They need transportation, they go out and buy a truck. They need a machine tool, they go out and buy one. They need a copy machine, they have one installed.
an entirely reasonable course of action, to be sure. but you're missing something: don't these companies generally also hire someone who knows how to use the given tool? they make sure they guy behind the wheel knows how to drive, they make sure only authorized personell can fool around in the machine shop (okay, the copier's a bit weaker, but still valid: it's primarially secratary types using them). this benifits them because otherwise they won't get anything out of the tool, and it'll become a liability, not an asset. and outside of the IT world, companies recognize this. they seem to forget it in the IT world (possibly because these days the average guy on the street thinks he knows alot about computers). it's also quite possible for an untrained operator to do damage to any one of these three new tools. for their own good, they want someone who knows what they're doing in controll.
what's more, a company may be liable for damages incurred by others if the company lets unqualified people use these tools (i have no idea what kind of damages to others could result from a copier). companies with large machine shops get sued about this periodically. and with good reason. that's a basic principle they should know: before letting someone use your tools, make sure they know what they're doing. to do otherwise, in many cases, constitutes negligence under the law. companies should know that people who don't know how to drive shouldn't be given the keys to a company truck. companies should know not to let untrained people in the machine shop. companies should know tools can be dangerous when misused. and companies - and indeed people - should know that computers are just tools.
nope. just as the 21st century started at midnight, jan 1, 2001, so did the current decade. december of 2000 was part of the previous century/millenium/decade. thanks to the stupid roman catholics for creating a numbering system starting at 1 instead of 0. it's dumb, but it's what we've got.
hmm... interesting. i've never considered the AMA or state bar associations "unions". i guess they are, in a sense, but they're also much more than that. for these examples to make sense, you'd effectively have to agree that you want the state to license you to be allowed to do IT work. ick!
also, my point wasn't that unions for skilled workers don't exist, but rather that they're not as beneficial for their members. the UAW can show clear gains for its members - can unions for skilled workers? i'd like to see numbers, if they exist. and yes, the AMA an bars do provide benefit, at least to the general public (i'm glad to know my doctor's not a quack), and maybe even to their members (i pay him because he's not a quack). but, like i said, they're much more than simple unions.
You're full of it. You're the one running around, finding all the anti-union posts and yelling "FUD!" at the authors. yet i've not seen any real discussion from you on any of the points people raise.
and it's a shame, too. because there are good arguments for unions in lots of cases. I've had this discussion with inteligent people with well-reasoned arguments and lots of factual evidence to back them up. yet you make a few assertions (and not even many of those) and decide that anyone who deosn't like unions is "a boss" of some sort. you live in a fantasy world.
...and actually, the unions for skilled workers are more democratic and better represent the workers than the unions for unskilled workers.
oh? cite something for me, please. show me how a union for "skilled workers" has gotten much for its members, moreso than the UAW has. the UAW has loads of problems, to be sure, but on the whole it's a union success story. and most of its members wouldn't fit into most classifications of "skilled workers". i'd further note that, acording to the Bureau of Labor statistics, 9% of private sector workers were unionized in 2000, down from 9.5% in 1999 and ~30% in the '50s. the economy, in the US, anyway, is moving away from industries where unionization makes sense.
i mean, c'mon. i'm a reasonable, inteligent tech worker (not a manager, thank you). tell me why i should want to unionize, and should want to work for a union shop?
// If the whole industry is organized, then shutting down one company isn't so bad...
oh, yeah? for who?!? for the employees, sure, the union can just help them get other jobs (assuming, of course, enough constant growth that there's space to absorb them, which is questionable at best). but what about for the people who run the company? don't care about them, or their needs? aparently not. nor about potential stockholders, or anyone with whom the company in question has business relationships, particularly customers or debtors. allowing companies the mobility to do stuff like this (mind you, i still think this particular move is a bad idea) enables them to serve far more interests. the greater damage done to lots of other people and companies is likely to far outweigh the 3.8% annual income these folks are likely to loose (if they even choose to accept!).
um, hi. i'm not a manager. never have been. i'd just been there longer, so the other people in my department (read that "my department" as in "the department of which i was a member") expected me to know what was going on, and be able to get things done more. you assume to much.
further, and more to the point, my original post was most certainly not FUD. as i said, i think unions are great in many cases, and i gave pretty well-reasoned explanations as to why i feel that way. FUD had nothing to do with it. did you have some particular issues with the points i raised, or would you rather i simply left you alone to continue mindlessly blathering at people you don't agree with?
The galaxies arn't new, just newly spotted. Spots are all the rage for galaxies this year. Only the most tragically un-hip galaxies would be cought dead in stripes. It's just so last year.
you're correct, it's not. but i find it hard to believe that you're really out of options, as it were. there's lots of people in any good sized city looking to split housing costs. and while relocation is somewhat more extreme, it's still an option. atlanta to expensive? move. i don't mean to be overly harsh, but i find that generally people (i'm speaking for myself here, too) let pride get in the way of considering lots of options that they consider "below them".
Well contrary to what you might think smart people do NOT save money by hiding it under a matress or even leaving it in a bank. A good deal of it is in non-liquid assets like land, their house etc. This cannot just be easialy liquidated.
any competant financial advisor-type person will tell you that diversification is good. but that doesn't just mean stocks, bonds, and real estate. it means a reasonable balance between non-liquid and (at least semi-) liquid assets. i invest in stocks, mutual funds, and so on... but i also have a few month's expense's worth of liquid assets i can get at on very short notice. just like i keep ~$100 in my bedroom, for real "right now" emergencies, i keep a few $K in liquid assets in my portfolio, and the rest in relatively-non-liquid assets. it's a multi-teired cacheing strategy, which any IT professional should be familiar with.
//...living in your own apartment in atlanta is freakin expensive.
um, so get a roommate? or move in with family? trust me, i know it sucks, compared to living on your own (often, anyway). but a job and a solo apartment are not rights (well, in the US, anyway). after i was told to leave one job, i was unemployed for over a year (i wasn't looking for most of that time - i was working on other projects that just didn't pay money, living off savings). i lived with my parents. it sucked, but it was a choice. nobody's obligated to give you a job so you can afford your apartment or pay off credit card debt you've incured.
Don't get me wrong: i think unions are great things - when they're needed. There are cases where management and large corporations simply abuse certain types of workers habitually, and it's accross the industry. The cannonical example is GM laying off thousands and closing several of its oldest Michigan plants after a year of record profits and significant pay increases of top management. I'm damn happy those abused auto workers got union power involved (even if it didn't help that batch, it's served as a huge deterent aginst GM - or others - pulling that $h!t again). but they're not a panacea. first off, nobody's asking these IT workers to take a 50% pay cut - they're being asked to take a 3.8% pay cut. and yes, even union employees have to take pay cuts on occasion. the problem here isn't the lack of a union, but the lack of a contract. if that's not the type of situation you're happy with, just work for employers who'll give you a set contract. but keep in mind that puts restrictions on you, too. and do you really think it's beneficial to put the company you're trying to stop from giving you a pay cut out of business? that's never been a concern with auto workers putting GM out of business, or teachers putting the state out of business. and always keep in mind pretty much every union employee accepts less than their bosses, moron or otherwise. go watch Roger and Me as Michael Moore tries to track down the head of GM to ask him about the layoffs, and his own salary. it's downright rediculous in the auto industry, the discrepencies (and that's even just within the US). unions have done nothing to stop that.
but unions are useful when you have a near monopoly on a certain type of employment. there's, what, a half dozen auto companies working in the US? it doesn't take much co-ordination to get everyone to agree to a certain pay cap for auto workers. and this is true of why most unions got started. teachers unions: not many public school employers (unless you're willing to switch states). the IT inudstry doesn't have that problem. there's thousands and thousands of employers to choose from, whereever you are. open up the want-ads and take a look. or visit Monster or Dice, just to get an idea of the number of jobs available today. besides, let nobody forget that unions have significant downsides, as well. i've dealt directly with several, and a number of things seem common. unions tend to make it very dificult to get rid of legitamatly bad people. they impose extra layers of beurocracy (thus extra cost to all parties). they tend to even out saleries (raising saleries for under-performers, cutting them for over-performers), such that while differences exist, they're dramatically lessened. they tend strongly to institute "union shops", depriving individuals of another choice, and using that as an extortion tactic to demand union dues. and, almost invariably, they get very political, imposing political preasure on both employers and employees.
i used to work for a particular Beleagured Telecom Equipment Manufacturer (tm). i was responsable for upgrading my department's network from 10baseT/shared to 100baseT/switched. this involved me and my admin staff (all IT, non-union people), the guys who did building wiring (some union), and the guy who installed switches (some other union - ITW, i think). my staff and the switch-installer-maintainer people executed their work perfectly. but the guy who installed wiring had to literally unplug all the wires from the old hub and plug them into the new switch, which was sitting, powerd up and ready to go, directly below it in the same rack. it took 3-4 weeks.
i've got lots of other "horror stories" about waiting until after hours to move furniture around, since the union guys wouldn't get to it for 2-4 weeks, we had a new employee starting tomorrow, and if they saw me do it, i'd get official complaints filled against me, and get harrased by the union movers complaining that i'm somehow taking their job.
unions can be great when they're needed, and can be horrible when they're not. think long and hard about whether you, as an IT worker, feel trapped enough in your current job that you're willing to put up with the downsides of unions. i know i don't, and i'm not. it's just not worth it, unless there's a real pressing need - and in the IT industry, there just isn't. go work somewhere else!
oh, and for ther record, what you got against H1-B visa workers? i've worked with a few, and most have been very good at their jobs (that's why they worked for us) - and those ones got paid appropriatly (often much more than me). personal issues there?
a valid point, and one i should have made clearer, but i am aware of that. but MSFT's research still doesn't seem worth placement on that list. their speech recognition/synthesis is second tier (at best), falling well behind the research leaders like IBM, AT&T, and Lucent (um, or is that Avaya now? or both?). their alternative interface work seems well behind both what Apple's done and what various.edu's have done, like MIT's labs. the help agent work may be valid; i don't know much about it. MSFT research does have the benefit of being one of the broadest comp.sci research labs around (outside of.edu,.gov, and the Bell system); maybe that got them points. and maybe the author knows stuff i don't: there's loads of projects there i know nothing about. anyway, he definatly should have mentioned at least a sentance or two on why each entry got its slot; as it is, we're all left speculating.
well, other people have already noted that he's too focused on human-workstation/server interaction (rather than broader human-computer interaction which includes the range of computers people don't think about as computers, like microwaves and air traffic control systems). but lets look at it within that frame. easy stuff first: today. i think it's laughable that he'd include Microsoft rather than Apple, particularly given the criteria he states. Microsoft is very much doing evolutionary progressions on there Win95 UI on the desktop, and very unimpressive stuff in the WebTV realm. Apple, on the other hand, took a much more dramatic jump in the Aqua development. further, Apple does a much more thurough and complete job of UI definitions, work that MS has largely just ignored, leaving up to the app designer. it's also quite interesting that Bell Labs didn't make it in the '80s. it was 1981 when rob pike wrote the first bitmap window system for Unix, and that decade when Bell Labs created the jerq, blit, and DMD (or MDM?) series of multi-tasking graphical terminals. pioneering work that led directly to much of what came after, particularly much of the Xerox PARC and Bellcore work following it. his "fall of the good" observation is distressing, and i agree with it, but not his reasoning. Xerox and Bell Labs certainly hadn't "peaked" in any real sense by their respective apearances in the list (okay, Xerox maybe by its third). the article is less useful without notes on why a give place made the list. i certainly hope X wasn't a positive contributing factor for MIT, for example! to my knowledge, MIT did more interesting things in the '90s. and i confess total ignorance as to what PARC's done since 2000. i'd really like to, but he doesn't say. i think the author's assertions about HCI research in universities are bogus. while research universities may have avoided "real-world" research in the past, today that's nearly reversed. many universities are indistinguishable from corporate R&D arms. in particular, given CS departments' increasing trend towards vo-tech training over broad educational foundations, this becomes more and more true. but this just changes the cause, not the problem. now universities arn't likely to be involved in pineering HCI research because they're doing much smaller, more incremental improvement sort of stuff.
the article mentioned that sony tried to compromise, but how? what did the various involved parties suggest? i mean, MS has the XboX on display, with employees doing the playing; surely sony could have done the same. what's the exact rule sony was violating?
hey, he didn't say they won't get customers in antarctica, just that they don't have any yet. the distributed OS development community gets a little thin that far south...
i've responded to this article several times in several forums. the basic summary of the article is "if you mis-configure something you've installed as root, you can make bad things happen". well, gee, thanks. there's nothing specific to inferno here. inferno itself, either installed on raw hardware (like a normal OS) or hosted on top of another OS installed properly, as per the directions is quite secure, and does not have any known holes in it, nor does it expose any in the underlying system. you are instructed to install the installation as a user other than root - the fact that the author of the 2600 article gets it wrong from step 0 sort of taints his findings.
the protocol, Styx, is very efficient with its bandwidth; very little overhead (it's more latency sensative than bandwidth sensative). of course, if you're pumping mpeg movies around, there's not much to be done about that...
any connection in the system can be optionally securely hashed and/or encrypted, using well-known algorithms like sha, rc4, des, or idea (among others). authentication is based on a public key model.
Plan 9 is open source, but it is not Open Source. that is, it doesn't meet the criterion set forth by OSI for its license to get the "Open Source" mark. you can, however, get full source to Plan 9 for free and use it towards any end, commercial or otherwise.
note also that the commentary you're linking to is commenting on an older version of the Plan 9 license; most (not all) of the issues have been addressed.
Yes. Inferno applications are written in a concurrent programming language called Limbo. the language reference manual is available online, as are varous descriptions of programming in the language (and some other papers as well). the language is C-like in structure, with influences from many other places, like Pascal and Algol. of particular note are channels, a data type for inter-process communication which makes writing multi-threaded and/or distributed apps easier than in maybe any other system. it's a beautiful language.
note the capitalization. Plan 9 is open source, but due to some traits in the license, it's not considered Open Source as per the requirements of the OSI. Inferno is open source except for a few core components, which are based on a subscription license model. i'm not sure if the license covering the non-core software is Open Source, although it is open source. the core software is clearly not.
no, no, you misunderstand! the enterprising hackers at Sony have actually ported Linux to the PS/2 contollers embeded on your average PC motherboard! nobody, including the engineers who did the job, is exactly clear on why they'd do such a thing, though. "somebody told us to get Linux running on PS/2" said one Sony engineer, who asked to remain anonymous "so we did."
how on earth does this get an "insightful" mod? yes, they're forming a licensing arm. yes, they've refused to license BeOS. gee, i wonder what their licensing arm could possibly be doing. licensing PalmOS, maybe? y'know, that "other" OS they've got? the one that's actually gotten lots of industry acceptance, wide usage, and made alot of money? that one? they don't want to dilute both their efforts and the market share of PalmOS by essentially having to compete with themselves. answering the question "which one should i buy?" is alot of time they don't want to worry about.
true, the PTO is often clueless about things like prior art. but show a court, and you've got a good case for getting the patent thrown out. i'm pretty sure the Tumbleweed or laser-pointer patents have never been enforced or brought to court. those patents will stand until challenged. and Tumbleweed's likely to never take that patent to court, because they know it'll be thrown out. also, the stupider the patent, the less money you need to fight it. prior art's the easiest way to get a patent thrown out, and the cheapest ('cause it takes the least time, and is the clearest). others (like obviousness, the grounds on which most people object to the Amazon patent) are harder to prove and more subjective, and do require a better background in patent law and someone persuasive to explain why it's obvious.
i strongly suspect this is a CDDB issue, not an iTunes issue. i've inserted several import CDs, including one Japanese one (Ghost in the Shell soundtrack), and it all worked fine. kanji and kana show up as expected.
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nope.
just as the 21st century started at midnight, jan 1, 2001, so did the current decade. december of 2000 was part of the previous century/millenium/decade. thanks to the stupid roman catholics for creating a numbering system starting at 1 instead of 0. it's dumb, but it's what we've got.
hmm... interesting. i've never considered the AMA or state bar associations "unions". i guess they are, in a sense, but they're also much more than that. for these examples to make sense, you'd effectively have to agree that you want the state to license you to be allowed to do IT work. ick!
also, my point wasn't that unions for skilled workers don't exist, but rather that they're not as beneficial for their members. the UAW can show clear gains for its members - can unions for skilled workers? i'd like to see numbers, if they exist.
and yes, the AMA an bars do provide benefit, at least to the general public (i'm glad to know my doctor's not a quack), and maybe even to their members (i pay him because he's not a quack). but, like i said, they're much more than simple unions.
and it's a shame, too. because there are good arguments for unions in lots of cases. I've had this discussion with inteligent people with well-reasoned arguments and lots of factual evidence to back them up. yet you make a few assertions (and not even many of those) and decide that anyone who deosn't like unions is "a boss" of some sort. you live in a fantasy world.oh? cite something for me, please. show me how a union for "skilled workers" has gotten much for its members, moreso than the UAW has. the UAW has loads of problems, to be sure, but on the whole it's a union success story. and most of its members wouldn't fit into most classifications of "skilled workers".
i'd further note that, acording to the Bureau of Labor statistics, 9% of private sector workers were unionized in 2000, down from 9.5% in 1999 and ~30% in the '50s. the economy, in the US, anyway, is moving away from industries where unionization makes sense.
i mean, c'mon. i'm a reasonable, inteligent tech worker (not a manager, thank you). tell me why i should want to unionize, and should want to work for a union shop?
and where'd you decide he was "a boss"? stop running around spreading FUD. try responding to some of the issues i and others have raised, instead.
// If the whole industry is organized, then shutting down one company isn't so bad...
oh, yeah? for who?!? for the employees, sure, the union can just help them get other jobs (assuming, of course, enough constant growth that there's space to absorb them, which is questionable at best). but what about for the people who run the company? don't care about them, or their needs? aparently not. nor about potential stockholders, or anyone with whom the company in question has business relationships, particularly customers or debtors. allowing companies the mobility to do stuff like this (mind you, i still think this particular move is a bad idea) enables them to serve far more interests. the greater damage done to lots of other people and companies is likely to far outweigh the 3.8% annual income these folks are likely to loose (if they even choose to accept!).
um, hi. i'm not a manager. never have been. i'd just been there longer, so the other people in my department (read that "my department" as in "the department of which i was a member") expected me to know what was going on, and be able to get things done more. you assume to much.
further, and more to the point, my original post was most certainly not FUD. as i said, i think unions are great in many cases, and i gave pretty well-reasoned explanations as to why i feel that way. FUD had nothing to do with it. did you have some particular issues with the points i raised, or would you rather i simply left you alone to continue mindlessly blathering at people you don't agree with?
The galaxies arn't new, just newly spotted. Spots are all the rage for galaxies this year. Only the most tragically un-hip galaxies would be cought dead in stripes. It's just so last year.
you're correct, it's not. but i find it hard to believe that you're really out of options, as it were. there's lots of people in any good sized city looking to split housing costs. and while relocation is somewhat more extreme, it's still an option. atlanta to expensive? move.
i don't mean to be overly harsh, but i find that generally people (i'm speaking for myself here, too) let pride get in the way of considering lots of options that they consider "below them".
// ...living in your own apartment in atlanta is freakin expensive.
um, so get a roommate? or move in with family? trust me, i know it sucks, compared to living on your own (often, anyway). but a job and a solo apartment are not rights (well, in the US, anyway). after i was told to leave one job, i was unemployed for over a year (i wasn't looking for most of that time - i was working on other projects that just didn't pay money, living off savings). i lived with my parents. it sucked, but it was a choice. nobody's obligated to give you a job so you can afford your apartment or pay off credit card debt you've incured.
I'm sorry, but this is an awful idea.
Don't get me wrong: i think unions are great things - when they're needed. There are cases where management and large corporations simply abuse certain types of workers habitually, and it's accross the industry. The cannonical example is GM laying off thousands and closing several of its oldest Michigan plants after a year of record profits and significant pay increases of top management. I'm damn happy those abused auto workers got union power involved (even if it didn't help that batch, it's served as a huge deterent aginst GM - or others - pulling that $h!t again).
but they're not a panacea. first off, nobody's asking these IT workers to take a 50% pay cut - they're being asked to take a 3.8% pay cut. and yes, even union employees have to take pay cuts on occasion. the problem here isn't the lack of a union, but the lack of a contract. if that's not the type of situation you're happy with, just work for employers who'll give you a set contract. but keep in mind that puts restrictions on you, too. and do you really think it's beneficial to put the company you're trying to stop from giving you a pay cut out of business? that's never been a concern with auto workers putting GM out of business, or teachers putting the state out of business. and always keep in mind pretty much every union employee accepts less than their bosses, moron or otherwise. go watch Roger and Me as Michael Moore tries to track down the head of GM to ask him about the layoffs, and his own salary. it's downright rediculous in the auto industry, the discrepencies (and that's even just within the US). unions have done nothing to stop that.
but unions are useful when you have a near monopoly on a certain type of employment. there's, what, a half dozen auto companies working in the US? it doesn't take much co-ordination to get everyone to agree to a certain pay cap for auto workers. and this is true of why most unions got started. teachers unions: not many public school employers (unless you're willing to switch states).
the IT inudstry doesn't have that problem. there's thousands and thousands of employers to choose from, whereever you are. open up the want-ads and take a look. or visit Monster or Dice, just to get an idea of the number of jobs available today.
besides, let nobody forget that unions have significant downsides, as well. i've dealt directly with several, and a number of things seem common. unions tend to make it very dificult to get rid of legitamatly bad people. they impose extra layers of beurocracy (thus extra cost to all parties). they tend to even out saleries (raising saleries for under-performers, cutting them for over-performers), such that while differences exist, they're dramatically lessened. they tend strongly to institute "union shops", depriving individuals of another choice, and using that as an extortion tactic to demand union dues. and, almost invariably, they get very political, imposing political preasure on both employers and employees.
i used to work for a particular Beleagured Telecom Equipment Manufacturer (tm). i was responsable for upgrading my department's network from 10baseT/shared to 100baseT/switched. this involved me and my admin staff (all IT, non-union people), the guys who did building wiring (some union), and the guy who installed switches (some other union - ITW, i think). my staff and the switch-installer-maintainer people executed their work perfectly. but the guy who installed wiring had to literally unplug all the wires from the old hub and plug them into the new switch, which was sitting, powerd up and ready to go, directly below it in the same rack. it took 3-4 weeks.
i've got lots of other "horror stories" about waiting until after hours to move furniture around, since the union guys wouldn't get to it for 2-4 weeks, we had a new employee starting tomorrow, and if they saw me do it, i'd get official complaints filled against me, and get harrased by the union movers complaining that i'm somehow taking their job.
unions can be great when they're needed, and can be horrible when they're not. think long and hard about whether you, as an IT worker, feel trapped enough in your current job that you're willing to put up with the downsides of unions. i know i don't, and i'm not. it's just not worth it, unless there's a real pressing need - and in the IT industry, there just isn't. go work somewhere else!
oh, and for ther record, what you got against H1-B visa workers? i've worked with a few, and most have been very good at their jobs (that's why they worked for us) - and those ones got paid appropriatly (often much more than me). personal issues there?
a valid point, and one i should have made clearer, but i am aware of that. but MSFT's research still doesn't seem worth placement on that list. their speech recognition/synthesis is second tier (at best), falling well behind the research leaders like IBM, AT&T, and Lucent (um, or is that Avaya now? or both?). their alternative interface work seems well behind both what Apple's done and what various .edu's have done, like MIT's labs. the help agent work may be valid; i don't know much about it. .edu, .gov, and the Bell system); maybe that got them points. and maybe the author knows stuff i don't: there's loads of projects there i know nothing about.
MSFT research does have the benefit of being one of the broadest comp.sci research labs around (outside of
anyway, he definatly should have mentioned at least a sentance or two on why each entry got its slot; as it is, we're all left speculating.
well, other people have already noted that he's too focused on human-workstation/server interaction (rather than broader human-computer interaction which includes the range of computers people don't think about as computers, like microwaves and air traffic control systems). but lets look at it within that frame.
easy stuff first: today. i think it's laughable that he'd include Microsoft rather than Apple, particularly given the criteria he states. Microsoft is very much doing evolutionary progressions on there Win95 UI on the desktop, and very unimpressive stuff in the WebTV realm. Apple, on the other hand, took a much more dramatic jump in the Aqua development. further, Apple does a much more thurough and complete job of UI definitions, work that MS has largely just ignored, leaving up to the app designer.
it's also quite interesting that Bell Labs didn't make it in the '80s. it was 1981 when rob pike wrote the first bitmap window system for Unix, and that decade when Bell Labs created the jerq, blit, and DMD (or MDM?) series of multi-tasking graphical terminals. pioneering work that led directly to much of what came after, particularly much of the Xerox PARC and Bellcore work following it.
his "fall of the good" observation is distressing, and i agree with it, but not his reasoning. Xerox and Bell Labs certainly hadn't "peaked" in any real sense by their respective apearances in the list (okay, Xerox maybe by its third).
the article is less useful without notes on why a give place made the list. i certainly hope X wasn't a positive contributing factor for MIT, for example! to my knowledge, MIT did more interesting things in the '90s. and i confess total ignorance as to what PARC's done since 2000. i'd really like to, but he doesn't say.
i think the author's assertions about HCI research in universities are bogus. while research universities may have avoided "real-world" research in the past, today that's nearly reversed. many universities are indistinguishable from corporate R&D arms. in particular, given CS departments' increasing trend towards vo-tech training over broad educational foundations, this becomes more and more true. but this just changes the cause, not the problem. now universities arn't likely to be involved in pineering HCI research because they're doing much smaller, more incremental improvement sort of stuff.
the article mentioned that sony tried to compromise, but how? what did the various involved parties suggest? i mean, MS has the XboX on display, with employees doing the playing; surely sony could have done the same. what's the exact rule sony was violating?
hey, he didn't say they won't get customers in antarctica, just that they don't have any yet. the distributed OS development community gets a little thin that far south...
i've responded to this article several times in several forums. the basic summary of the article is "if you mis-configure something you've installed as root, you can make bad things happen". well, gee, thanks. there's nothing specific to inferno here. inferno itself, either installed on raw hardware (like a normal OS) or hosted on top of another OS installed properly, as per the directions is quite secure, and does not have any known holes in it, nor does it expose any in the underlying system. you are instructed to install the installation as a user other than root - the fact that the author of the 2600 article gets it wrong from step 0 sort of taints his findings.
the protocol, Styx, is very efficient with its bandwidth; very little overhead (it's more latency sensative than bandwidth sensative). of course, if you're pumping mpeg movies around, there's not much to be done about that...
any connection in the system can be optionally securely hashed and/or encrypted, using well-known algorithms like sha, rc4, des, or idea (among others). authentication is based on a public key model.
Plan 9 is open source, but it is not Open Source. that is, it doesn't meet the criterion set forth by OSI for its license to get the "Open Source" mark. you can, however, get full source to Plan 9 for free and use it towards any end, commercial or otherwise.
note also that the commentary you're linking to is commenting on an older version of the Plan 9 license; most (not all) of the issues have been addressed.
Yes. Inferno applications are written in a concurrent programming language called Limbo. the language reference manual is available online, as are varous descriptions of programming in the language (and some other papers as well). the language is C-like in structure, with influences from many other places, like Pascal and Algol. of particular note are channels, a data type for inter-process communication which makes writing multi-threaded and/or distributed apps easier than in maybe any other system. it's a beautiful language.
note the capitalization. Plan 9 is open source, but due to some traits in the license, it's not considered Open Source as per the requirements of the OSI. Inferno is open source except for a few core components, which are based on a subscription license model. i'm not sure if the license covering the non-core software is Open Source, although it is open source. the core software is clearly not.
no, no, you misunderstand! the enterprising hackers at Sony have actually ported Linux to the PS/2 contollers embeded on your average PC motherboard! nobody, including the engineers who did the job, is exactly clear on why they'd do such a thing, though. "somebody told us to get Linux running on PS/2" said one Sony engineer, who asked to remain anonymous "so we did."
how on earth does this get an "insightful" mod?
yes, they're forming a licensing arm. yes, they've refused to license BeOS. gee, i wonder what their licensing arm could possibly be doing. licensing PalmOS, maybe? y'know, that "other" OS they've got? the one that's actually gotten lots of industry acceptance, wide usage, and made alot of money? that one? they don't want to dilute both their efforts and the market share of PalmOS by essentially having to compete with themselves. answering the question "which one should i buy?" is alot of time they don't want to worry about.
true, the PTO is often clueless about things like prior art. but show a court, and you've got a good case for getting the patent thrown out. i'm pretty sure the Tumbleweed or laser-pointer patents have never been enforced or brought to court. those patents will stand until challenged. and Tumbleweed's likely to never take that patent to court, because they know it'll be thrown out.
also, the stupider the patent, the less money you need to fight it. prior art's the easiest way to get a patent thrown out, and the cheapest ('cause it takes the least time, and is the clearest). others (like obviousness, the grounds on which most people object to the Amazon patent) are harder to prove and more subjective, and do require a better background in patent law and someone persuasive to explain why it's obvious.
i strongly suspect this is a CDDB issue, not an iTunes issue. i've inserted several import CDs, including one Japanese one (Ghost in the Shell soundtrack), and it all worked fine. kanji and kana show up as expected.