Although I'm primarily a hardware type, I've written a lot of (working!) code in my time, and Clippy et. al. personify what I call 'Software just smart enough to be stupid'.
What's amazing is that most people put up with crapware (it's an interesting exercise to turn off animated menus when confronted with them for the first time), but in this case it was so detested that 'Kill Clippy' became almost a cult call.
I use a number of very expensive tools from PCB design suite vendors, and the disconnect between those specifying the software and the needs of the users is astounding - just as with Clippy;)
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A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a Unicorn.
AT&T required it's subscribers to rent telephones from WE; they were not permitted to buy their own.
Sounds just like the thing going on here, doesn't it, with the difference that Comcast buys the set top boxes from a third party; the key is they are forcing subscribers to use this one and no other to enrich themselves via a forced revenue stream.
This issue was a major factor in the modified final judgment that broke up AT&T.
Yes, AT&T was a little different, but not that much.
Apart from that, the Communications act 1996 required that set-top boxes be freely available for consumers to purchase to prevent this sort of thing.
It would not surprise me one bit if this thing really gets off the ground.
Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.
Interestingly, Virgin Media (well, the part that used to be NTL) simplifies this for themselves by hijacking DNS requests; by which I mean it doesn't matter what you set your DNS to (such as OpenDNS) - all DNS requests go to the ISP DNS servers.
I ran into this a few years back when I was using NTL, which I now do not.
The very best are not affected by what we are pleased to call an education: They know how to think, and nothing the educational system does can remove this innate ability, no matter how hard it tries.
The rest, however, are being shunted to the sidings of science because the government might be embarrassed that their increasing scores are in fact an indicator of decreasing ability.
Superb stuff; Ray, you are clearly getting under their skin, which is a Good Thing{tm]. While we're talking of the RIAA and their sicilian techniques (my wife is a sicilian so I have to be careful...), they claim each download costs them some ridiculous amount of money in lost sales. What's really amusing here is they clearly did *not* take economics in college - the value of **anything** is what someone is willing to pay for it. In fact, in the USA (where I lived for some decades) the sticker price on a CD is merely an invitation to 'make an offer' - yes, folks, you could walk up to the counter and say "I'll offer you 20 cents for this CD" (although the bemused minimum wage counter clerk might wonder why the hell you are saying it!)
In the mass market, the value of an item may be measured by the number of people who are willing to pay 'MSRP' v. the number of people who are willing to buy a lookalike (whatever).
In the mass music market, the RIAA are pricing themselves out because they do not see the sticker price as 'an invitation to make an offer' but as a fixed price to guarantee their profit margin (see any prices go down recently on what is a highly discretionary purchase?); that does not mean I condone illegal copyright violation, but perhaps if the RIAA got a clue, they would realise that they are (to a great extent) bringing this upon themselves by still thinking they can **require** a high price for something that the market does not agree is high value - besides, if the artists actually got a significant amount of the money, I might have more sympathy.
No, (I know, it's been said many times) the RIAA is trying to maintain an old, tired monopolistic model in a medium, that is, by definition, a flat marketplace (one where the value placed by many is viewable by all potential purchasers) - such a model simply does not work here, because it requires that the perceived value not be widely available... I'm eagerly awaiting the day the RIAA admits the internet is a 'communication medium that they can not control';)
Of course, this requires the RIAA to **get a clue**, which I don't think is going to happen before they get significantly sanctioned by the courts.
Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.
I work for a multinational company in the UK that has now forbidden all laptops to be taken to the USA, amongst other measures. All our laptops have full disk encryption (from the boot prompt), but the current rules means the TSA can order the passwords (multiple) to be used to access the system. As such, employees that travel to the USA get a clean laptop on arrival and then log in to the secure network to access their files.
No company wants sensitive data to be in a data mining facility. Wherever possible, people now travel from the USA to the UK, not the other way around.
I had almost exactly this situation a few years ago. My then boss had test suites written for him in VB, and when we were designing the test software for the newest of products, he insisted it be in VB (for the Windows part, at least).
There were many problems with that, not least that the test suite had to test a number of different systems, and was distributed by nature. The test client could in fact be anything (the target system was running LynxOS). My argument was that the existing (VB5 transitioning to VB6) implementations did not give me proper access to sockets and IPC functionality, so we compromised.
The client had a VB front end, which called DLLs written in C (I wrote those for the back end access) which then did the heavy lifting of communicating with the target and invoking the tests. The VB front end dealt with data display and user interface.
From my experience, that's the best place for VB, and it also meant I could port the client to anything I wanted (I simply had to invoke tests and get results across sockets).
He was happy (he could see how the overall logic of the system worked) and I was happier because I could do the back end in a far more portable (and writeable, to me) manner.
Ethernet is pervasive. If you have a recent system, you have Gbit ethernet, although the latency kills you in highspeed interconnects, but you have to ask; is it important?
For the majority of applications, the answer is no.
For some (supercomputing really) where all processors in the cluster need to be kept busy and not waste any time getting their data, it is a big deal.
In those applications, you are not going to worry about buying the InfiniBand HCA (or Myrinet system) and the various devices that also speak (IB, Myrinet, your choice of highspeed interconnect here).
In those cases, you use what you need, not what you have.
I have actually designed a very big Infiniband switch (288 ports, 10Gb/s full duplex each port, fully bisectional), and that was a couple of years back. I also designed other things InfiniBand, but that's another story:)
I can assure you, if we can do it, they have some of them.
Oh, the throughput numbers (for a 7U rack) are 288 * 8Gb/s * 2 (bidirectional, 8b/10b encoded in the link) = 4.608Tb/s data throughput = 576MByte/sec.
PeteS
Slashdot Mirror
What's amazing is that most people put up with crapware (it's an interesting exercise to turn off animated menus when confronted with them for the first time), but in this case it was so detested that 'Kill Clippy' became almost a cult call.
I use a number of very expensive tools from PCB design suite vendors, and the disconnect between those specifying the software and the needs of the users is astounding - just as with Clippy ;)
--------------
A truly wise man never plays leapfrog with a Unicorn.
AT&T required it's subscribers to rent telephones from WE; they were not permitted to buy their own.
Sounds just like the thing going on here, doesn't it, with the difference that Comcast buys the set top boxes from a third party; the key is they are forcing subscribers to use this one and no other to enrich themselves via a forced revenue stream.
This issue was a major factor in the modified final judgment that broke up AT&T.
Yes, AT&T was a little different, but not that much.
Apart from that, the Communications act 1996 required that set-top boxes be freely available for consumers to purchase to prevent this sort of thing.
It would not surprise me one bit if this thing really gets off the ground.
Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.
I ran into this a few years back when I was using NTL, which I now do not.
The rest, however, are being shunted to the sidings of science because the government might be embarrassed that their increasing scores are in fact an indicator of decreasing ability.
-------------
Only the Mediocre area always at their best
1. Mensuration (no, it's not a female issue) - basically straight numeracy problems. No calculators or slide rules permitted.
Typical problem: Evaluate 27 ^^[2/3]
2. Algebra and Plane geometry. Just what it says. No calculators or slide rules permitted.
3. Calculus. Slide rules and/or calculators permitted.
A pass (D) was calculated:
Minimum of 50% on all 3 papers and an average of 65%.
Note there was no 'grading on the curve'.
---------------
Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.
Superb stuff; Ray, you are clearly getting under their skin, which is a Good Thing{tm].
While we're talking of the RIAA and their sicilian techniques (my wife is a sicilian so I have to be careful...), they claim each download costs them some ridiculous amount of money in lost sales. What's really amusing here is they clearly did *not* take economics in college - the value of **anything** is what someone is willing to pay for it. In fact, in the USA (where I lived for some decades) the sticker price on a CD is merely an invitation to 'make an offer' - yes, folks, you could walk up to the counter and say "I'll offer you 20 cents for this CD" (although the bemused minimum wage counter clerk might wonder why the hell you are saying it!)
In the mass market, the value of an item may be measured by the number of people who are willing to pay 'MSRP' v. the number of people who are willing to buy a lookalike (whatever).
In the mass music market, the RIAA are pricing themselves out because they do not see the sticker price as 'an invitation to make an offer' but as a fixed price to guarantee their profit margin (see any prices go down recently on what is a highly discretionary purchase?); that does not mean I condone illegal copyright violation, but perhaps if the RIAA got a clue, they would realise that they are (to a great extent) bringing this upon themselves by still thinking they can **require** a high price for something that the market does not agree is high value - besides, if the artists actually got a significant amount of the money, I might have more sympathy.
No, (I know, it's been said many times) the RIAA is trying to maintain an old, tired monopolistic model in a medium, that is, by definition, a flat marketplace (one where the value placed by many is viewable by all potential purchasers) - such a model simply does not work here, because it requires that the perceived value not be widely available... I'm eagerly awaiting the day the RIAA admits the internet is a 'communication medium that they can not control' ;)
Of course, this requires the RIAA to **get a clue**, which I don't think is going to happen before they get significantly sanctioned by the courts.
Artificial Intelligence is no match for Natural Stupidity.
I work for a multinational company in the UK that has now forbidden all laptops to be taken to the USA, amongst other measures. All our laptops have full disk encryption (from the boot prompt), but the current rules means the TSA can order the passwords (multiple) to be used to access the system. As such, employees that travel to the USA get a clean laptop on arrival and then log in to the secure network to access their files. No company wants sensitive data to be in a data mining facility. Wherever possible, people now travel from the USA to the UK, not the other way around.
Cutting off one's nose to spite one's face is so appropriate. Both parties here are just trying to get more money out of the other.
Truly hilarious.
I had almost exactly this situation a few years ago. My then boss had test suites written for him in VB, and when we were designing the test software for the newest of products, he insisted it be in VB (for the Windows part, at least).
There were many problems with that, not least that the test suite had to test a number of different systems, and was distributed by nature. The test client could in fact be anything (the target system was running LynxOS). My argument was that the existing (VB5 transitioning to VB6) implementations did not give me proper access to sockets and IPC functionality, so we compromised.
The client had a VB front end, which called DLLs written in C (I wrote those for the back end access) which then did the heavy lifting of communicating with the target and invoking the tests. The VB front end dealt with data display and user interface.
From my experience, that's the best place for VB, and it also meant I could port the client to anything I wanted (I simply had to invoke tests and get results across sockets).
He was happy (he could see how the overall logic of the system worked) and I was happier because I could do the back end in a far more portable (and writeable, to me) manner.
Pete
For the majority of applications, the answer is no.
For some (supercomputing really) where all processors in the cluster need to be kept busy and not waste any time getting their data, it is a big deal.
In those applications, you are not going to worry about buying the InfiniBand HCA (or Myrinet system) and the various devices that also speak (IB, Myrinet, your choice of highspeed interconnect here).
In those cases, you use what you need, not what you have.
PeteS
I have actually designed a very big Infiniband switch (288 ports, 10Gb/s full duplex each port, fully bisectional), and that was a couple of years back. I also designed other things InfiniBand, but that's another story :)
I can assure you, if we can do it, they have some of them.
Oh, the throughput numbers (for a 7U rack) are 288 * 8Gb/s * 2 (bidirectional, 8b/10b encoded in the link) = 4.608Tb/s data throughput = 576MByte/sec.
PeteS