I was at a start-up doing a wireless data platform for the Newton and Windows-based computers, circa 1994. Things were not ready for data even then; data was expensive, the modems were very bulky, and everything was extremely slow.
We got/some/ mileage out of a very space efficient data protocol layered on TCP (which actually doesn't need much tweaking to be a pretty reasonable protocol for wireless networks). But I'd say we were about five years too early, which is a killer for a startup with limited funding.
One really good reason -- your average "worker" doesn't keep up to date. I've lost count of the number of people who don't learn new stuff, who have never read an ACM paper, or who don't keep their skills sharp. These folks seem to drop off the radar. I see them running a lot of "consulting" businesses on LinkedIn.
If you're not learning, you're/not/ coasting. You're losing ground.
Me: I'm 50, I'm still getting promotions and working on cool stuff, and as long as I keep my head in gear I should do well. I would like to be programming well into my 60s, and right now this looks entirely feasible.
Definitely not true at any of the companies I've worked at in the past 30 years, including several start-ups, Apple, and Microsoft. I've only seen/one/ example of something that I considered prejudice, and it was against a young white guy.
Tech is about as close to a meritocracy as I've seen. If a crippled black lesbian midget showed up tomorrow and did well on an interview loop, they'd be hired at any company I'm aware of.
(In my current company, if a manager ever/uttered/ any of your points above, they'd get a stern talking to from HR, and would likely be fired if they persisted in their prejudice. Seriously).
The US had online communities (Compuserve, Genie, a number of others). Not much commerce, I'll grant you that. It took a mandate of congress to forbid the telephone companies from having a monopoly on modems to make even this much of the business happen.
I had accounts on computers on the Arpanet in 1978, back when there less than 100 hosts. After the TCP/IP switchover in 1984 or so there were thousands. Getting the protocols out of the hands of government organizations let networking expand very rapidly.
Getting the government and the control freaks out of positions of power is the best thing that happened to networking. It wouldn't have happened if this guy had been in charge; we'd have 2400 baud modems and be paying through the nose by the kilobyte, just like the phone companies wanted in the 70s.
France had MiniTel (expensive, slow, clunky and hard to use). I think they turned it off a few years ago.
Europe had the ISO networking standards. These were intellectual train-wrecks written in ivory towers by architecture astronauts; too complex to implement or use, and by the time people starting implementing then, the "RFC" world had solidly taken over. (We're left with the awfulness of X.500, X.509 and so forth).
This guy isn't necessarily an idiot. But it's who we need to fight.
I've worked (that is, helped design and ship) desktop computers (OS in ROM) that boot in about a second. Hit [reset], and a second later you're wiggling a mouse at icons.
"Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock."
I'd hate to be a developer at Nokia right now. Then again, they really, really screwed up, and it's hard to see this whole non-takeover takeover as anything but positive, given the alternatives.
Standards committees that didn't have to ship anything were responsible for a ton of late 80s to mid 90s disasters, like X.500, X.509 (certificates), and the whole of the ISO networking stack. There are borderline disasters such as SNMP. There are smoking radioactive holes where you don't want/ever/ want to go (SOAP is my favorite example here).
The proper path: Write working code, get users and customers, re-design and re-write a few times, THEN you can have a standard.
RIght -- San Jose didn't have cable modems for/years/ after they were available to the surrounding cities (this is in the heart of f--king Silicon Valley, mind you; High Tech central) because the city wanted perks and freebies from Comcast.
I suffered on dial-up, ISDN and Metricom wireless modems while my friends had megabit plus.
A big, sarcastic "Thank you, Mr. Helms," is what I said when I walked out on the worst teacher I ever had. I ditched his useless 7th grade math class in the middle of a quiz, went to the school library and started reading about real math, at my own pace.
I know you're not out there, Mr. Helms, but thank you for being enough of a loser and a jerk and a world-class bore that I finally got fed up and started learning math on my own, without teachers to hold me back.
(That school eventually threw me out; another really good thing. Honestly, being a reject of the US "cookie cutter" school system is not necessarily bad).
> That in itself would be the main reason I would never own a console these days.
Let's see: Locked down ecosystem = no viruses or malware to worry about, pretty effective banning system for people who do manage to hack their consoles and do Bad Stuff to other people, decent quality bar for games, hardware that I basically don't have to worry about (short of sending it back to the manufacturer if it breaks -- yeah, I had a RROD; the world didn't end, a week later I had a better console).
I'm happy to pay for that.
And hey, it's not like someone said "You can have a PC, or a console, but not both." Sheesh, get some perspective.
Not popular on Slashdot, but I'm very happy with Windows Home Server. We've got a bunch of Windows machines around, and it images everything automatically. I do manual backups of important stuff (e.g., vacation pictures, mail archives) on DVD and thumb drives, and do a total clone of the WHS backup directory every two months (it's less than a terabyte, and fits comfortably on a cheap HD).
The Linux boxes just have source code, so a git push to a Windows box suffices there.
Backups are stored both off-site and in a local fire safe.
About seven years ago I went from full-time Java programming to full-time.NET programming.
And after a month or so of being uncomfortable, there came a day when I thought to myself, "Oh thank God, the nightmare is over."
Real async I/O (not faking it by handwaving and mumbling "Well, do that with threads."). A wonderful native code interop story. An IDE that just worked. The ability to do user interfaces that didn't utterly suck and didn't look like they were designed by a misanthropic X-Windows hacker. Oh, it wasn't perfect, but I was spending most of my time writing code and actaully having fun, instead of wading through screwed-up configuration files and figuring out WTF was wrong with the JIT -vs- non-JIT environment.
Say what you want, but the day I left Java behind, I was quite happy.
"Worthless in practice" . . . not in my experience. Many leaks occur as people cut-and-paste or include more and more people in casual distribution ("Hey Joe, you might be interested in..."). Putting restrictions on a document helps this.
Security is a process, not a destination. Guarding against casual or thoughtless disclosure is a great mitigation; don't dismiss it because it doesn't solve the whole problem. No single thing will.
Slashdot Mirror
I just bought xboxminusone.com -- wonder if they'll want that, too?
You do know that you can do almost everything on a Windows box through an API, or through a command line tool, right?
I was at a start-up doing a wireless data platform for the Newton and Windows-based computers, circa 1994. Things were not ready for data even then; data was expensive, the modems were very bulky, and everything was extremely slow.
We got /some/ mileage out of a very space efficient data protocol layered on TCP (which actually doesn't need much tweaking to be a pretty reasonable protocol for wireless networks). But I'd say we were about five years too early, which is a killer for a startup with limited funding.
One really good reason -- your average "worker" doesn't keep up to date. I've lost count of the number of people who don't learn new stuff, who have never read an ACM paper, or who don't keep their skills sharp. These folks seem to drop off the radar. I see them running a lot of "consulting" businesses on LinkedIn.
If you're not learning, you're /not/ coasting. You're losing ground.
Me: I'm 50, I'm still getting promotions and working on cool stuff, and as long as I keep my head in gear I should do well. I would like to be programming well into my 60s, and right now this looks entirely feasible.
Definitely not true at any of the companies I've worked at in the past 30 years, including several start-ups, Apple, and Microsoft. I've only seen /one/ example of something that I considered prejudice, and it was against a young white guy.
Tech is about as close to a meritocracy as I've seen. If a crippled black lesbian midget showed up tomorrow and did well on an interview loop, they'd be hired at any company I'm aware of.
(In my current company, if a manager ever /uttered/ any of your points above, they'd get a stern talking to from HR, and would likely be fired if they persisted in their prejudice. Seriously).
The US had online communities (Compuserve, Genie, a number of others). Not much commerce, I'll grant you that. It took a mandate of congress to forbid the telephone companies from having a monopoly on modems to make even this much of the business happen.
I had accounts on computers on the Arpanet in 1978, back when there less than 100 hosts. After the TCP/IP switchover in 1984 or so there were thousands. Getting the protocols out of the hands of government organizations let networking expand very rapidly.
Getting the government and the control freaks out of positions of power is the best thing that happened to networking. It wouldn't have happened if this guy had been in charge; we'd have 2400 baud modems and be paying through the nose by the kilobyte, just like the phone companies wanted in the 70s.
France had MiniTel (expensive, slow, clunky and hard to use). I think they turned it off a few years ago.
Europe had the ISO networking standards. These were intellectual train-wrecks written in ivory towers by architecture astronauts; too complex to implement or use, and by the time people starting implementing then, the "RFC" world had solidly taken over. (We're left with the awfulness of X.500, X.509 and so forth).
This guy isn't necessarily an idiot. But it's who we need to fight.
> unless they tried to sell it, no one can say a damned thing about it
Not true. Commercial activity is not required for infringement. (So said the patent lawyer I talked to at Apple, years and years ago).
I've worked (that is, helped design and ship) desktop computers (OS in ROM) that boot in about a second. Hit [reset], and a second later you're wiggling a mouse at icons.
Meh. :-)
"Fry the friendly skies..."
Diplomacy.
"Diplomacy is the art of saying 'Nice doggie' until you can find a rock."
I'd hate to be a developer at Nokia right now. Then again, they really, really screwed up, and it's hard to see this whole non-takeover takeover as anything but positive, given the alternatives.
Standards committees that didn't have to ship anything were responsible for a ton of late 80s to mid 90s disasters, like X.500, X.509 (certificates), and the whole of the ISO networking stack. There are borderline disasters such as SNMP. There are smoking radioactive holes where you don't want /ever/ want to go (SOAP is my favorite example here).
The proper path: Write working code, get users and customers, re-design and re-write a few times, THEN you can have a standard.
Take away his TV, internet and phone and see how he likes civilization . . .
What a colossal waste of money.
RIght -- San Jose didn't have cable modems for /years/ after they were available to the surrounding cities (this is in the heart of f--king Silicon Valley, mind you; High Tech central) because the city wanted perks and freebies from Comcast.
I suffered on dial-up, ISDN and Metricom wireless modems while my friends had megabit plus.
A big, sarcastic "Thank you, Mr. Helms," is what I said when I walked out on the worst teacher I ever had. I ditched his useless 7th grade math class in the middle of a quiz, went to the school library and started reading about real math, at my own pace.
I know you're not out there, Mr. Helms, but thank you for being enough of a loser and a jerk and a world-class bore that I finally got fed up and started learning math on my own, without teachers to hold me back.
(That school eventually threw me out; another really good thing. Honestly, being a reject of the US "cookie cutter" school system is not necessarily bad).
Turn the new one into a parody; the lemmings are now Lawyers, Protected speech. Done.
"Markedly unstable" = /exploding/ poison super rats ?
That'd be fantastic.
Gosh, I would have thought that the Baby Roasting and Bayonetting business would have shown up more clearly.
The red shirts, okay. The fake nose and clown shoes, no way.
> That in itself would be the main reason I would never own a console these days.
Let's see: Locked down ecosystem = no viruses or malware to worry about, pretty effective banning system for people who do manage to hack their consoles and do Bad Stuff to other people, decent quality bar for games, hardware that I basically don't have to worry about (short of sending it back to the manufacturer if it breaks -- yeah, I had a RROD; the world didn't end, a week later I had a better console).
I'm happy to pay for that.
And hey, it's not like someone said "You can have a PC, or a console, but not both." Sheesh, get some perspective.
Not popular on Slashdot, but I'm very happy with Windows Home Server. We've got a bunch of Windows machines around, and it images everything automatically. I do manual backups of important stuff (e.g., vacation pictures, mail archives) on DVD and thumb drives, and do a total clone of the WHS backup directory every two months (it's less than a terabyte, and fits comfortably on a cheap HD).
The Linux boxes just have source code, so a git push to a Windows box suffices there.
Backups are stored both off-site and in a local fire safe.
I'd like to see nicknames, like:
Bellicose Bill
or
Ballistic Ballmer
or
Screamin' Steven
rather than boorrrrring build numbers.
Just sayin'.
About seven years ago I went from full-time Java programming to full-time .NET programming.
And after a month or so of being uncomfortable, there came a day when I thought to myself, "Oh thank God, the nightmare is over."
Real async I/O (not faking it by handwaving and mumbling "Well, do that with threads."). A wonderful native code interop story. An IDE that just worked. The ability to do user interfaces that didn't utterly suck and didn't look like they were designed by a misanthropic X-Windows hacker. Oh, it wasn't perfect, but I was spending most of my time writing code and actaully having fun, instead of wading through screwed-up configuration files and figuring out WTF was wrong with the JIT -vs- non-JIT environment.
Say what you want, but the day I left Java behind, I was quite happy.
"Worthless in practice" . . . not in my experience. Many leaks occur as people cut-and-paste or include more and more people in casual distribution ("Hey Joe, you might be interested in..."). Putting restrictions on a document helps this.
Security is a process, not a destination. Guarding against casual or thoughtless disclosure is a great mitigation; don't dismiss it because it doesn't solve the whole problem. No single thing will.