I had a pretty deep fondness for Pascal back in the day, and messed around with Delphi, Modula and Oberon, but the reality is that these aren't exactly common languages anymore, at least not in commercial circles. It's a real pity too, because learning TurboPascal was my sort of "Wizard of Oz black-and-white to color" moment back in highschool, where I shed all the evils that I had learned through mucking around with various flavors of BASIC, and basked in the glory of structured procedural code.
BB is a long way from bankruptcy, so I would say that's an "advantage" it does not have, and as someone who has to deal with employment law in British Columbia, I can tell you that if you want an employee gone quickly and easily, you'd better be prepared to pay out a healthy severance of a week per year plus a significant amount on top, or you will be handed your ass in court. The last thing you ever want to be found to have pulled off was a constructive dismissal. You want a severance package to give to the employee you want to terminate, and then you need to tell them before they agree to it that they should seek legal council. Under no circumstances do you want the severance agreement to look coerced.
BB will lose because a court will most certainly find that BB's obligation to those employees followed them to the subsidiary. That along with what appears to be clear motive to get them off of BB's books and then try a quick and dirty termination, not to mention the highly dubious nature of getting their signatures on a piece of paper, will almost certainly lead to extra damages being awarded.
BB should just pay them a boatload of fucking money (BB may not have customers, but it still has a fuck ton of cash), and make this go away. And then who they should really fire is their HR department.
I don't think BB would have violated any Federal laws up here, but they most certainly violated Ontario labor law. This is a classic case of constructive dismissal. Transferring employees to a subsidiary does not abrogate any legal or contractual obligations BB has to those employees, and since it's clear the intent here was to get them off of BB's books and then throw them out the door, that will make the constructive dismissal claims by the employees all the stronger.
My totally non-legal advice to BB is get out the checkbook, because they do not want a judge to make the finding and come up with the employees' award.
In Canadian Labour law there's the notion of "constructive dismissal" (I'm sure there must be similar principles in the US), wherein an employer creates conditions in which an employee is effectively terminated, without an actual notice of layoff or termination. The classic example is reducing an employee's hours to or near 0. In most jurisdictions in Canada, "constructive dismissal" is viewed as a termination, and when that happens, no notice has been given commensurate with the employee's length of time working for the company, and that employee is due severance. Such actions also can cause serious with an employee being able to receive unemployment benefits, as the employee does not receive a "Record of Employment" showing the number of hours he worked.
As a followup, I think quantum computing probably is one area of ongoing research that is far more recent than work on digital computer theory, so that is a field that isn't really deeply rooted in traditional computer science.
I'm really hard pressed to think of any major new theoretical computational breakthroughs in the last few decades. Material development, allowing the packing of more and more logic into chips certainly has kept pace, but the underlying logical structures themselves are, so far as I can tell, well-rooted in the computer science developments from the WWII era until the late 1960s. A lot of what seems new, even if it wasn't implemented on production machines, was at least partially implemented in various prototypes. IBM, HP, Xerox, Honeywell and the likely have warehouses filled with test machines that worked on concepts ranging from massive parallelism to virtualization.
A classic case of an RPC system is a DDE link, where a wordprocessor document has a link to a spreadsheet via DDE or OLE link (the latter being a CORBA implementation). An asynchronous DDE or OLE link means you can keep working on the document, and possibly, depending on your implementation, even on the linked spreadsheet cells, without waiting for the spreadsheet to update. AJAX is simply just a form of asynchronous RPC. It's not new, and by god, it's fucking awful to use unless you're using an abstraction layer like a javascript framework. And really, the idea of asynchronous IPC goes back decades, classic examples being database forms that can continue to receive user input even while waiting for communications with the database. The idea that you might want to do some client-side processing or that a client-side process, including a deata entry form, can continue to "work" (whatever that work might be) predates AJAX by decades.
How is asynchronous RPC in CORBA and its implementations not an example of this? For goodness sake, even most IPC systems have asynchronous modes. If there's anything that novel about AJAX, it's JSON, but that's little more than XML "on the wire". The only thing AJAX is is "asynchronous web form communications on a browser", and there were pre-AJAX techniques like IFORMS and persistent HTTP connections.
Even if I could listen to FM radio, why would I? Honestly, I don't even use the radio in my car anymore. It's been ten years or more since I listened to the radio.
The big change in many cases has simply been that consumer and enterprise-grade PCs are now capable of the kind of processing that was only available to mainframes up until the last ten to fifteen years. Another responder to my thread tried to reject my statement by saying *he* didn't have access to such technologies, which seems a rather absurd standard. The fact is that IBM was working with virtualization and parallel computing in the late 1960s, and IBM, MIT and other R&D organizations spent the first decades of the computing era developing all sorts of technologies and techniques, but the cost of hardware in those days meant only very large government, academic and corporate organizations could actually afford them.
I think you're going to find that mixing up client-server models has been around for decades. Yes, specific applications like AJAX didn't exist, but most certainly the underlying concepts have been around and used in various systems for a very long time.
They were at least doing simulation work on parallelism back in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the 1980s, as you say, mainframes were using these techniques extensively. IBM pioneered virtualization in the 1970s largely because they needed to support legacy applications on newer hardware.
It seems strange to me that someone would claim that thirty years worth of intensive CS research doesn't count because they didn't get it on their PC until the last ten years.
To be perfectly blunt, much of the work that constitutes modern computing was done in the 1950s and 1960s. Parallel computing, virtualization, all these things were either developed on paper or implemented in some form long before many of us were born. It's often why I find software patents so absurd, because they pretend that somehow someone thirty or forty years ago didn't develop something like it.
Unless you have ready access to rather cheap wood, buying properly seasoned wood is fairly expensive, and even where you have access to a ready supply of firewood, cutting, splitting and stacking is a LOT of work. I know, when I was a kid we had a wood furnace in the basement and a fireplace in the livingroom, and in the spring I'd be helping my grandfather and my cousin get firewood, either from clear cuts where my grandfather had a firewood license, or on his own property. To get enough firewood to last through the winter was a fairly significant amount of work, and I remember my old man observing that if we were all being paid minimum wage for the amount of work we were doing (even back in the mid-1980s), it wouldn't have been that much more for oil or electric heat.
I really do feel that, in this Age of Trump, the days of the AC should come to an end. I know that a pseudonym isn't much better, but in general, the quality of posts is at least a little higher from those who have actually taken the time to create an account and log in to it.
I'm sorry, there are unlikely to be any substantial amounts of power generated by fossil fuels by 2100. Storage technologies will almost certainly have overcome any difficulties like that. This is little more than the absurd claims of people who just want to believe investing in fossil fuels is a long-term viable way to use your money.
That are at the best 90% effective. It doesn't reduce all the sulfur dioxide and other noxious compounds, and does little or nothing to reduce CO2 emissions.
If market forces were allowed their way, the Great Lakes would still be a toxic soup. Sometimes a government has to step in to prevent industries from fucking things up. I may remind you that that great conservative lion Ronald Reagan did a helluva lot of the initial work on what is, or was until a few weeks ago, the government's push to try to clean up polluting industries.
Sure there is! They have this magic smokestacks that take coal smoke and turn it into magic rainbows! It's true. It works on much the same principal as cigarette filters do, filtering out the nastiness and leaving only the cool, sweet smoke that leading chiropractors have determined is actually healthy!
Well, unless you're using the Invisible Hand as a sort of religious icon masking the fact that you want to take part in short term profiteering regardless of any long-term effects your business may be causing. Those that want to keep doing nasty things like selling cigarettes to children or vomiting sulfur dioxide and CO2 into the atmosphere will often decry any attempt to limit the harm their business cause by praying to the Invisible Hand, declaring that any attempt to interfere with this deity will lead to Communism or some other sort of ideological bogeyman to scare Rust Belt types into believing that America will only be great so long as a few rather rich people accrue even more money.
Natural gas killed coal, and by the time natural gas is on the decline, coal will be even less viable. It's done. Besides, why in the hell would you even want to burn the stuff? Apart from CO2 emissions, so much effort has to be put into keeping it from ruining the environment and poisoning everyone around it that it's a good thing they're erecting its tombstone.
I think BB should give investors back their money and fold up. They can spin off QNX if they really do think they have a hope in hell of ultimately outcompeting Google and the other RTOS offerings, but BB as a phone manufacturer is dead dead dead, and if all it's going to do is keep the scam going a few more years with its aging portfolio of patents, then all it really is doing is guaranteeing Chen and senior management undeserved salaries.
I had a pretty deep fondness for Pascal back in the day, and messed around with Delphi, Modula and Oberon, but the reality is that these aren't exactly common languages anymore, at least not in commercial circles. It's a real pity too, because learning TurboPascal was my sort of "Wizard of Oz black-and-white to color" moment back in highschool, where I shed all the evils that I had learned through mucking around with various flavors of BASIC, and basked in the glory of structured procedural code.
BB is a long way from bankruptcy, so I would say that's an "advantage" it does not have, and as someone who has to deal with employment law in British Columbia, I can tell you that if you want an employee gone quickly and easily, you'd better be prepared to pay out a healthy severance of a week per year plus a significant amount on top, or you will be handed your ass in court. The last thing you ever want to be found to have pulled off was a constructive dismissal. You want a severance package to give to the employee you want to terminate, and then you need to tell them before they agree to it that they should seek legal council. Under no circumstances do you want the severance agreement to look coerced.
BB will lose because a court will most certainly find that BB's obligation to those employees followed them to the subsidiary. That along with what appears to be clear motive to get them off of BB's books and then try a quick and dirty termination, not to mention the highly dubious nature of getting their signatures on a piece of paper, will almost certainly lead to extra damages being awarded.
BB should just pay them a boatload of fucking money (BB may not have customers, but it still has a fuck ton of cash), and make this go away. And then who they should really fire is their HR department.
I don't think BB would have violated any Federal laws up here, but they most certainly violated Ontario labor law. This is a classic case of constructive dismissal. Transferring employees to a subsidiary does not abrogate any legal or contractual obligations BB has to those employees, and since it's clear the intent here was to get them off of BB's books and then throw them out the door, that will make the constructive dismissal claims by the employees all the stronger.
My totally non-legal advice to BB is get out the checkbook, because they do not want a judge to make the finding and come up with the employees' award.
In Canadian Labour law there's the notion of "constructive dismissal" (I'm sure there must be similar principles in the US), wherein an employer creates conditions in which an employee is effectively terminated, without an actual notice of layoff or termination. The classic example is reducing an employee's hours to or near 0. In most jurisdictions in Canada, "constructive dismissal" is viewed as a termination, and when that happens, no notice has been given commensurate with the employee's length of time working for the company, and that employee is due severance. Such actions also can cause serious with an employee being able to receive unemployment benefits, as the employee does not receive a "Record of Employment" showing the number of hours he worked.
As a followup, I think quantum computing probably is one area of ongoing research that is far more recent than work on digital computer theory, so that is a field that isn't really deeply rooted in traditional computer science.
I'm really hard pressed to think of any major new theoretical computational breakthroughs in the last few decades. Material development, allowing the packing of more and more logic into chips certainly has kept pace, but the underlying logical structures themselves are, so far as I can tell, well-rooted in the computer science developments from the WWII era until the late 1960s. A lot of what seems new, even if it wasn't implemented on production machines, was at least partially implemented in various prototypes. IBM, HP, Xerox, Honeywell and the likely have warehouses filled with test machines that worked on concepts ranging from massive parallelism to virtualization.
A classic case of an RPC system is a DDE link, where a wordprocessor document has a link to a spreadsheet via DDE or OLE link (the latter being a CORBA implementation). An asynchronous DDE or OLE link means you can keep working on the document, and possibly, depending on your implementation, even on the linked spreadsheet cells, without waiting for the spreadsheet to update. AJAX is simply just a form of asynchronous RPC. It's not new, and by god, it's fucking awful to use unless you're using an abstraction layer like a javascript framework. And really, the idea of asynchronous IPC goes back decades, classic examples being database forms that can continue to receive user input even while waiting for communications with the database. The idea that you might want to do some client-side processing or that a client-side process, including a deata entry form, can continue to "work" (whatever that work might be) predates AJAX by decades.
How is asynchronous RPC in CORBA and its implementations not an example of this? For goodness sake, even most IPC systems have asynchronous modes. If there's anything that novel about AJAX, it's JSON, but that's little more than XML "on the wire". The only thing AJAX is is "asynchronous web form communications on a browser", and there were pre-AJAX techniques like IFORMS and persistent HTTP connections.
Even if I could listen to FM radio, why would I? Honestly, I don't even use the radio in my car anymore. It's been ten years or more since I listened to the radio.
How is AJAX simply not a form of RPC?
The big change in many cases has simply been that consumer and enterprise-grade PCs are now capable of the kind of processing that was only available to mainframes up until the last ten to fifteen years. Another responder to my thread tried to reject my statement by saying *he* didn't have access to such technologies, which seems a rather absurd standard. The fact is that IBM was working with virtualization and parallel computing in the late 1960s, and IBM, MIT and other R&D organizations spent the first decades of the computing era developing all sorts of technologies and techniques, but the cost of hardware in those days meant only very large government, academic and corporate organizations could actually afford them.
I think you're going to find that mixing up client-server models has been around for decades. Yes, specific applications like AJAX didn't exist, but most certainly the underlying concepts have been around and used in various systems for a very long time.
They were at least doing simulation work on parallelism back in the 1960s and 1970s, and by the 1980s, as you say, mainframes were using these techniques extensively. IBM pioneered virtualization in the 1970s largely because they needed to support legacy applications on newer hardware.
It seems strange to me that someone would claim that thirty years worth of intensive CS research doesn't count because they didn't get it on their PC until the last ten years.
To be perfectly blunt, much of the work that constitutes modern computing was done in the 1950s and 1960s. Parallel computing, virtualization, all these things were either developed on paper or implemented in some form long before many of us were born. It's often why I find software patents so absurd, because they pretend that somehow someone thirty or forty years ago didn't develop something like it.
Unless you have ready access to rather cheap wood, buying properly seasoned wood is fairly expensive, and even where you have access to a ready supply of firewood, cutting, splitting and stacking is a LOT of work. I know, when I was a kid we had a wood furnace in the basement and a fireplace in the livingroom, and in the spring I'd be helping my grandfather and my cousin get firewood, either from clear cuts where my grandfather had a firewood license, or on his own property. To get enough firewood to last through the winter was a fairly significant amount of work, and I remember my old man observing that if we were all being paid minimum wage for the amount of work we were doing (even back in the mid-1980s), it wouldn't have been that much more for oil or electric heat.
I really do feel that, in this Age of Trump, the days of the AC should come to an end. I know that a pseudonym isn't much better, but in general, the quality of posts is at least a little higher from those who have actually taken the time to create an account and log in to it.
Yeah, the best thing to do is to totally shoot the messenger!
I'm sorry, there are unlikely to be any substantial amounts of power generated by fossil fuels by 2100. Storage technologies will almost certainly have overcome any difficulties like that. This is little more than the absurd claims of people who just want to believe investing in fossil fuels is a long-term viable way to use your money.
That are at the best 90% effective. It doesn't reduce all the sulfur dioxide and other noxious compounds, and does little or nothing to reduce CO2 emissions.
Burning coal is just plain bad.
If market forces were allowed their way, the Great Lakes would still be a toxic soup. Sometimes a government has to step in to prevent industries from fucking things up. I may remind you that that great conservative lion Ronald Reagan did a helluva lot of the initial work on what is, or was until a few weeks ago, the government's push to try to clean up polluting industries.
Sure there is! They have this magic smokestacks that take coal smoke and turn it into magic rainbows! It's true. It works on much the same principal as cigarette filters do, filtering out the nastiness and leaving only the cool, sweet smoke that leading chiropractors have determined is actually healthy!
Well, unless you're using the Invisible Hand as a sort of religious icon masking the fact that you want to take part in short term profiteering regardless of any long-term effects your business may be causing. Those that want to keep doing nasty things like selling cigarettes to children or vomiting sulfur dioxide and CO2 into the atmosphere will often decry any attempt to limit the harm their business cause by praying to the Invisible Hand, declaring that any attempt to interfere with this deity will lead to Communism or some other sort of ideological bogeyman to scare Rust Belt types into believing that America will only be great so long as a few rather rich people accrue even more money.
Natural gas killed coal, and by the time natural gas is on the decline, coal will be even less viable. It's done. Besides, why in the hell would you even want to burn the stuff? Apart from CO2 emissions, so much effort has to be put into keeping it from ruining the environment and poisoning everyone around it that it's a good thing they're erecting its tombstone.
I think BB should give investors back their money and fold up. They can spin off QNX if they really do think they have a hope in hell of ultimately outcompeting Google and the other RTOS offerings, but BB as a phone manufacturer is dead dead dead, and if all it's going to do is keep the scam going a few more years with its aging portfolio of patents, then all it really is doing is guaranteeing Chen and senior management undeserved salaries.