Yup, native born white Americans are much less likely to sell out their country's interest for financial gain.
That's why only native-born (and until recently, white Americans) are eligible for the presidency so that this doesn't happen at the highest leve and that system has worked very well.
Some of the nastiest copy protection was for software on the Atari ST - much worse than the 680xx machine that won the battle, the Mac.
Great machine, excellent price, but except for music and maybe games, you are right that there was never enough software for it. But it had NOTHING to do with copy protection or the lack of it - just that there wasn't room for 3 680xx machines and the hardware/software geeks preferred Amigas and Macs...
Most frivolous cases are dismissed way before hearing and damages other than things like lost wages are minimal.
The BC Humnan rights tribunal handles a lot of every day cases that don't make it to the news - like people being fired because of race or perceived disability.
The tribunal essentially provides a small claims type of court to pursue such cases, and the majority of them are wrongful dismissal type of cases. We are involved in one right now and are thankful for this process since we are fighting a billion dollar corporation and will likely win without a spending megabucks on a lawyer.
I mean, come on. Should a car jacker be treated less harshly because he never would have actually bought the car at market value?
Trollish - but it's a lazy Sunday...
The actual analogous question is "what is the loss to the owner of a car's design if a copy of the car is made for private use?" In this case, whether the car copier would have bought the car at claimed market value or not does indeed speak to the losses that the car copyright holder incurs and the damages that he should receive if any...
The car jacker is analogous to the person who steals a CD from a store - which, as we know, brings far lower penalties than copying it...
OK, IANAL, but from what I understood, production of third party documents can be ordered but only after a judge assesses arguments about the relevance.
From what I read from the responses (the few that are on-topic - eyeroll), this has not happened. And from reading the article, the blogger has filed a counter-motion to quash, (and, I would hope file a further motion for costs arising from improper conduct).
So, how does this all work in the US - can a lawyer really just demand any third party documents and judicial review only occurs if the third-party complains???
And what sanctions, if any, could be imposed for such an obviously frivolous request???
It's a problem of very low standards. The shows mentioned are better than many in that they don't get *everything* wrong.
House was great in the first season when it focussed on the politics of medicine rather than the medicine itself which was always far-fetched. Then the producers got timid and decided to shy away from the controversial and focus on the medical mysteries which got worse and worse. Omar Epps really started sounding like Jordi Laforge in terms of the mumbo jumbo coming out of his mouth. The episode where they used Geiger counters to look for home radiation for something that would have required Chernobyl to cause the symptoms is where they jumped the shark for me and I stopped watching. If House has fact-checkers, they either failed (or should have failed) biology or are consistently ignored.
CSI is similar. Always far-fetched, but with enough eye-candy to provide distractions at first. But things got worse and worse - and the episode with the drug induced cannibalism killed it for me. No amount of CGI can redeem Reefer Madness propaganda.
Numb3rs lost me in the pilot - I can only remember that the equations he was using would only work in an ideal situation and the math dude would have been smart enough to realize that...
I'm OK with the odd dramatic device *occasionally* stretching a point, but these shows do it so consistently that we might as well be watching X-files or Star Trek. I like STNG as much as the next guy but it didn't *pretend* to be a reflection of the real world as these shows do...
NIH should be funding the best science period. No one can predict what will lead to what at that stage. If Americans are too shortsighted to realize this, the research and benefits will be and is moving offshore. But the malaria example was not about whether WHO or NIH should fund research but that a rational system *should* encourage some allocation of resources for the world's most prevalent disease.
The last mile work *is* fantastically expensive - no argument there *but* it is also fantastically profitable and the least risky of the entire pipeline. If it weren't, pharma would be doing the first steps too. I argue that it is fantastically inefficient. Your argument that it isn't wasteful seems to be predicated on infinite resources - that somehow because the money that went into Viagra came from people that paid for Viagra and that the advertising for Viagra came from Viagra profits that this is not wasteful. While I agree, it's not a zero sum economy, resources are limited and a system which encourages spending them on expanding a Viagra market, and shrinking Levitra's market is encouraging waste.
I gave you the example of Parkinson's and GDNF, which although the ideas came out of public funded research, has been patented for use in Parkinson's. Amgen abandoned trials because of liability issues though it is a very promising therapy. However, they still own the patent which makes it difficult for anyone else to do the research.
While we're with Parkinson's what about the attempts to market dopamine agonists as treatments for "restless leg syndrome" for which their efficacy is limited - but it does allow patents to be extended on these drugs by creating a market for a slow-release version, in case the slow-release formulation wasn't any better for Parkinson's during initial trials. This is a completely logical and natural consequence of the present system and extremely wasteful. We won't even get into the issue of delaying of drug release/development to get the maximum patent protection rather than trying to deliver the most effective product.
These are examples of where the allocation of resources to maximize profit does not coincide with the best allocation of resources to benefit the health of the population. The existence of large black and gray markets for prescription drugs, banned, abandoned or unapproved drugs (PT-141 was an example), points to serious inefficiencies in the system in delivering what people want and need. It's true that you could fix a lot of these things with some common sense, more sensible regulation/licensing and tweaking the patent system and this is probably as much as the American public could be convinced of in my lifetime
However, I look at NIH/NSF
and how fantastically successful these public funded organizations have been at advancing basic research and providing drug leads while spending very little money. If we entrust them with these tasks, why not entrust them with, the admitted more expensive but also much less technically difficult steps involved in the last mile of drug development? It requires too much trust in governments I guess...
And again, in that particular case, you're way off the mark. The money spent marketing it is irrelevant precisely because it's a good deal smaller than the profit made from that marketing.
C'mon, think that one through please. That really is nonsensical. That money was spent - it came from drug sales (and expensed so part of it came from potential tax revenue). It could have been put to better use. The whole sum, not just the profits. If it had been a public enterprise for example, the revenue from drug sales could have been put into other more productive areas than trying to expand a the market for ED drugs.
And the final part of your reply is really cheap. You have no idea what I do, or what my opinion is on DDT, or how little money is spent on malaria research. Probably less than a Superbowl spot for Levitra. If you knew the long term damage that was being done right now by cuts in NIH resulting in closing of labs and programs that will take years to rebuild perhaps you would think differently. If you knew how small the monies we are talking about relative to the wastage in the present system...
Trust me, I'm not the armchair idealogue here reading the coffee table books. I only wish there were coffee table books that explain how drug research works and how broken the system is. Things are going to be very hard to change until enough intelligent people like yourself just step back and think whether there just might be a better way to do this.
Pfizer was looking for another blood pressure medication - because blood pressure medications make money - people don't get better and they need to take it regularly.
You may be right that a publicly run research effort may have decided ED was a luxury but even so - what likely would have happened is what did happen - people testing the drug for hypertension would have reported its side effect and then people would have started using it without big pharma. Google melanotan and PT-141 and tanning if you want to see this happening as we speak and how the presence of patents and and for profit isn't "helping" the process along. While you're at it Google Parkinson's and nerve growth factor and see the effect that patents had on restricting research for one of the few avenues for a cure to this disease. Meanwhile, massive amounts of money are spent on developing slightly different particle sizes and delivery systems to extend patents on proven money makers for lifelong treatments
To me the money spent marketing Viagra/Levitra/Cialis could have been much better spent on trying to help the 0.5 Billion people who suffer from malaria of which roughly one Chicago's worth of people die each year and for which the best drugs have been developed for the cattle that graze in the sub-Sahara.
Yeah - I'm the one with misplaced priorities and lack of compassion...
if you know of a better system that capitalism to decide that number, let us know.
Essentially, the present system is to publicly (under)fund the difficult work of the basic science and then allow the private sector to patent the discoveries, remove them from the public domain, and massively profit.
In exchange, they do the technically simple tasks of clinical trials, production and assessing which drugs to release back to the public using the criterion of maximizing profit (eg viagra) rather than the health of the population (eg antibiotics or AIDs drugs for Africans).
The question should be "If you know of a worse system to develop drugs and therapies, let us know..."
It's sort of right. Usually the phenotype will be recessive - so two bad copies need exist for the condition to be seen but only one bad copy needs to exist for it to be a useful sequence. For example, although the frequency of cystic fibrosis in Caucasians is 1/400, but the allele frequency is 1/20. So you need to look at the square root which gives you much higher probability of a hit. (BTW, the frequency in Asians is I believe on the order of 1/500,000 so CF could be cured simply by outbreeding - and no - that never worked for me as a pickup line...)
Note, that you don't necessarily need to have a visible phenotype for the sequence to be useful. You might have a marker already from previous studies to allow you to identify a single bad copy.
Actually when I first learned of it in the late 70's I thought Pascal was a pretty cool and powerful language.
At that time, Fortran IV was probably the language most people learned first (BASIC was starting to take hold too...). The local university provided time and DECwriters for high school kids like myself on the weekends and gave a lecture series. One of them was on this new language PASCAL. I remember being excited at the "else" statement and the recursive functions and of course not having to worry about column 7. The string manipulation was pretty powerful too compared to Fortran. The structured stuff didn't really sink in until it was hammered into us at university
So in the context of the time, Pascal was (and still is) a perfectly reasonable general-purpose programming language. Maybe the general-purposeness of it might have hurt it more than anything else - it never was the best at anything (except perhaps enforced readability)...
Hmm, what about MVS/VM and mainframes or did someone else write these OS's?
From what I understood, IBM was thinking of writing a simple OS for the PC but didn't think the market would ever amount to anything and if it did, that the money wasn't in the simple OS. Surely, even if what you say is true, all they had to do was provide the option of a 3rd party OS or sell the machine without an OS and have people buy theirs later.
I think the difference was that MS had market share and IBM had none and that OS/2 was not an extension of Windows. It's not like a browser or a file compression routine or some format thing that could IBM/MS could use market penetration to copy, modify and then kill the opposition. Apps written for Windows had to be completely rewritten to take advantage of Presentation Manager. They would have been far better off to be a DOS replacement and force developers to choose. I remember a lot of people in the Mac camp were thinking of jumping because OS/2 really *was* cool, something no one thought about Windows...
No, 'twas Windows support that killed the beast...
on
IBM Won't Open-Source OS/2
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Back in those days I had a Mac || which was the ultimate fast coolest home machine in my geek BBS world.
Windows *was* around but it was slow and buggy on the XT/AT class machines that were around. The competition that Mac owners were worried about was OS/2 and Presentation Manager which was arguably superior to the MacOS of the day. Unfortunately, Windows came first and there were apps for it and (almost) none for the new OS/2.
So the brilliant marketing boys at IBM decided to support Windows and Windows apps under OS/2 and market it as a "better Windows than Windows". And it was - about the only stable way to run Windows before 3.1 was to run in under OS/2. So they basically supported MS's buggy product and discouraged migration of apps to their much superior system (why not just develop for Windows if OS/2 can run Windows too?). When MS finally fixed Windows, there was no reason to run it under OS/2, no reason for most of the buyers to continue OS/2 and no reason for developers to do the considerable work of porting their DOS apps to OS/2 rather than Windows 3.1.
That was the analyses that I remember from back then anyway.
If you re-read my post, I never advocated using C (though I know people that would...) for everything. I just believe that learning how things actually work under the hood is useful and should be learned early on. I can understand if you are going to learn just one language for something like a biologist who wants to do bioinformatics - then Perl/Python/Java are fine. However, for CS majors who aren't going to be sure which language or which application they are going to end up working on, learning C provides a good basis and foundation for whatever they decide to eventually pursue.
This is not an elitist type of argument, that my language is better than yours. I'm with you - the right tool for the job, and more importantly, the ability to be able to adapt and use the right tool for the job. BTW, I use Perl a lot, simply because its so quick to get something up and running when you don't have to worry about typing or data structure memory management - however, having an idea of going on underneath still helps in debugging.
I remember the transition from cards to terminals.
It was generally though of as a good thing(TM) (if you've ever had the misfortune to use cards, you'd know why) though there was some whingeing about whether people would get careless and do less desk checking since it was so *easy* to just edit and run.
As for C (C++ didn't come until much later), this was thought of as a really good thing - basically an Assembler with all the bookkeepping done for you. To an Assembler programmer, whose life is basically pointer arithmetic, C is pretty nifty. There were and still are knocks against C from the FORTRAN crowd because C code is harder to write optimizing compilers for and slower than Fortran in some situations. But back in the early 80's, it was all Fortran IV and '77 (if you were lucky) and a lot of very ugly spaghetti code. The control structures in C allowed for modern structured programming with only a small hit in performance.
The equivalent that you are looking for to Java is PASCAL which almost forced modular programming. PASCAL was a great language for teaching but it never really penetrated into the science world as C did. Probably because it was too slow and too limited or because PASCAL programmers just weren't very good since they never learned memory management or pointer arithmetic (see the Java parallels..?).
Personally, I think if you learn Assembler or C/C++ you learn a superset of skills that allow you to learn and use whatever language that is best for your situation. A C/C++ programmer has no problem moving to Java or Perl/Python but it often doesn't work the other way around...
Wow, this is a triple convergence of a bad and confusing title, summary and article (which is a summary of the actual journal article) which is unusual even for slashdot.
This really isn't about Darwinian evolution which involves random mutations and selection of the favorable ones. However, there are some characteristics which are neither advantageous or disadvantageous. There is a debate about how many characteristics are "neutral". For example, did large noses appear because they are advantageous (for warming air perhaps) or because they just worked out that way by chance. So the original paper asked this question about worm vulvas and found that nearly all the characteristics that they looked at did NOT arrive by chance but were selected for (i.e. were advantageous in some way).
It is important to note both possible results would be consistent with Darwinian evolution. The only questions being addressed are the mechanism (does evolution go through mostly neutral phenotypes before a favorable phenotype is selected) and the extent that characteristics are neutral. For worm vulvas, it appears that the vulvas that form are biased towards the most favorable ones.
Google and wiki it. You are mistaken. Sickle cell anemia occurs when there are 2 bad alleles.
You are thinking of the reason that this situation is maintained (at least as given in textbooks - whether this is really the case is harder to prove) - heterozygotes with only one sickle cell allele may have an advantage in resisting malaria.
Whether or not the factual basis is correct in the argument is of little or no consequence. The fact that you *had* to tell her immediately that she was "wrong" shows that you are WRONG(TM) in the larger sense of putting your male ego ahead of her feelings. By "always having to be right" (who knew that a slashdotter would be like this?), you stifle honest discourse which is not just about the dissemination of cold facts but about the spiritual process of trust-building and sharing emotions.
Don't worry, there'll be plenty of time for you to get schooled about this after you get married...
I find it ironic that after all these years the business dolts still don't get what was wrong with the PC-jr.
Sure, the keyboard was bad but it wasn't so much the keyboard which was quickly fixed but the fact that the machine was intentionally technologically crippled in order not to compete with the more expensive parent. Remember this was back in the day where the letters IBM actually meant something. That type of airline niche marketing might have worked but they crippled the one thing (other than the display) that even the most ignorant buyer would understand - the keyboard. If IBM, the maker of the best electric typewriters in the world intentionally made a such an obviously crappy keyboard - what did that say about the rest of the components. So when the geeks recommended other machines (as we did en masse...), people listened and the rest was history. The IBM mystique was gone forever - and attempts at this type of crude technical crippling were abandoned - or more correctly, became more subtle.
So it wasn't so much the keyboard, but what the keyboard revealed about the philosophy that killed the PC-jr and squandered so much of IBM's goodwill in the personal computing industry...
This is not about private versus government funding or about funding Science.
At this very moment, decades of the basic science research that your are talking about are being lost because of underfunding of NIH. People are leaving, labs are being shut down, students are looking elsewhere for their careers. The amount of money we are talking about is about the amount being spent on the Hubble (I called it the Rubble because of the defense contract type of incompetence that went into building it). However, because there is no Star Trek lobby, no fancy pictures, I realise that it is impossible to squeeze that money from the coffers. For that reason, and for that reason only, I don't begrudge the money being spent on the Hubble, despite the wastage and inefficiencies - it would not have gone to NIH or NSF.
But could it, should it have been better spent in other areas, if you want to do real high risk science - you betcha. Unfortunately, the reality is that people only understand big buildings and bigger machines that go ping when it comes to money being spent on science, not the minds behind them where the money could do the most good...
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, native born white Americans are much less likely to sell out their country's interest for financial gain.
That's why only native-born (and until recently, white Americans) are eligible for the presidency so that this doesn't happen at the highest leve and that system has worked very well.
Some of the nastiest copy protection was for software on the Atari ST - much worse than the 680xx machine that won the battle, the Mac.
Great machine, excellent price, but except for music and maybe games, you are right that there was never enough software for it. But it had NOTHING to do with copy protection or the lack of it - just that there wasn't room for 3 680xx machines and the hardware/software geeks preferred Amigas and Macs...
History is never simple. It is just as wrong to just remember the resistance and not the rest
See "Le Chagrin et la pitie" for a more nuanced view of the different reactions to the Germans in occupied France.
Those drunken partying Danes, at least hid and smuggled out their Jewish population.
This is utter BS and I can't believe that noone has actually called you on this. Political incorrectness cuts both ways
The "conviction rate" is less than 50% and here is a link
http://www.bchrt.bc.ca/annual_reports/Annual_Report_2006-2007.pdf/
Most frivolous cases are dismissed way before hearing and damages other than things like lost wages are minimal.
The BC Humnan rights tribunal handles a lot of every day cases that don't make it to the news - like people being fired because of race or perceived disability.
The tribunal essentially provides a small claims type of court to pursue such cases, and the majority of them are wrongful dismissal type of cases. We are involved in one right now and are thankful for this process since we are fighting a billion dollar corporation and will likely win without a spending megabucks on a lawyer.
The actual analogous question is "what is the loss to the owner of a car's design if a copy of the car is made for private use?" In this case, whether the car copier would have bought the car at claimed market value or not does indeed speak to the losses that the car copyright holder incurs and the damages that he should receive if any...
The car jacker is analogous to the person who steals a CD from a store - which, as we know, brings far lower penalties than copying it...
OK, IANAL, but from what I understood, production of third party documents can be ordered but only after a judge assesses arguments about the relevance.
From what I read from the responses (the few that are on-topic - eyeroll), this has not happened. And from reading the article, the blogger has filed a counter-motion to quash, (and, I would hope file a further motion for costs arising from improper conduct).
So, how does this all work in the US - can a lawyer really just demand any third party documents and judicial review only occurs if the third-party complains???
And what sanctions, if any, could be imposed for such an obviously frivolous request???
It's a problem of very low standards. The shows mentioned are better than many in that they don't get *everything* wrong.
House was great in the first season when it focussed on the politics of medicine rather than the medicine itself which was always far-fetched. Then the producers got timid and decided to shy away from the controversial and focus on the medical mysteries which got worse and worse. Omar Epps really started sounding like Jordi Laforge in terms of the mumbo jumbo coming out of his mouth. The episode where they used Geiger counters to look for home radiation for something that would have required Chernobyl to cause the symptoms is where they jumped the shark for me and I stopped watching. If House has fact-checkers, they either failed (or should have failed) biology or are consistently ignored.
CSI is similar. Always far-fetched, but with enough eye-candy to provide distractions at first. But things got worse and worse - and the episode with the drug induced cannibalism killed it for me. No amount of CGI can redeem Reefer Madness propaganda.
Numb3rs lost me in the pilot - I can only remember that the equations he was using would only work in an ideal situation and the math dude would have been smart enough to realize that...
I'm OK with the odd dramatic device *occasionally* stretching a point, but these shows do it so consistently that we might as well be watching X-files or Star Trek. I like STNG as much as the next guy but it didn't *pretend* to be a reflection of the real world as these shows do...
NIH should be funding the best science period. No one can predict what will lead to what at that stage. If Americans are too shortsighted to realize this, the research and benefits will be and is moving offshore. But the malaria example was not about whether WHO or NIH should fund research but that a rational system *should* encourage some allocation of resources for the world's most prevalent disease.
The last mile work *is* fantastically expensive - no argument there *but* it is also fantastically profitable and the least risky of the entire pipeline. If it weren't, pharma would be doing the first steps too. I argue that it is fantastically inefficient. Your argument that it isn't wasteful seems to be predicated on infinite resources - that somehow because the money that went into Viagra came from people that paid for Viagra and that the advertising for Viagra came from Viagra profits that this is not wasteful. While I agree, it's not a zero sum economy, resources are limited and a system which encourages spending them on expanding a Viagra market, and shrinking Levitra's market is encouraging waste.
I gave you the example of Parkinson's and GDNF, which although the ideas came out of public funded research, has been patented for use in Parkinson's. Amgen abandoned trials because of liability issues though it is a very promising therapy. However, they still own the patent which makes it difficult for anyone else to do the research.
While we're with Parkinson's what about the attempts to market dopamine agonists as treatments for "restless leg syndrome" for which their efficacy is limited - but it does allow patents to be extended on these drugs by creating a market for a slow-release version, in case the slow-release formulation wasn't any better for Parkinson's during initial trials. This is a completely logical and natural consequence of the present system and extremely wasteful. We won't even get into the issue of delaying of drug release/development to get the maximum patent protection rather than trying to deliver the most effective product.
These are examples of where the allocation of resources to maximize profit does not coincide with the best allocation of resources to benefit the health of the population. The existence of large black and gray markets for prescription drugs, banned, abandoned or unapproved drugs (PT-141 was an example), points to serious inefficiencies in the system in delivering what people want and need. It's true that you could fix a lot of these things with some common sense, more sensible regulation/licensing and tweaking the patent system and this is probably as much as the American public could be convinced of in my lifetime
However, I look at NIH/NSF and how fantastically successful these public funded organizations have been at advancing basic research and providing drug leads while spending very little money. If we entrust them with these tasks, why not entrust them with, the admitted more expensive but also much less technically difficult steps involved in the last mile of drug development? It requires too much trust in governments I guess...
And the final part of your reply is really cheap. You have no idea what I do, or what my opinion is on DDT, or how little money is spent on malaria research. Probably less than a Superbowl spot for Levitra. If you knew the long term damage that was being done right now by cuts in NIH resulting in closing of labs and programs that will take years to rebuild perhaps you would think differently. If you knew how small the monies we are talking about relative to the wastage in the present system...
Trust me, I'm not the armchair idealogue here reading the coffee table books. I only wish there were coffee table books that explain how drug research works and how broken the system is. Things are going to be very hard to change until enough intelligent people like yourself just step back and think whether there just might be a better way to do this.
Pfizer was looking for another blood pressure medication - because blood pressure medications make money - people don't get better and they need to take it regularly.
You may be right that a publicly run research effort may have decided ED was a luxury but even so - what likely would have happened is what did happen - people testing the drug for hypertension would have reported its side effect and then people would have started using it without big pharma. Google melanotan and PT-141 and tanning if you want to see this happening as we speak and how the presence of patents and and for profit isn't "helping" the process along. While you're at it Google Parkinson's and nerve growth factor and see the effect that patents had on restricting research for one of the few avenues for a cure to this disease. Meanwhile, massive amounts of money are spent on developing slightly different particle sizes and delivery systems to extend patents on proven money makers for lifelong treatments
To me the money spent marketing Viagra/Levitra/Cialis could have been much better spent on trying to help the 0.5 Billion people who suffer from malaria of which roughly one Chicago's worth of people die each year and for which the best drugs have been developed for the cattle that graze in the sub-Sahara.
Yeah - I'm the one with misplaced priorities and lack of compassion...
Essentially, the present system is to publicly (under)fund the difficult work of the basic science and then allow the private sector to patent the discoveries, remove them from the public domain, and massively profit.
In exchange, they do the technically simple tasks of clinical trials, production and assessing which drugs to release back to the public using the criterion of maximizing profit (eg viagra) rather than the health of the population (eg antibiotics or AIDs drugs for Africans).
The question should be "If you know of a worse system to develop drugs and therapies, let us know..."
Yeah they really have to show that no single strand is forming transiently before they can come up with such a unlikely mechanism.
Resistance to nucleases would be a test for example.
It wouldn't have made it into a decent biology journal, that's for sure...
It's sort of right. Usually the phenotype will be recessive - so two bad copies need exist for the condition to be seen but only one bad copy needs to exist for it to be a useful sequence. For example, although the frequency of cystic fibrosis in Caucasians is 1/400, but the allele frequency is 1/20. So you need to look at the square root which gives you much higher probability of a hit. (BTW, the frequency in Asians is I believe on the order of 1/500,000 so CF could be cured simply by outbreeding - and no - that never worked for me as a pickup line...)
Note, that you don't necessarily need to have a visible phenotype for the sequence to be useful. You might have a marker already from previous studies to allow you to identify a single bad copy.
Actually when I first learned of it in the late 70's I thought Pascal was a pretty cool and powerful language.
At that time, Fortran IV was probably the language most people learned first (BASIC was starting to take hold too...). The local university provided time and DECwriters for high school kids like myself on the weekends and gave a lecture series. One of them was on this new language PASCAL. I remember being excited at the "else" statement and the recursive functions and of course not having to worry about column 7. The string manipulation was pretty powerful too compared to Fortran. The structured stuff didn't really sink in until it was hammered into us at university
So in the context of the time, Pascal was (and still is) a perfectly reasonable general-purpose programming language. Maybe the general-purposeness of it might have hurt it more than anything else - it never was the best at anything (except perhaps enforced readability)...
Hmm, what about MVS/VM and mainframes or did someone else write these OS's?
From what I understood, IBM was thinking of writing a simple OS for the PC but didn't think the market would ever amount to anything and if it did, that the money wasn't in the simple OS. Surely, even if what you say is true, all they had to do was provide the option of a 3rd party OS or sell the machine without an OS and have people buy theirs later.
I think the difference was that MS had market share and IBM had none and that OS/2 was not an extension of Windows. It's not like a browser or a file compression routine or some format thing that could IBM/MS could use market penetration to copy, modify and then kill the opposition. Apps written for Windows had to be completely rewritten to take advantage of Presentation Manager. They would have been far better off to be a DOS replacement and force developers to choose. I remember a lot of people in the Mac camp were thinking of jumping because OS/2 really *was* cool, something no one thought about Windows...
Back in those days I had a Mac || which was the ultimate fast coolest home machine in my geek BBS world.
Windows *was* around but it was slow and buggy on the XT/AT class machines that were around. The competition that Mac owners were worried about was OS/2 and Presentation Manager which was arguably superior to the MacOS of the day. Unfortunately, Windows came first and there were apps for it and (almost) none for the new OS/2.
So the brilliant marketing boys at IBM decided to support Windows and Windows apps under OS/2 and market it as a "better Windows than Windows". And it was - about the only stable way to run Windows before 3.1 was to run in under OS/2. So they basically supported MS's buggy product and discouraged migration of apps to their much superior system (why not just develop for Windows if OS/2 can run Windows too?). When MS finally fixed Windows, there was no reason to run it under OS/2, no reason for most of the buyers to continue OS/2 and no reason for developers to do the considerable work of porting their DOS apps to OS/2 rather than Windows 3.1.
That was the analyses that I remember from back then anyway.
If you re-read my post, I never advocated using C (though I know people that would...) for everything. I just believe that learning how things actually work under the hood is useful and should be learned early on. I can understand if you are going to learn just one language for something like a biologist who wants to do bioinformatics - then Perl/Python/Java are fine. However, for CS majors who aren't going to be sure which language or which application they are going to end up working on, learning C provides a good basis and foundation for whatever they decide to eventually pursue.
This is not an elitist type of argument, that my language is better than yours. I'm with you - the right tool for the job, and more importantly, the ability to be able to adapt and use the right tool for the job. BTW, I use Perl a lot, simply because its so quick to get something up and running when you don't have to worry about typing or data structure memory management - however, having an idea of going on underneath still helps in debugging.
I remember the transition from cards to terminals.
It was generally though of as a good thing(TM) (if you've ever had the misfortune to use cards, you'd know why) though there was some whingeing about whether people would get careless and do less desk checking since it was so *easy* to just edit and run.
As for C (C++ didn't come until much later), this was thought of as a really good thing - basically an Assembler with all the bookkeepping done for you. To an Assembler programmer, whose life is basically pointer arithmetic, C is pretty nifty. There were and still are knocks against C from the FORTRAN crowd because C code is harder to write optimizing compilers for and slower than Fortran in some situations. But back in the early 80's, it was all Fortran IV and '77 (if you were lucky) and a lot of very ugly spaghetti code. The control structures in C allowed for modern structured programming with only a small hit in performance.
The equivalent that you are looking for to Java is PASCAL which almost forced modular programming. PASCAL was a great language for teaching but it never really penetrated into the science world as C did. Probably because it was too slow and too limited or because PASCAL programmers just weren't very good since they never learned memory management or pointer arithmetic (see the Java parallels..?).
Personally, I think if you learn Assembler or C/C++ you learn a superset of skills that allow you to learn and use whatever language that is best for your situation. A C/C++ programmer has no problem moving to Java or Perl/Python but it often doesn't work the other way around...
Wow, this is a triple convergence of a bad and confusing title, summary and article (which is a summary of the actual journal article) which is unusual even for slashdot.
This really isn't about Darwinian evolution which involves random mutations and selection of the favorable ones. However, there are some characteristics which are neither advantageous or disadvantageous. There is a debate about how many characteristics are "neutral". For example, did large noses appear because they are advantageous (for warming air perhaps) or because they just worked out that way by chance. So the original paper asked this question about worm vulvas and found that nearly all the characteristics that they looked at did NOT arrive by chance but were selected for (i.e. were advantageous in some way).
It is important to note both possible results would be consistent with Darwinian evolution. The only questions being addressed are the mechanism (does evolution go through mostly neutral phenotypes before a favorable phenotype is selected) and the extent that characteristics are neutral. For worm vulvas, it appears that the vulvas that form are biased towards the most favorable ones.
Google and wiki it. You are mistaken. Sickle cell anemia occurs when there are 2 bad alleles.
You are thinking of the reason that this situation is maintained (at least as given in textbooks - whether this is really the case is harder to prove) - heterozygotes with only one sickle cell allele may have an advantage in resisting malaria.
"You must be new here" also gets cheap laughs...
Irony, however, people are never quite sure of...
Whether or not the factual basis is correct in the argument is of little or no consequence. The fact that you *had* to tell her immediately that she was "wrong" shows that you are WRONG(TM) in the larger sense of putting your male ego ahead of her feelings. By "always having to be right" (who knew that a slashdotter would be like this?), you stifle honest discourse which is not just about the dissemination of cold facts but about the spiritual process of trust-building and sharing emotions.
Don't worry, there'll be plenty of time for you to get schooled about this after you get married...
I find it ironic that after all these years the business dolts still don't get what was wrong with the PC-jr.
Sure, the keyboard was bad but it wasn't so much the keyboard which was quickly fixed but the fact that the machine was intentionally technologically crippled in order not to compete with the more expensive parent. Remember this was back in the day where the letters IBM actually meant something. That type of airline niche marketing might have worked but they crippled the one thing (other than the display) that even the most ignorant buyer would understand - the keyboard. If IBM, the maker of the best electric typewriters in the world intentionally made a such an obviously crappy keyboard - what did that say about the rest of the components. So when the geeks recommended other machines (as we did en masse...), people listened and the rest was history. The IBM mystique was gone forever - and attempts at this type of crude technical crippling were abandoned - or more correctly, became more subtle.
So it wasn't so much the keyboard, but what the keyboard revealed about the philosophy that killed the PC-jr and squandered so much of IBM's goodwill in the personal computing industry...
Man, are you barking up the wrong tree.
This is not about private versus government funding or about funding Science.
At this very moment, decades of the basic science research that your are talking about are being lost because of underfunding of NIH. People are leaving, labs are being shut down, students are looking elsewhere for their careers. The amount of money we are talking about is about the amount being spent on the Hubble (I called it the Rubble because of the defense contract type of incompetence that went into building it). However, because there is no Star Trek lobby, no fancy pictures, I realise that it is impossible to squeeze that money from the coffers. For that reason, and for that reason only, I don't begrudge the money being spent on the Hubble, despite the wastage and inefficiencies - it would not have gone to NIH or NSF.
But could it, should it have been better spent in other areas, if you want to do real high risk science - you betcha. Unfortunately, the reality is that people only understand big buildings and bigger machines that go ping when it comes to money being spent on science, not the minds behind them where the money could do the most good...