The Bell telephone monopoly might have done a bunch of good things, but as we can see from the Microsoft PC OS monopoly, there are downsides to keeping a company in a monopoly position for too long.
Sorry to be contrary again, but Microsoft isn't a monopoly in the same way that the Bell System was. Microsoft is a big company that plays fast and loose with its majority position in the market. The Bell System was a legally sanctioned monopoly
regulated
by a consent decree. The Microsoft of your example has a beast of an OS that they develop with huge armies of coders. It's full of obfuscation and DRM and bloat. Bell Labs had Kernighan and Ritchie (and Thompson and fewer than 10 other main guys) who developed UNIX that ran timesharing on PDP11s with 128k RAM, and by 1985, it had 95% of all the goodness that modern Mac/Win/Lin OSes have. BTL UNIX was the opposite of obfuscated and bloated. Well, that's was true through V6. By the time System V came about, the system started to grow fatter and creepy features started creeping in, but I'm not talking about the same order of magnitude of bloat that MS provides in its products
Round about that time I started marveling at how cool UNIX (and BSD and SunOS) were getting, right around the time they got squashed by the Microsoft marketing machine. Remember, the Bell System wasn't allowed to compete with Microsoft - that was the regulated monopoly consent decree thing.
I'm not even saying that the Bell System was alone in supporting basic research. Other big research players were IBM, Xerox, HP, GE, Kodak, and such companies, but eventually the accountants came with their steely knives and that's life in the fast lane.
Re advocating research in academia, that's nice, but academia can't really afford research unless it's supported by industry. And modern industry can't afford to support basic research at universities any more than it can support its own basic research. The shareholders say, "basic research? how does that help our share value?"
True, but prodding and breaking up monopolies/centralized control structures allowed for greater innovation, such as: cell phones, ability to choose phone providers, and being able to actually purchase your own home phone.
I disagree. Breaking up the service monopolies (like the Bell System) enabled greedy companies to skim cream from centers of high profit (like businesses and dense urban areas) at the expense of residential and rural customers.
Your examples of innovation are weak. Bell Labs invented AMPS, an early cell phone system, and did lots of cell communication research before that. They did scads of other basic research too. Choice of phone providers and buying your phone aren't great innovation.
I'm not saying that the Bell System monopoly was good or bad, but its monopoly position enabled it to finance true research and innovation. Today's competitive commerce does not allow that kind of research and innovation at all - any "research" investment is in applied research, and is all about short term profits.
As it turns out, one of the original text adventures ("Adventure", IIRC) was written in Cambridge, England, so I got to be wrong twice in one discussion.
The original text
adventure was written by Will Crowther, while working at BBN in Cambridge, MA, USA.
Airplane avionics systems must be free of bugs, or people die.
While I agree that the the avionics system must be safe, your statement implies that these military avionics systems are old, well-worn, and safe. But the article quoted (from The Register) notes:
A recent B-2 crash shortly after takeoff at the Pacific island of Guam was caused by a false sensor data feed into the OFP, resulting from an airspeed measuring device being affected by tropical moisture.
So moist sensors can crash a $2 billion B-2, but upgrading a 1MHz 25kB processor is too risky. I think you need to base your risk assessment on facts and statistics, rather than on black and white statements like old time-tested systems are safer than newer ones. It's possible that a newer system would have safety advantages from more modern language technology, like more type-safe, better error checking and handling, faster control loops, harder real-time, better simulation tools, etc.
I am aware that conservative groups like military ones are often more comfortable with "the devil they know," but they might not always be right.
No, it's probably you. In days of old, C's =- operator was equivalent to its present-day -= operator, as is clearly shown in the example.
For conclusive evidence, see Dennis Ritchie's article, The Development of the C Language. See the section headed "More History." It discusses =+, which was a sibling of =- . Ritchie says it was fixed in 1976 (by allowing +=), but I remember compilers also accepting the deprecated =- until 1980 or so.
If I recall, this is how Carter won that suit. AT&T always claimed that they were concerned that if competitors connected their hardware to the AT&T network that they might damage the network with badly coupled electrical loads, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ringer_equivalence_number
Carterphone had a device where the handset sat in the cradle of their device, it worked in a similar manner to the later acoustically coupled modems, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler
So there was no electrical connection (coupling) between the Carter device and the phone. The device had a cradle that the handset sat in, coupling the mic and the speaker. The AT&T lawyers said, well, your device is touching our handset. So Carter lifted the handset an inch out of the coupler, and said, is this too close? The AT&T lawyer said yes. So Carter carried his device across the room and said is this too close? The lawyer said no. Then Carter moved closer and closer, and AT&T's defense crumbled.
maybe this is off topic, but i'm amused that in an article about high tech, they include 5 photos that are each about 2 megabytes that they shrink to about 2% of their original size for display. not very technically astute.
Pong paddle control requires movement in only one dimension. A typical mouse coordinates movement in two dimensions (without scroll wheels, buttons, etc). I am not familiar with the OCZ device, but using Pong as a demo seems like a low hurdle for a pointing device or for a device that interprets brain stimuli.
The cnet article missed the interesting bit - that Roku's founder (and Replay TV's as well), Anthony Wood, worked at Neflix for a while on this and then returned to Roku, and Neflix bought a stake in Roku, as reported
here.
It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.
This quote is quaint, and is often repeated on the web, but I see no record of it in "The Origin of the Species" or anywhere on the referenced Darwin site or in any other reliable source. Wikiquote claims that it's a
misattribution.
I would rather have it tell me when she is under ground level so I could catch her digging.
GPS is not designed to provide an accurate measure of
altitude. There are altimeters you could use to see if your animal got under a fence or up a tree, but GPS wouldn't be ideal for that purpose.
Cyber is the noun it's part of the name of the command the article is about.
I think that's tenuous. When an adjective is part of a name, that doesn't make it a noun. In the name "the White House," White is part of the name, but it's still an adjective, not a noun.
In the article, and in the name of the organization, cyber a shorthand for cyber-warfare. When they say "Cyber Command," it's not the command that's cyber, it's the warfare. And even if they are using cyber as a noun, they are intending "cyber warfare." Of course, teens use it as a verb.
All I can picture is a pimply teenager sitting in front a flickering screen, typing "Wanna cyber????"
You can only picture a teenager because for you, the implicit noun modified by cyber- is sex - arguably the default focus of a teen's attention. For the military, the implicit noun is war - that is the default focus of their attention. It is clear that cyber- is an adjective prefix that indicates computation. What it means when the noun is implied is in the mind of the beholder.
Ssh, as in "Ssh, it's a secret." If everybody knew, it wouldn't be a surprise. I will look for prior art on the use of "ssh" for keeping secrets that predates its use in secure net technology. I'll get right back to you on that.
Slashdot Mirror
George W. Bush got an MBA from Harvard, which is considered a first-tier business school.
Sorry to be contrary again, but Microsoft isn't a monopoly in the same way that the Bell System was. Microsoft is a big company that plays fast and loose with its majority position in the market. The Bell System was a legally sanctioned monopoly regulated by a consent decree. The Microsoft of your example has a beast of an OS that they develop with huge armies of coders. It's full of obfuscation and DRM and bloat. Bell Labs had Kernighan and Ritchie (and Thompson and fewer than 10 other main guys) who developed UNIX that ran timesharing on PDP11s with 128k RAM, and by 1985, it had 95% of all the goodness that modern Mac/Win/Lin OSes have. BTL UNIX was the opposite of obfuscated and bloated. Well, that's was true through V6. By the time System V came about, the system started to grow fatter and creepy features started creeping in, but I'm not talking about the same order of magnitude of bloat that MS provides in its products
Round about that time I started marveling at how cool UNIX (and BSD and SunOS) were getting, right around the time they got squashed by the Microsoft marketing machine. Remember, the Bell System wasn't allowed to compete with Microsoft - that was the regulated monopoly consent decree thing.
I'm not even saying that the Bell System was alone in supporting basic research. Other big research players were IBM, Xerox, HP, GE, Kodak, and such companies, but eventually the accountants came with their steely knives and that's life in the fast lane.
Re advocating research in academia, that's nice, but academia can't really afford research unless it's supported by industry. And modern industry can't afford to support basic research at universities any more than it can support its own basic research. The shareholders say, "basic research? how does that help our share value?"
I disagree. Breaking up the service monopolies (like the Bell System) enabled greedy companies to skim cream from centers of high profit (like businesses and dense urban areas) at the expense of residential and rural customers.
Your examples of innovation are weak. Bell Labs invented AMPS, an early cell phone system, and did lots of cell communication research before that. They did scads of other basic research too. Choice of phone providers and buying your phone aren't great innovation.
I'm not saying that the Bell System monopoly was good or bad, but its monopoly position enabled it to finance true research and innovation. Today's competitive commerce does not allow that kind of research and innovation at all - any "research" investment is in applied research, and is all about short term profits.
One Bell System, it worked.
-trb (at BTL 1978-83)
http://groups.google.com/group/fa.unix-wizards/msg/13aa7081ac516aff?dmode=source
The original text adventure was written by Will Crowther, while working at BBN in Cambridge, MA, USA.
While I agree that the the avionics system must be safe, your statement implies that these military avionics systems are old, well-worn, and safe. But the article quoted (from The Register) notes:
So moist sensors can crash a $2 billion B-2, but upgrading a 1MHz 25kB processor is too risky. I think you need to base your risk assessment on facts and statistics, rather than on black and white statements like old time-tested systems are safer than newer ones. It's possible that a newer system would have safety advantages from more modern language technology, like more type-safe, better error checking and handling, faster control loops, harder real-time, better simulation tools, etc.
I am aware that conservative groups like military ones are often more comfortable with "the devil they know," but they might not always be right.
If the processor has a flash area that can be used to patch processor bugs, I imagine that a crafty black hat could put bugs in there too.
No, it's probably you. In days of old, C's =- operator was equivalent to its present-day -= operator, as is clearly shown in the example. For conclusive evidence, see Dennis Ritchie's article, The Development of the C Language. See the section headed "More History." It discusses =+, which was a sibling of =- . Ritchie says it was fixed in 1976 (by allowing +=), but I remember compilers also accepting the deprecated =- until 1980 or so.
Carterphone had a device where the handset sat in the cradle of their device, it worked in a similar manner to the later acoustically coupled modems, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acoustic_coupler
So there was no electrical connection (coupling) between the Carter device and the phone. The device had a cradle that the handset sat in, coupling the mic and the speaker. The AT&T lawyers said, well, your device is touching our handset. So Carter lifted the handset an inch out of the coupler, and said, is this too close? The AT&T lawyer said yes. So Carter carried his device across the room and said is this too close? The lawyer said no. Then Carter moved closer and closer, and AT&T's defense crumbled.
Also linked from the wikipedia article is a biograpical documentary film about Otlet, mostly in English with some French, hosted by archive.org .
If you take a photo of the sun and look at the image on this monitor, you can blind yourself.
maybe this is off topic, but i'm amused that in an article about high tech, they include 5 photos that are each about 2 megabytes that they shrink to about 2% of their original size for display. not very technically astute.
Pong paddle control requires movement in only one dimension. A typical mouse coordinates movement in two dimensions (without scroll wheels, buttons, etc). I am not familiar with the OCZ device, but using Pong as a demo seems like a low hurdle for a pointing device or for a device that interprets brain stimuli.
I believe the word you're looking for is "snackurity."
The cnet article missed the interesting bit - that Roku's founder (and Replay TV's as well), Anthony Wood, worked at Neflix for a while on this and then returned to Roku, and Neflix bought a stake in Roku, as reported here.
Feel free to run Windows, if that's what you prefer.
This quote is quaint, and is often repeated on the web, but I see no record of it in "The Origin of the Species" or anywhere on the referenced Darwin site or in any other reliable source. Wikiquote claims that it's a misattribution.
There's no taste for accounting.
When person A calls person B an idiot, it doesn't indicate that person B is an idiot. It does indicate that person A berates people.
GPS is not designed to provide an accurate measure of altitude. There are altimeters you could use to see if your animal got under a fence or up a tree, but GPS wouldn't be ideal for that purpose.
I think that's tenuous. When an adjective is part of a name, that doesn't make it a noun. In the name "the White House," White is part of the name, but it's still an adjective, not a noun.
In the article, and in the name of the organization, cyber a shorthand for cyber-warfare. When they say "Cyber Command," it's not the command that's cyber, it's the warfare. And even if they are using cyber as a noun, they are intending "cyber warfare." Of course, teens use it as a verb.
You can only picture a teenager because for you, the implicit noun modified by cyber- is sex - arguably the default focus of a teen's attention. For the military, the implicit noun is war - that is the default focus of their attention. It is clear that cyber- is an adjective prefix that indicates computation. What it means when the noun is implied is in the mind of the beholder.
Of course they were literate. They knew ancient Greek!
Ssh, as in "Ssh, it's a secret." If everybody knew, it wouldn't be a surprise. I will look for prior art on the use of "ssh" for keeping secrets that predates its use in secure net technology. I'll get right back to you on that.
I heard that April Fools Day was cancelled this year.