I've long thought that it would be interesting to have an operating system for operating systems, an OS/OS. It would need to be a very efficient software platform that would be, for most practical purposes, invisible to the operating systems themselves.
Write the device drivers for the OS/OS and then the OS themselves just need a device driver for the abstract OSOS device.
Think of it as the lowest level of a layering of operating systems with a single job -- dealing with physical devices.
Well, it may be true if you are only interested in one particular item from one particular seller. Sometimes it seems better to place the smallest possible bid early and leave it there. Then a few minutes before the bidding is over, check the auction to see if you need (or want) to bid higher. Getting into a bidding war early is likely to increase the final selling price.
For a different situation, suppose that there are two sellers selling substantially similar items.
You could bid on one item. If someone else bids on it, you might elect to place a bid on the other item instead.
My opinion of large companies is that most of them got there by being less than honest. And they haven't turned honest now that they are large.
I think that the average American consumer is far more honest and ethical than the average large company, American or not. And small companies with integrity have little chance of ever being large companies with integrity.
The real difference is that the large companies can afford herds of lawyers who can help them limit their liabilities. There aren't many large companies out there that won't trample all over your rights if they can make money as a result.
The surprising thing is that so many of the large companies find themselves in hot water so often.
Of course, our Congresscritters have recently passed a law to reduce their liabilities (by making it far more difficult and expensive to keep them honest) with the recent anti-class action lawsuit law.
So now we have large record companies that calculate expenses in such a way as to make it nearly impossible for many recording artists to ever come out ahead. Yet, they keep going with recording artists that can't come out ahead so you know the record companies are making money out of them.
Don't the recording companies now routinely require the artists to assign their copyrights to the record companies before they'll even record the music? I seem to remember reading something about that two or three years ago.
That is a good question whether it would fall in the same catagory as theft of service.
Not in Texas. Or, to be more accurate, after reviewing the law on theft of service, it is very unlikely that it could be classified as that.
From the Texas Penal Code:
31.04. THEFT OF SERVICE.
(a) A person commits theft of service if, with intent to avoid payment for service that he knows is provided only for compensation:
(1) he intentionally or knowingly secures performance of the service by deception, threat, or false token;
(2) having control over the disposition of services of another to which he is not entitled, he intentionally or knowingly diverts the other's services to his own benefit or to the benefit of
another not entitled to them;
(3) having control of personal property under a written rental agreement, he holds the property beyond the expiration of the rental period without the effective consent of the owner of the property, thereby depriving the owner of the
property of its use in further rentals; or
(4) he intentionally or knowingly secures the
performance of the service by agreeing to provide compensation and, after the service is rendered, fails to make payment after receiving notice demanding payment.
First of all, (3) and (4) wouldn't normally apply. However, if you agreed to pay the neighbor half the bill and then didn't, you could be found guilty for that. But that would be theft of service from the neighbor, not his ISP.
If you broke your neighbor's wep and then used his network you would have committed theft of service. Similary, you would also be guilty of theft of service if you reconfigured his access point to enable yourself to connect as well.
But I can't see that it would be theft of service if your neighbor gave you permission to connect to the internet through his access point.
I'm not a lawyer, so my interpreation could be wrong. And, of course, other states may differ.
Another related issue comes to mind.
It's not unusual for small towns to allow wireless providers to mount antennas on city own facilities such as water towers.
This would seem to require them to find other places to mount their equipment antennas.
In my town, there are two wireless providers. I work for one.
The other doesn't have a local office. So their network lines (T-1, ATM,... whatever they have) terminate at the city hall. From there, they have a radio uplink to the water tower. From the water tower, they have point to point to their access points.
This would sure cause them trouble.
In reality, I really don't consider them to be the competition. That is SBC. With their DSL rates, another year or two and we probably won't have enough customers to bother.
You are quite right. This may act to introduce them to a new level of computing and help some of them become Open Source.
But I think there is another aspect that is a bit more important -- to increase the amount of Open Source windoze software available that runs on other platforms.
Microsoft wants windoze users to run only software that only runs on windoze. That is, for example, why they want everyone to use Internet Exploder instead of the alternatives such as Opera, Firefox, and Netscape that run on other platforms as well. If the only software they know how to run is available only for windoze, many users will never see Linux as a viable alternative. In essence, it locks the majority of the consumer type users into windozes users.
Thus, by having more software that can be compiled to run under a wide variety of platforms, the naieve users will find it easier to migrate to open source platforms.
So I see this as a very good thing for Open Source Software.
In the process, Trolltech could win big. If more developers use Qt for precisely the above reasons, their familiarity with Qt is more likely to help them choose Qt for both internal and commercial applications.
1) I didn't have much else to do. I wasn't into hitting the bars nightly and I didn't want to sit around watching tv. Also, I only knew about two people in town (a couple of cousins) outside of work).
2) I didn't necessarily spend all the time working. At the time, home computers were barely out, but I was too busy paying college debts to afford them.
Those home computers that were affordable like the Radio Shack Color Computer weren't very attractive to me. What I wanted was a PDP-8 for home, but I just couldn't afford it.
So I spent part of my evenings at the office figuring out how to really use the company's PDP-11/70 with RSTS/E.
---
For example, we really needed more computing power when I arrived. The PDP-11/70 just wasn't enough. The funny thing was that it was only using about 30% of the CPU under heavy load. Most of the time it was waiting for disk accesses.
We added 1 megabyte of memory, but that didn't make any difference.
I experimented with disk caching. Under RSTS/E, you could either turn disk caching on for everything or just for selected files. Turning it on for everything didn't improve much apparently because you didn't have much memory to really cache much.
But I dug through all the documentation and was appalled at how the disk caching worked. A minimal cache time of 30 seconds was defined. In other words, when you cached a disk block, it was there for 30 seconds before it could be removed and so there wasn't enough room to cache most disk accesses. Even allocated much of our new memory didn't help.
So late one night, without telling anyone what I was going to do, I patched the operating system to change the thirty second cache time to five seconds. The results were phenomenal. We went from 70% CPU idle time to 0% CPU idle time. Since the vast majority of the cached disk blocks weren't needed after a few seconds, keeping them there thirty seconds was just blocking additional disk blocks from being cached. Caching all disk reads for five seconds had a phenomenal positive impact on the computer.
When adding disk blocks to the disk cache, the algorithm would first remove any that had been there longer than the maximum cache time. So after patching the system to change the cache time, it was useful to observe the amount of memory used for the cache for a day or two and then adjust the maximum disk cache time up or down. If it was full most of the time, reduce it slightly since there were likely to be eligible disk blocks that weren't being cached. If it was not full, increase the time slightly until most of the memory allocating for the disk cache was being used.
Modifying the disk cache time did lead to one problem.
My boss didn't really understand computers much. When certain employees would complain that the computer was too slow, he'd up their priority.
Before the disk cache time change, it made little difference because their processes still had to spend much of the time waiting for disk accesses. After the change, increasing the priority would allow the one process to use nearly 100% of the CPU time until it finished. Noone else could run anything -- it was as if the entire computer was frozen.
Of course, everyone but my boss and the people who would get him to raise their priority hated this. But once he had raised the priority, it might take an hour or more to get enough CPU time to drop the priority back down.
So it was time for another late night modification. I modified the utilty (correctly spelled - it had to fit in 6 leltters) program to act like it had raised the priority without actually doing so.
Then everyone was happy. Someone would call my boss and he'd raise their priority. They were happy because their job would finish faster and he was happy because he'd look better to their boss. The rest of us were happy because we could still get our work done.
Keep to the minimum possible. Remember that the earliest part is most valuable since there are more witnesses: better to do half an hour Monday to Thursday than two hours on Wednesday. It also sounds better to say: "I've worked late four nights this week." No-one will be keeping track that closely anyway.
At my first job out of college, being in a strange town with nothing to do anyway, I would routinely work late. When I left, instead of going down to the bottom floor, signing out, and then walking up several flights of stairs in the parking garage to where I was parked, I would just exit through the fire escape and walk down to where I was parked.
Then one day I walked into the senior vice president's office and saw him looking at the night and weekend signin/signout log maintained by the guards on the first floor.
After that, I always went down to the first floor and signed out.
And it worked. One morning I really overslept and came in about 11 am to find a note that I needed to report to the senior vice president's office.
So when I went in to report, I apologized for being so late. He told me not to worry since I worked late so much of the time.
In 1977 or so, I was on the train between Lake Bennett and Whitehorse in Canada. A cook from the station at Lake Bennett was on the train.
The cook said that he hated U.S. money because when he was drunk, he couldn't tell the difference in bills and has on more than one occasion accidentally tipped the barmaid with a rather large bill ($20 if I remember correctly) rather than the $1 he intended.
If it showed it down to the street level and a user could see that the intrusion attempt is coming from the neighbor next door, then the user could talk to his neighbor.
Slashdot Mirror
I've long thought that it would be interesting to have an operating system for operating systems, an OS/OS. It would need to be a very efficient software platform that would be, for most practical purposes, invisible to the operating systems themselves.
Write the device drivers for the OS/OS and then the OS themselves just need a device driver for the abstract OSOS device.
Think of it as the lowest level of a layering of operating systems with a single job -- dealing with physical devices.
Obnoxous ads are enough to compel me to change channels on a tv set.
Ads using rap music (music?) will do it nearly every time, but there are others as well.
That is not true.
Well, it may be true if you are only interested in one particular item from one particular seller. Sometimes it seems better to place the smallest possible bid early and leave it there. Then a few minutes before the bidding is over, check the auction to see if you need (or want) to bid higher. Getting into a bidding war early is likely to increase the final selling price.
For a different situation, suppose that there are two sellers selling substantially similar items.
You could bid on one item. If someone else bids on it, you might elect to place a bid on the other item instead.
My opinion of large companies is that most of them got there by being less than honest. And they haven't turned honest now that they are large.
I think that the average American consumer is far more honest and ethical than the average large company, American or not. And small companies with integrity have little chance of ever being large companies with integrity.
The real difference is that the large companies can afford herds of lawyers who can help them limit their liabilities. There aren't many large companies out there that won't trample all over your rights if they can make money as a result.
The surprising thing is that so many of the large companies find themselves in hot water so often.
Of course, our Congresscritters have recently passed a law to reduce their liabilities (by making it far more difficult and expensive to keep them honest) with the recent anti-class action lawsuit law.
So now we have large record companies that calculate expenses in such a way as to make it nearly impossible for many recording artists to ever come out ahead. Yet, they keep going with recording artists that can't come out ahead so you know the record companies are making money out of them.
Don't the recording companies now routinely require the artists to assign their copyrights to the record companies before they'll even record the music? I seem to remember reading something about that two or three years ago.
No amplifiers?
Every fixed wireless operator I know of uses amplifiers.
But the amplifiers have to be marketed and sold as part of the system. So, your "addon amplifier" is correct, but may be misleading.
I mu'st agree. The mi'su'se of apo'strophe's can be 'seriou'sly annoying.
I think that the FCC's authorization is required only if an amplifier is also present.
Not in Texas. Or, to be more accurate, after reviewing the law on theft of service, it is very unlikely that it could be classified as that.
From the Texas Penal Code:
First of all, (3) and (4) wouldn't normally apply. However, if you agreed to pay the neighbor half the bill and then didn't, you could be found guilty for that. But that would be theft of service from the neighbor, not his ISP.
If you broke your neighbor's wep and then used his network you would have committed theft of service. Similary, you would also be guilty of theft of service if you reconfigured his access point to enable yourself to connect as well.
But I can't see that it would be theft of service if your neighbor gave you permission to connect to the internet through his access point.
I'm not a lawyer, so my interpreation could be wrong. And, of course, other states may differ.
Another related issue comes to mind. It's not unusual for small towns to allow wireless providers to mount antennas on city own facilities such as water towers. This would seem to require them to find other places to mount their equipment antennas. In my town, there are two wireless providers. I work for one. The other doesn't have a local office. So their network lines (T-1, ATM, ... whatever they have) terminate at the city hall. From there, they have a radio uplink to the water tower. From the water tower, they have point to point to their access points.
This would sure cause them trouble.
In reality, I really don't consider them to be the competition. That is SBC. With their DSL rates, another year or two and we probably won't have enough customers to bother.
I wonder what effect this will have on municipally owned cable tv.
My sister gets her cable tv and internet service from a municiapply owned entity.
I suspect you didn't read it first.
If you had, someone else would have beaten you to the first post.
While IBM is not defending against patent claims, they are clearly using patent claims as a defensive measure.
It sends a very clear message to anyone else who might be thinking about the trying to mimic SCO.
I used to store dates as the number of days since Tecas Independence Day (the date that Texas became a Republic).
You are quite right. This may act to introduce them to a new level of computing and help some of them become Open Source.
But I think there is another aspect that is a bit more important -- to increase the amount of Open Source windoze software available that runs on other platforms.
Microsoft wants windoze users to run only software that only runs on windoze. That is, for example, why they want everyone to use Internet Exploder instead of the alternatives such as Opera, Firefox, and Netscape that run on other platforms as well. If the only software they know how to run is available only for windoze, many users will never see Linux as a viable alternative. In essence, it locks the majority of the consumer type users into windozes users.
Thus, by having more software that can be compiled to run under a wide variety of platforms, the naieve users will find it easier to migrate to open source platforms.
So I see this as a very good thing for Open Source Software.
In the process, Trolltech could win big. If more developers use Qt for precisely the above reasons, their familiarity with Qt is more likely to help them choose Qt for both internal and commercial applications.
If I patent a method for encoding my dick length in a 16 bit integer, will Microsoft be willing to enter a cross licensing agreement with me?
I'm surprised noone has brought up The Woodside Literary Agency.
The Woodside Literary Agency spammed certain Usenet newsgroups looking for authors.
For a fee, they would represent an author to get his work published.
They apparently never met a manuscript they didn't like.
So some of the participants in one of the misc.writing newsgroup had a contest to see if anyone could get a manuscript rejected.
For example, see Even Hitler got the blues
They can bury me in a pine box for all I care.
Instead of a tombstone, I think that a life-size statue of myself sitting on a horse with a sword in my hand would be cool.
Facing forward on the horse would be a plus.
In my case, it was really two things:
1) I didn't have much else to do. I wasn't into hitting the bars nightly and I didn't want to sit around watching tv. Also, I only knew about two people in town (a couple of cousins) outside of work).
2) I didn't necessarily spend all the time working. At the time, home computers were barely out, but I was too busy paying college debts to afford them.
Those home computers that were affordable like the Radio Shack Color Computer weren't very attractive to me. What I wanted was a PDP-8 for home, but I just couldn't afford it.
So I spent part of my evenings at the office figuring out how to really use the company's PDP-11/70 with RSTS/E.
---
For example, we really needed more computing power when I arrived. The PDP-11/70 just wasn't enough. The funny thing was that it was only using about 30% of the CPU under heavy load. Most of the time it was waiting for disk accesses.
We added 1 megabyte of memory, but that didn't make any difference.
I experimented with disk caching. Under RSTS/E, you could either turn disk caching on for everything or just for selected files. Turning it on for everything didn't improve much apparently because you didn't have much memory to really cache much.
But I dug through all the documentation and was appalled at how the disk caching worked. A minimal cache time of 30 seconds was defined. In other words, when you cached a disk block, it was there for 30 seconds before it could be removed and so there wasn't enough room to cache most disk accesses. Even allocated much of our new memory didn't help.
So late one night, without telling anyone what I was going to do, I patched the operating system to change the thirty second cache time to five seconds. The results were phenomenal. We went from 70% CPU idle time to 0% CPU idle time. Since the vast majority of the cached disk blocks weren't needed after a few seconds, keeping them there thirty seconds was just blocking additional disk blocks from being cached. Caching all disk reads for five seconds had a phenomenal positive impact on the computer.
When adding disk blocks to the disk cache, the algorithm would first remove any that had been there longer than the maximum cache time. So after patching the system to change the cache time, it was useful to observe the amount of memory used for the cache for a day or two and then adjust the maximum disk cache time up or down. If it was full most of the time, reduce it slightly since there were likely to be eligible disk blocks that weren't being cached. If it was not full, increase the time slightly until most of the memory allocating for the disk cache was being used.
Modifying the disk cache time did lead to one problem.
My boss didn't really understand computers much. When certain employees would complain that the computer was too slow, he'd up their priority.
Before the disk cache time change, it made little difference because their processes still had to spend much of the time waiting for disk accesses. After the change, increasing the priority would allow the one process to use nearly 100% of the CPU time until it finished. Noone else could run anything -- it was as if the entire computer was frozen.
Of course, everyone but my boss and the people who would get him to raise their priority hated this. But once he had raised the priority, it might take an hour or more to get enough CPU time to drop the priority back down.
So it was time for another late night modification. I modified the utilty (correctly spelled - it had to fit in 6 leltters) program to act like it had raised the priority without actually doing so.
Then everyone was happy. Someone would call my boss and he'd raise their priority. They were happy because their job would finish faster and he was happy because he'd look better to their boss. The rest of us were happy because we could still get our work done.
I told a number of other RSTS
I knew one programmer who had a boss who was continually giving conflicting orders and trying to add useless projects to his workload.
So he went out and bought a tape recorder and took it to the office.
Whenever his boss came in to his office, he'd turn the tape recorder on and hold the microphone up for his boss to speak into.
His boss would get pissed off and turn around and leave.
At my first job out of college, being in a strange town with nothing to do anyway, I would routinely work late. When I left, instead of going down to the bottom floor, signing out, and then walking up several flights of stairs in the parking garage to where I was parked, I would just exit through the fire escape and walk down to where I was parked.
Then one day I walked into the senior vice president's office and saw him looking at the night and weekend signin/signout log maintained by the guards on the first floor.
After that, I always went down to the first floor and signed out.
And it worked. One morning I really overslept and came in about 11 am to find a note that I needed to report to the senior vice president's office.
So when I went in to report, I apologized for being so late. He told me not to worry since I worked late so much of the time.
In 1977 or so, I was on the train between Lake Bennett and Whitehorse in Canada. A cook from the station at Lake Bennett was on the train.
The cook said that he hated U.S. money because when he was drunk, he couldn't tell the difference in bills and has on more than one occasion accidentally tipped the barmaid with a rather large bill ($20 if I remember correctly) rather than the $1 he intended.
The real question is why anyone would buy anything from McAfee in the first place.
They may have been pretty good once, but they have fallen to being completely useless.
I would just about run without virus protection than to use McAfee's anti-virus.
I would pay for an anti-virus service from someone else's before I'd use McAfee's for free. In fact, I did just that a couple of years ago.
Yeah.
Wait til the porn industry gets a hold of this. We'll have internet-enabled dildos that visually show the source of an intrusion.
I wonder how a visual map aids users.
If it showed it down to the street level and a user could see that the intrusion attempt is coming from the neighbor next door, then the user could talk to his neighbor.
Anything else is eye candy at best.
My oldest brother went to a doctor with something like that.
His doctor back-flushed his sinuses out with a saline solution while he sat with his head above a pan to catch the results coming out of his mouth.
The doctor also said that some people learn how to do it themselves and flush their sinuses out while standing in the shower.