As someone who has broken 60, likes a beer, is male
and has a hands free mobile this is the kind of anecdote research we have come to know and hate from Socioligsts and Pschychologists who, we
understand, are completely innumerate.
Hand helds (Handys in Germany), if you have ever used them, say in a hire car, are positively dangerous and should be banned by law.
Since 260 K/H (162 mph) is not un-usual on German
autobahnen I usually slow to 140 K/H (88 mph) when
in the office.
At 55 mph in the US, I have trouble not getting bored!
Some men, and almost all women, can walk and chew gum at the same time.
(1) I used to rely, and would like to continue to rely on/. to alert me to interesting news.
(2) The quality of the 'news selection' is going down.
(3) I am sick of egregious op-ed, trolls, astroturfers, shills and idiots who dont know when to keep their fingers still, off the keyboard.
The bottom line these days is that it is getting harder and harder to get FACTS, not subjective opinions, and there are far too many un-funny FUNNY posts.
All that said Intuit is behaving atrociously by egregiously breaking the functionality that their users have already paid for. This is certainly illegal at Roman Common Law, all of Europe, and in the UK, also, like the US, an Anglo-Saxon Common law jurisdiction; Unfair Contract Terms kills any EULA, then tortious damage!
The real problem here, once again, is the flacidity of the US legal system, in which lower court judges almost never rule quickly and definitively for fear of reversal on appeal, which I am told is a judicial career-damaging position.
I say to all of you in the US, again, that your problem is the practise of the courts, which now denies justice to you all. When you do Tort reform adopt the UK convention that the looser pays all party-and-party costs for both parties. That together with an O.16 practise rule for summary judgement and provision for security as to costs would, _at_once_, stifle vexatious lawsuits like SCO, disposed of in Germany in under a month, and make the likes of Intuit rightly fear their user base far too much to even think of trying this kind of thing.
Incedentally, it would also solve, or at least seriously ameliorate the current IP rustling/patent malpractice since corporations would have a strong dis-incentive to vexatiously defend nugatory IP in the courts and both the RIAA and MPIAA would both have to think hard about issuing suit without up-front evidence. You might have to fix your discovery rule to prevent 'fishing' without a statement of claim backed by prima facie evidence disclosing a cause of action.
Finally, I am also getting very tired of people quoting, wrongly, the mantra of US Capitalism,
The only responsibility is to make a shareholder profit unsaid, in the short term.
When history reflects the 1990s flawed vision of Sharelolder Value will, I suspect, mark the beginning of the decline of the US economy. It is certainly responsible for Enron, the banking and insurance scandels
Those of us who are not in the US continue to be amazed by the scale of disinformation and lies that are now tolerated, an indeed promoted by the MSM.
If I have the jargon correct here we have _academic_astroturfing_, it must work otherwise no one would bother to do it.
People should read Gibbon, in summary the US did _NOT_ become great by behaving as it is today. I would be deeply worried but for the economic vitality I see in Asia and South America.
Exactly right; it is a tool derived from those who can't design, to be used by those who can't code, and used to support two lies:
1. You can find out what the (L)USERs want by asking them.
2. A toolset costing, say USD 5000 per seat can turn village idiots into competant developers.
The belief that you can buy a toolset and 30 youngsters (1-2 years post graduation) and have a development team is the mark of the Pointy Haired Manager!
Try installing a stock Oracle DB release on Solaris You start the OS patching/Oracle patching execrcise
and are still at it, after uninstalls, days later
When you finally get it right you are reluctant to change anything!
On Linux it takes an hour and RPM documents it all
It is the exact same story with Java, a client passed (String)null to a JNI that I had written
and the JVM got a SEG FAULT! when
GetStringUTFChars
chokes SIGSEGV on a jstring null.
You look up the documentation - nothing
While I am at this rant check out JDB, and unlike gdb and the Perl debugger you find
that 'newline' dosnt repeat the last command.
Working in a Cathederal is really, really _bad_
for good taste and common sense.
the purpose of a review is to help inform the less informed readers, not just to collect cash from suppliers
Spamassassin is NON intrusive, better than 99.9%
accurate and free
since I run all my machines on Linux or Solaris I dont have to worry much about viri, and
thanks to Spamassassin,
no longer have to read 500 solicitations to buy Viagra or have my breasts or penis enlarged!
Never have I heard more nonsense
The last thing you want in an enterprise solution is a GUI
In a Enterprise SPAM filter you want to minimise
noise, maximise flexability
and
The entire problem here is the state that the administration of justice, in the USA, has been allowed to get into, both on the civil and criminal side.
There is literally nothing preventing or moderating people from commencing baseless
litigation, and that, together with an intelectually bankrupt theory of intellectual property means that, in practice, individuals and small companies are dis-incentived to inovate, individuals are oppressed and, de facto, deprived of their Constitutional rights and in which evil monopolies flourish.
Perhaps the basic issue is education, or a pliable media,
I see no other reason why why basic issues such as the need for efficient, effective, fair, and unbiased administration of justice are not discuessed.
I emphasise again that this is not a matter of law, it is about the administrative process.
For example, in the UK, expert High Court Masters exist with deep experience in most areans so the parties do not need to use expensive expert witnesses to 'teach the judge' and are discouraged, by way of incremental orders as to costs, use of them. The looser is oftem made to pay for a mis step at once!
Had the SCO action been started in England I would give it a month, before it was set aside
where I live, in Switzerland, a week.
Sadly, the consequnce of this is that a great nation, which rightly has aspirations, as a worl leader in democracy and freedom simply looks inept and foolish.
First of all the Court is not identified,
second, unless any such declaritive judgement
came from the Supreme Court it would be useless.
Then there is the question of treaty obligations
under the Bern Convention.
What this _REALLY_ points to again is the shambolic
state of the administration of justice in the USA
which is by the lawers, for the lawers; and the public interest go hang.
OK I do UNDERSTAND that hardly anyone understands
contemporary technology history or design, BUT
(a) in the 70's there were both 32 and 60+ architectures made by IBM and CDC; these were
computers, not chips and 32/36/48/60/64/80 bit
ALUs were common
(b) the dominant technology was bi-polar not cmos; and bipolar is faster, saturated bipolar is wire!
(c) ALU layering and SaturatedCarryPath (Kilburn) adders mean that you can build much faster multipliers in this technology since the ALU is unclocked, and knows when it is finished, in each multiply step
Thus the design of the mill can be much more agressive. You can use an asynchrounous element in a synchronous design, but not in FET designs where capacitance rulers
The sense of the original post, 4 bit micros eg the 4004 have nothing to do with this.
RISC cpus, run, as a main instruction set, exactly the same instruction set that makes up the x86 microcode, ie no Pentium/AMD actually executes the x86 intruction set, it mearly interprets it; huge
numbers of transistors are used for optimisations
eg Register Renaming.
This is a systems/application availability issue.
When the current monopoly is broken, RISC cpu architectures, using 64 bit ALU, and probably statistical (huffman) op-code compressinion will be the future.
Finally, remember that RISC was, almost, an accident --- (Google RISC Peterson Berkeley)
I have been involved with lots of (Expensive Enterprise Application) installs on Solaris, RHES,
SuSE
In all cases the installs are much easier on Linux, e.g. you dont have to apply 400 Solaris patches first and the install script usually runs OK the FIRST time, so
2 years ago I had 5 Oracle installs going on at the
same time, 1 on a SUN enterprise box, supported by
an experienced Oracle DBA with good SysAdmin skills
the other four on SuSE 7.3 and RH (shrinkwrap) two each, the SUN install took 4 elapsed days, done
by a first-class Oracle/SUN expert, I did the first, of four, Linux installs and the remaining
three were done by young Saudi's with about two
years of experience; they took anout 2 hours each
It is the kernel and glibc, and they are 10x less buggy
This is why SUN should really open source Solaris,
no LOL licence and Java.
Then bugs would be fixed not kept fresh for the next release.
I am sorry but I am getting ever more _pissed_off_ with the poor quality and no push-back on software quality the industry is full of Pinto's _BUT_
Ralph Nader is pre-occupied elsewhere
Having recently re-read ESR's Cathederal and Bazar
paper, I come increasingly to understand that one,
perhaps the _most_ important benefit of OpenSource is is that it provides an effective mechanism of
_feature_moderation_.
This provides some level of isolation from Design Despots inside academia or corporations and especially from the marketing departments of
corporations, for whom no feature is too silly.
Anyone who wants a concerete example of this just need to look at the Java implementation of Regular Expressions or Date-formatting.
For years I used to oppose DEC sending only marketeers to DECUS and to encourage them to invite a cross section of engineering 'nerds'; in retrospect I suspect that this helped prevent the capture of design exclusively by marketing
The failure to include many GNU products, by default, in Solaris Distributions, is the same thing. Without Linux Perl would still not ship with Solaris; ingnorant design despots within the
cathederal would have continued an effective veto!
I have made the same point frequently; if you talk
to SUN's Solaris beaurocracy they will tell you that
pre-adding Perl, Python... increases their testing
and integration costs
They need to be made to read the Catherderal and Bazar, and pass a test each Friday fo 5 years!
First, the authorities closed eyes, and in some cases complicity with sexual abuse in prison is
just one reason why the US is having a hard-ride
in the modern world; it is illegal under US law,
contrary to to the Constitution, which almost all
office holders are sworn to uphold, and un-consiencable, it is a real 'abuse of process'
which ALL investigative journalists should persue.
If you need to understand why there is no trust of
the US abroad just look at this condoned abuse at home. This is a simple moral issue!
The purpose of Prison is either (a) simply to deprive the the prisoner of liberty, or to do (a)
and to make life hard, hard-labour.
SO, in a WELL run judicial system you hand the serious spammer, a comersurate FINE, a short custodial sentance by sending him to JAIL for, say
the 9 years with all but six months suspended.
He gets to find out that jail is unpleasent, without abuse, an dosnt want to go back for 8.5 years.
Absolute NONSENSE; none of the problems of IT in a modern, sensibly designed, healthcare system are particularly hard, and the technologies have already been developed elsewhere; since real exposure to
hard cost/benefit is almost unknown and doctors are
(understandably) conservative the real problem is
lack of diversity and competition ---
now it will take 9 years to find that this initiative has failed.
Framemaker, already beta'd for Linux, is important
as it opens i32/i32-64 desktops outside Solaris 86.
As another poster has noted, Document-Construction
in the Large, for which Word is literally useless,
the pre-print and print industries are all real markets where a combination of desktop, server and process management are required.
Sometimes, and I err in this as much as the next man, think that those of us who develop sofware and use a computer to help run our business are at risk of loosing the plot; computers are now a process tool in may industries, banking... printing... retail.
Entirely predictably, these industries seek out value, and efficiency in the market, and sofware vendors follow the money.
Slashdot Mirror
we have come to know and hate from Socioligsts and Pschychologists who, we understand, are completely innumerate.
Hand helds (Handys in Germany), if you have ever used them, say in a hire car, are positively dangerous and should be banned by law.
Since 260 K/H (162 mph) is not un-usual on German autobahnen I usually slow to 140 K/H (88 mph) when in the office.
At 55 mph in the US, I have trouble not getting bored!
Some men, and almost all women, can walk and chew gum at the same time.
(1) I used to rely, and would like to continue to rely on /. to alert me to interesting news.
(2) The quality of the 'news selection' is going down.
(3) I am sick of egregious op-ed, trolls, astroturfers, shills and idiots who dont know when to keep their fingers still, off the keyboard.
The bottom line these days is that it is getting harder and harder to get FACTS, not subjective opinions, and there are far too many un-funny FUNNY posts.
All that said Intuit is behaving atrociously by egregiously breaking the functionality that their users have already paid for. This is certainly illegal at Roman Common Law, all of Europe, and in the UK, also, like the US, an Anglo-Saxon Common law jurisdiction; Unfair Contract Terms kills any EULA, then tortious damage!
The real problem here, once again, is the flacidity of the US legal system, in which lower court judges almost never rule quickly and definitively for fear of reversal on appeal, which I am told is a judicial career-damaging position.
I say to all of you in the US, again, that your problem is the practise of the courts, which now denies justice to you all. When you do Tort reform adopt the UK convention that the looser pays all party-and-party costs for both parties. That together with an O.16 practise rule for summary judgement and provision for security as to costs would, _at_once_, stifle vexatious lawsuits like SCO, disposed of in Germany in under a month, and make the likes of Intuit rightly fear their user base far too much to even think of trying this kind of thing.
Incedentally, it would also solve, or at least seriously ameliorate the current IP rustling/patent malpractice since corporations would have a strong dis-incentive to vexatiously defend nugatory IP in the courts and both the RIAA and MPIAA would both have to think hard about issuing suit without up-front evidence. You might have to fix your discovery rule to prevent 'fishing' without a statement of claim backed by prima facie evidence disclosing a cause of action.
Finally, I am also getting very tired of people quoting, wrongly, the mantra of US Capitalism,
The only responsibility is to make a shareholder profit unsaid, in the short term.
When history reflects the 1990s flawed vision of Sharelolder Value will, I suspect, mark the beginning of the decline of the US economy. It is certainly responsible for Enron, the banking and insurance scandels
Those of us who are not in the US continue to be amazed by the scale of disinformation and lies that are now tolerated, an indeed promoted by the MSM.
If I have the jargon correct here we have _academic_astroturfing_, it must work otherwise no one would bother to do it.
People should read Gibbon, in summary the US did _NOT_ become great by behaving as it is today. I would be deeply worried but for the economic vitality I see in Asia and South America.
No, as I already said this is RIGHT ON!
Exactly right; it is a tool derived from those who can't design, to be used by those who can't code, and used to support two lies:
1. You can find out what the (L)USERs want by asking them.
2. A toolset costing, say USD 5000 per seat can turn village idiots into competant developers.
The belief that you can buy a toolset and 30 youngsters (1-2 years post graduation) and have a development team is the mark of the Pointy Haired Manager!
You start the OS patching/Oracle patching execrcise
and are still at it, after uninstalls, days later
When you finally get it right you are reluctant to
change anything!
On Linux it takes an hour and RPM documents it all
It is the exact same story with Java, a client
passed (String)null to a JNI that I had written
and the JVM got a SEG FAULT!
when
GetStringUTFChars
chokes SIGSEGV on a jstring null.
You look up the documentation - nothing
While I am at this rant check out JDB, and
unlike gdb and the Perl debugger you find
that 'newline' dosnt repeat the last command.
Working in a Cathederal is really, really _bad_
for good taste and common sense.
So to correctly interpret your Astroturfing
the purpose of a review is to help inform the less informed readers, not just to collect cash from suppliers
Spamassassin is NON intrusive, better than 99.9%
accurate and free
since I run all my machines on Linux or Solaris I dont
have to worry much about viri, and
thanks to Spamassassin,
no longer have to read 500 solicitations to buy Viagra or have my breasts or penis enlarged!
Never have I heard more nonsense
The last thing you want in an enterprise solution is a GUI
In a Enterprise SPAM filter you want to minimise
noise, maximise flexability
and
be Hippocratic 'Primum non nocere'
that means NOT guessing attachments are viri
Just say what happens; the commercial products fail
to detect
mis-detect OK mail ...
prevent people working by canning MS project files
till now I have to send all attachments as Base64
encoded PGP encrypted files
and all the M$-l'admins are to stupid to understand
or do anything about it.
The entire problem here is the state that the administration of justice, in the USA, has been allowed to get into, both on the civil and criminal side.
There is literally nothing preventing or moderating people from commencing baseless litigation, and that, together with an intelectually bankrupt theory of intellectual property means that, in practice, individuals and small companies are dis-incentived to inovate, individuals are oppressed and, de facto, deprived of their Constitutional rights and in which evil monopolies flourish. Perhaps the basic issue is education, or a pliable media,
I see no other reason why why basic issues such as the need for efficient, effective, fair, and unbiased administration of justice are not discuessed. I emphasise again that this is not a matter of law, it is about the administrative process.
For example, in the UK, expert High Court Masters exist with deep experience in most areans so the parties do not need to use expensive expert witnesses to 'teach the judge' and are discouraged, by way of incremental orders as to costs, use of them. The looser is oftem made to pay for a mis step at once!
Had the SCO action been started in England I would give it a month, before it was set aside where I live, in Switzerland, a week.
Sadly, the consequnce of this is that a great nation, which rightly has aspirations, as a worl leader in democracy and freedom simply looks inept and foolish.
Then there is the question of treaty obligations under the Bern Convention.
What this _REALLY_ points to again is the shambolic state of the administration of justice in the USA which is by the lawers, for the lawers; and the public interest go hang.
(a) in the 70's there were both 32 and 60+ architectures made by IBM and CDC; these were computers, not chips and 32/36/48/60/64/80 bit ALUs were common (b) the dominant technology was bi-polar not cmos; and bipolar is faster, saturated bipolar is wire!
(c) ALU layering and SaturatedCarryPath (Kilburn) adders mean that you can build much faster multipliers in this technology since the ALU is unclocked, and knows when it is finished, in each multiply step
Thus the design of the mill can be much more agressive. You can use an asynchrounous element in a synchronous design, but not in FET designs where capacitance rulers
The sense of the original post, 4 bit micros eg the 4004 have nothing to do with this.
RISC cpus, run, as a main instruction set, exactly the same instruction set that makes up the x86 microcode, ie no Pentium/AMD actually executes the x86 intruction set, it mearly interprets it; huge numbers of transistors are used for optimisations eg Register Renaming.
This is a systems/application availability issue.
When the current monopoly is broken, RISC cpu architectures, using 64 bit ALU, and probably statistical (huffman) op-code compressinion will be the future.
Finally, remember that RISC was, almost, an accident --- (Google RISC Peterson Berkeley)
The Mathematician, scientist, engineer
Plus ca change
In fact the community process, which ESR described so well is working properly,
and there is competition in the marketplace
so build your solution
dont tell the rest of us how to do it!
In all cases the installs are much easier on Linux, e.g. you dont have to apply 400 Solaris patches first and the install script usually runs OK the FIRST time, so
2 years ago I had 5 Oracle installs going on at the same time, 1 on a SUN enterprise box, supported by an experienced Oracle DBA with good SysAdmin skills
the other four on SuSE 7.3 and RH (shrinkwrap) two each, the SUN install took 4 elapsed days, done by a first-class Oracle/SUN expert,
I did the first, of four, Linux installs and the remaining three were done by young Saudi's
with about two years of experience; they took anout 2 hours each
It is the kernel and glibc, and they are 10x less buggy
This is why SUN should really open source Solaris, no LOL licence and Java.
Then bugs would be fixed not kept fresh for the next release.
I am sorry but I am getting ever more _pissed_off_ with the poor quality and no push-back on software quality
the industry is full of Pinto's _BUT_ Ralph Nader is pre-occupied elsewhere
how do you think the Civil Airline industry would work if 1 plane in 100 crashed?
There are two interesting questions here:
1: Who was responsible for this incompetance.
Where is the effective oversight?
2: When will effective competition to NASA deploy itself
Given Posting Guidelines it is hard to be pejoritive and rude enough about this totally failed organization.
This provides some level of isolation from Design Despots inside academia or corporations and especially from the marketing departments of corporations, for whom no feature is too silly. Anyone who wants a concerete example of this just need to look at the Java implementation of Regular Expressions or Date-formatting.
For years I used to oppose DEC sending only marketeers to DECUS and to encourage them to invite a cross section of engineering 'nerds'; in retrospect I suspect that this helped prevent the capture of design exclusively by marketing
The failure to include many GNU products, by default, in Solaris Distributions, is the same thing. Without Linux Perl would still not ship with Solaris; ingnorant design despots within the cathederal would have continued an effective veto!
My understanding is that copyright/patent law, in the US, stems from a Constitutional provision to encourage innovation
This only does the reverse!
The rest of this post is as mis-informed.
I have made the same point frequently; if you talk to SUN's Solaris beaurocracy they will tell you that pre-adding Perl, Python ... increases their testing
and integration costs
They need to be made to read the Catherderal and Bazar, and pass a test each Friday fo 5 years!
First, the authorities closed eyes, and in some cases complicity with sexual abuse in prison is just one reason why the US is having a hard-ride in the modern world; it is illegal under US law, contrary to to the Constitution, which almost all office holders are sworn to uphold, and un-consiencable, it is a real 'abuse of process' which ALL investigative journalists should persue. If you need to understand why there is no trust of the US abroad just look at this condoned abuse at home. This is a simple moral issue! The purpose of Prison is either (a) simply to deprive the the prisoner of liberty, or to do (a) and to make life hard, hard-labour. SO, in a WELL run judicial system you hand the serious spammer, a comersurate FINE, a short custodial sentance by sending him to JAIL for, say the 9 years with all but six months suspended. He gets to find out that jail is unpleasent, without abuse, an dosnt want to go back for 8.5 years.
Absolute NONSENSE; none of the problems of IT in a modern, sensibly designed, healthcare system are particularly hard,
and the technologies have already been developed elsewhere; since real exposure to hard cost/benefit is almost unknown
and doctors are (understandably) conservative the real problem is lack of diversity and competition ---
now it will take 9 years to find that this initiative has failed.
Framemaker, already beta'd for Linux, is important as it opens i32/i32-64 desktops outside Solaris 86.
... printing ... retail.
As another poster has noted, Document-Construction in the Large, for which Word is literally useless, the pre-print and print industries are all real markets where a combination of desktop, server and process management are required.
Sometimes, and I err in this as much as the next man, think that those of us who develop sofware and use a computer to help run our business are at risk of loosing the plot; computers are now a process tool in may industries, banking
Entirely predictably, these industries seek out value, and efficiency in the market, and sofware vendors follow the money.
I have also worked in a company set up like this
Ther results were
(a) a Project Plan needed by the CEO blocked
(b) An urgent software upgrade blocked
(c) A senior developer fired, then necessarily
re-hired as a contractor
(d) a new CIO