you would code it as: compute total = units * cost And you could define "total" as having 2 decimal places in binary coded decimal, "cost" was something like 1.30232 in binary, and "units" was a character. How do you do that in C?
MVS is preemptively multitasked. And you can easily create subtasks within each address space, which meet the definition of a thread.
Running off the external battery shouldn't attempt to charge the internal battery.
Consider running off of 15v aircraft adapters, which provide enough power to run the computer, but not enough to charge the battery.
Apple doesn't publish how the current MagSafe adapters are designed, but they do have a document that explains how power adapter sensing worked on the PowerBook. The power plug shell is used an "adapter sense" line to signal the adapter type to the computer's power management unit.
That might be true in a vanilla environment.
For some reason, many applications don't understand how to communicate with authenticating proxy servers. (Even Internet Explorer's system of downloading intermediate certificate authorities can't authenticate!).
Google Update is one such app.
The first problem is you can't install a program (such as Chrome) that is Google Update based.
So let's say you download the stand-alone Chrome installer.
Then what happens is the Google Updater tries to update. It can't. So it tries again. It can't.
The visible symptom as my machine was hitting the hard drive every second, forever. Tracing through the processes led to Google Update.
Deleted Google Update and the problem was solved.
In my experience what happens is the opposite problem:
1. Corporate IT department decrees that all machines will only run WIndows, and will only use Internet Explorer, because that way there is only one client version to target.
2. Corporate IT develops (or buys from a vendor) a web based application. It becomes widely deployed.
Needless to say, said web application only works with IE. Why should it work with anything else? See item #1.
3. A new version of IE comes out. The widely deployed app won't operate with it, because it was designed to be dependent on ActiveX, and it is incompatible with IE version what-ever-we-have +1.
4. So, corporate IT decrees that no one using this application can upgrade IE until the app has been fixed and tested.
Which is why we are still using IE 6.
Now the interesting question is, what happens when we need to use two web apps, each of which has different (and mutually exclusive) browser version requirements?
The ironic thing is that if in step #1 they had said we can use any browser, on any O/S, then we wouldn't be in this mess, because the web apps wouldn't be browser version specific.
I agree -- C is too low level for an introductory class, and OOP is too high level.
My first language (after Basic) was Pascal, and I did most of the college courses in Modula-2.
Of course we also learned FORTRAN, Forth, COBOL, Algol, SNOBOL, PDP assembler (with no operating system), APL, Ada, Prolog and COMPASS.
But no C!
In 2002, SCO had a new CEO, Darl McBride. SCO wasn't doing so well; their primary product was a version of Unix that ran on Intel machines, but they were competing with Linux for that same market. And Linux is free, and the new hotness in Unix-style operating systems.
Somehow Darl learned that SCO owned Unix, i.e. the copyrights to the source. And he was led to believe that the code in Unix had leaked into Linux. So he came up with a new money making plan:
This wouldn't work very well for most customers, since SCO's market was mostly small businesses.
But there was a big fish he could go after: IBM. You see, IBM was a licensee of the AT&T Unix that SCO owned. IBM derived its own versions of Unix from it. And as part of that, IBM enhanced its own Unix with new technologies. And IBM also contributed those same new technologies, which IBM had developed on its own, to Linux.
So Darl's theory was that SCO not only owned the rights to its own Unix, and to the AT&T Unix that it had acquired, but also to every version of Unix that was derived from them by a licensee. So, he could sue IBM for leaking SCO's property to Linux, and he could sue any company that used Linux (unless they paid SCO an extortion fee not to).
The SCO Group sued IBM for $1 billion dollars!
(A common theory is that SCO expected IBM to just buy SCO to make the problem go away, thus enabling Darl and the other SCO executives to cash in their SCOX shares at a profit.)
We'll skip all the counter lawsuits, ridiculous claims by SCO, Microsoft's part in it, the suits by SCO against other customers, and get to the best part:
Remember that it all started because the SCO Group's predecessor (The Santa Cruz Operation) had purchased the AT&T Unix copyrights from Novell. Well it turns out that they didn't. What they purchased was the right to market and license it. And to collect licensing fees, for which they had to pay Novell a portion. They did not actually own the copyrights or any substantial amount of intellectual property.
So Novell sued SCO, claiming that a) SCO didn't own anything, and b) SCO owed Novell money, because the SCO Group hadn't been paying Novell their share of the licensing fees.
Novell won, and SCO went bankrupt.
Robert Silverberg's 1971 novel "The World Inside" is about people living in 1000 story skyscrapers, each holding 800,000 people.
* Maybe Ubuntu users are used to that kind of thing.
Is new guns and their "pop" mode. Basically it is an ultrafast start and shutdown mode for the gun. The reason is, of course, RADAR detectors. They've gotten quite good. They don't necessarily need the gun to be on and transmitting to pick it up. When the gun is in standby (with it's electronics operating but not transmitting a beam) they can still be picked up. Same sort of way RADAR counterdetectors work. Even though the detector itself isn't trying to emit anything, it does anyhow (as does any superheterodyne device).
In some states radar detectors are illegal. As you explained, they can use radar detector detectors to detect a radar detector.
But radar detector detectors are also superhetorodyne. So my radar detector has a radar detector detector detector function -- if it detects a radar detector detector, it can shut its interal oscillator down for a period of time, making it undetectable.
The problem is that when the radar detector detector detector function is on, it also detects other radar detectors.
SAE (Stand Alone Environment) from NewEra Software?
Here's a marketing PDF: http://ssss.cm-cp.com/mktdoc/SAE_02.pdf
Well, I wasn't thinking of me -- I only search for fuzzy bunnies and pink ponies.
But I have a friend (really) who was surfing through a company network. They claim that he was accessing inappropriate content and he was fired. He says that he was checking out vacation destinations for a trip, but one of the search results was fake (it used fake key words or something to boost its page rank) and let to a pr0n site.
So I'm thinking that the AVG LinkSearch can lead to cases where someone is accused of such activity, when really they didn't.
How long before someone gets fired or arrested, and tries to explain that it was their anti-virus software that was viewing the child pr0n?
But how many of the patents discussed in /. reveal anything in the patent application that any programmer or engineer couldn't figure out just by hearing the idea of the patent?
For example, are developers of web commerce sites going to look to the Amazon patent to see how to develop a one-click purchase procedure?
My idea is that a patent should not prevent anyone else from developing the same thing, as long as they don't use the detailed implementation described in the patent to do it.
How do you tell that? Keep the patent details a secret.
That is, if someone wants to know the implementation details of a patent (before it expires), they should have to submit an application. The details won't be publicly available.
Of course, this proposal would never be allowed in the real world, because companies want to use patents to prevent other companies from having the same ideas, no matter if they are trivial to implement or not.
You didn't say which particular model of PowerBook G4 you have, but the display in my Titanium PowerBook G4 (1 GHz) is an AU Optronics B152EW01, which the spec sheet says supports "Native 256K colors (RGB 6-bit data driver)".
Yeah, you are correct, I was just thinking about how Iomega squandered the opportunity for Zip to be a ubiquitous standard.
... the point where it would be considered standard equipment. Probably because the price per disk was so high -- they still cost $9 per 100 MB disk today!
Think back to 1998. The iMac has been introduced and shockingly has no floppy drive, because Steve Jobs said that 1.44 MB disks are too small to be of any use. Magazine articles were written about "What will replace the floppy disk"?
The candidates were Zip 100MB, SyQuest EZ135, magneto-optical discs and the 120 MB Super Floppy. The CD-R specification had just been published, but back then no one was thinking that it would replace the floppy disk.
Some machines did start coming with internal Zip drives as an option, but it never really reached critical mass
So where are we today? There still is no standard replacement for a floppy drive. Yes, CD-RW drives are standard now, but packet-writing software isn't a standard part of Windows or Mac OS operating systems.
(And even if you have packet-writing software from somewhere else, there are compatibility problems between vendors and versions. I have a CD that was written using IBM DLA that can't be read using Roxio DirectCD.)