>another point, are you paying less now for phone service than your parents did under ma bell?
Lucent Technologies is precisely the kind of "no-name" spin-off that I am thinking about. They had to make a name for themselves once they ceased to be Bell Labs, and they have steadily produced decent quality things that Ma Bell would never have created.
In Bill Cosby's Himself (1981), he mentions taking his wife to the hospital in his $17,000 Ferarri. How much is a new Ferarri these days? Just skimming the net turned up numbers from the mid- $40k range for a 1986 model to the mid $170k range for a new one. Yeah, take my phone bill and cut it down 90% and it is lower than my parent's phone bill of the time.
Not particularly, but when the government gets involved, they tend to shoot themselves in the foot as often as they shoot us in the foot.
Heck, I want Microsoft broken up for reasons of sheer selfishness: Most major advances in technology and science come from populations that feel like their existence is threatened. The half of Microsoft that does not have Mr. Gates at the helm will definitely feel the threat, and will very likely do something spectacular to assure their survival.
Something that a unified Microsoft would not have done, otherwise.
Something that will shake up the company that Mr. Gates ends up in control of.
I have no idea what that something will be, but I sit in eager anticipation of whatever it is. The tool that is being used to kick-start Microsoft up is their violation of the anti-trust laws in the United States. The tool that was used to kick-start IBM in the late 1980's was Microsoft. The tool that was used to kick-start NASA to reach the moon was a speach by John F. Kennedy.
While you are designing the lab, take into account the turnover rate that you will experience, and plan for it in advance.
Many things will cause turnover:
Changing Schools
Better Job Offers
Personality conflicts
Terminations
and if you do not have a ready pool of replacement employees, or worse, if existing staff has belittled possible replacements, your lab will dry up and wither.
Frankly, if you develop a reputation as having good people, local companies will snap your best people up. Who can resist a job offer of $21.50 an hour when they are working for $6.25 an hour?
As it stands right now, the only way for DeCSS to be used legally within the United States is if the MPAA changes its mind and allows it to be used. The only way that will occur is if it is in their best financial interest to do so...
So, for those of you that have Intel-based DVD drives, does the documentation of any of them fail to state that they can only be used with Microsoft(tm) Windows or WindowsNT (tm)? You may be able to file a class-action lawsuit against those manufacturers to get your money (plus damages?) back.
Me, I'm just not going to purchase a DVD player or any DVD movies until I can legally play the @#$! things without supporting a company that has been found to be a monopoly.
Re:Notice something familiar about MS uptimes?
on
Server Uptimes Ranked
·
· Score: 5
Given that IBM's OS/2 and Microsoft's various Windows operating systems shared a similar code base, doesn't it seem weird that OS/2 never seemed to suffer this problem?
In fact, it did.
In 1997, a team at Ford Motor Company had noticed that, after 6 to 8 weeks of operation, our OS/2 v2.11 machines would begin executing once-per-day tasks several times during a day, and after several such executions, the computers would crash. Further analysis showed that those tasks were being executed every 1h09m54s. I spent a day trying to manipulate that number into something meaningful, and gave up in frustration. We assumed that our own code was to blame, and rewrote it several times (to no avail).
After rewriting our code seemed to have no effect, we decided to install the latest set of O/S patches on our machines. On a Sunday, we moved between machines that were scattered over a several hundred acre manufacturing facility.
Black Monday
Seven weeks and one day later, the facility started building units. Within hours, the OS/2 systems started showing the symptoms that led to the crash, in the exact order in which we upgraded them!
The coincidence was too much to escape notice, so we called IBM Technical support. Their Level 1 guy spent about five minutes talking to us before he realized this was a deep O/S problem, and we were kicked to Level 2 support. The Level 2 person heard our version of the events ("The machine flakes out and every 1h09m54s executes a task that should only happen once a day"), and asked, "are the machines crashing 49.7 days after being rebooted?"
BINGO!
Apparently, someone inside IBM had noticed this problem a few weeks before we did, and had the patch in final testing when we called. (I think the patch was #XR2011 or #XR2014). However, since we were a customer, our bug report took priority over theirs.
The Problem
Someone used an unsigned 32 bit integer to record the number of milliseconds since the O/S was booted. That number rolls over after 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, 47.296 seconds. The symptoms we saw began the day previous to crash day due to the rollover that occured when our code scheduled a task for "tomorrow".
The Moral
It's too bad that Microsoft and IBM were not on speaking terms at this point. If they had still been working together, MS would have had a fix two years ago.
The remaining question: what movie clip would be most appropriate?
Although it is tempting to answer "the longest one you can find", this has the negative side effect of making part of their point for them.
Don't get me wrong, though - this is extremely useful information for the Defense Lawyers to have in their posession.
The cost of the DVD
The cost of the CDs needed to copy the DVD (Using low-cost CDs and maximum lossless compression!)
The cost of the blank VHS tape needed to copy the DVD movie.
If the defense never uses the information, you lose the time spent calculating the answer. If they need it to counter a plaintiff's claim, they have it at their fingertips. The VHS tape cost is what will kill the suit.
Agreed. I was 10 years old and addicted to Star Wars, so I sat through the whole thing. I wondered why my parents left the room within minutes of the show's beginning - It was Star Wars! How could they leave?
Then, I lived through the "Instruction Manual" holo-video for the kid's Life Day gift.
It seems it would be funny to have a faltering instruction droid use the assembly tools to repair itself instead of explain the incredibly complex gizmo. Some of my best laughs have come from poorly written documentation.
But at age 10, I was suddenly VERY afraid that the Radio Shack 150-in-1 Science Kit that I had begged to get for Christmas would be as frustrating at that wookie kid's gift was. Fortunately, Radio Shack pulled through.
The code reduction in The Quality Plateau (Day 2) does not perform the same function as the original. On the last iteration of the loop in the original code, ReleaseMutex() is called when g_nIndex == MAX_TIMES.
In the final code, ReleaseMutex() is not called when Index == MAX_TIMES.
That kind of reduction causes hard-to-track bugs:(
Slashdot Mirror
>another point, are you paying less now for phone service than your parents did under ma bell?
Lucent Technologies is precisely the kind of "no-name" spin-off that I am thinking about. They had to make a name for themselves once they ceased to be Bell Labs, and they have steadily produced decent quality things that Ma Bell would never have created.
In Bill Cosby's Himself (1981), he mentions taking his wife to the hospital in his $17,000 Ferarri. How much is a new Ferarri these days? Just skimming the net turned up numbers from the mid- $40k range for a 1986 model to the mid $170k range for a new one. Yeah, take my phone bill and cut it down 90% and it is lower than my parent's phone bill of the time.
Not particularly, but when the government gets involved, they tend to shoot themselves in the foot as often as they shoot us in the foot.
Heck, I want Microsoft broken up for reasons of sheer selfishness: Most major advances in technology and science come from populations that feel like their existence is threatened. The half of Microsoft that does not have Mr. Gates at the helm will definitely feel the threat, and will very likely do something spectacular to assure their survival.
Something that a unified Microsoft would not have done, otherwise.
Something that will shake up the company that Mr. Gates ends up in control of.
I have no idea what that something will be, but I sit in eager anticipation of whatever it is. The tool that is being used to kick-start Microsoft up is their violation of the anti-trust laws in the United States. The tool that was used to kick-start IBM in the late 1980's was Microsoft. The tool that was used to kick-start NASA to reach the moon was a speach by John F. Kennedy.
Eminent domain is starting to be the *only* answer for things like this, and this.
While you are designing the lab, take into account the turnover rate that you will experience, and plan for it in advance.
Many things will cause turnover:
- Changing Schools
- Better Job Offers
- Personality conflicts
- Terminations
and if you do not have a ready pool of replacement employees, or worse, if existing staff has belittled possible replacements, your lab will dry up and wither.Frankly, if you develop a reputation as having good people, local companies will snap your best people up. Who can resist a job offer of $21.50 an hour when they are working for $6.25 an hour?
You decide ...
Drat.
I was wondering when my next addiction was going to come out. Now it appears that the answer is, "Never."
As it stands right now, the only way for DeCSS to be used legally within the United States is if the MPAA changes its mind and allows it to be used. The only way that will occur is if it is in their best financial interest to do so ...
So, for those of you that have Intel-based DVD drives, does the documentation of any of them fail to state that they can only be used with Microsoft(tm) Windows or WindowsNT (tm)? You may be able to file a class-action lawsuit against those manufacturers to get your money (plus damages?) back.
Me, I'm just not going to purchase a DVD player or any DVD movies until I can legally play the @#$! things without supporting a company that has been found to be a monopoly.
Given that IBM's OS/2 and Microsoft's various Windows operating systems shared a similar code base, doesn't it seem weird that OS/2 never seemed to suffer this problem?
In fact, it did.
In 1997, a team at Ford Motor Company had noticed that, after 6 to 8 weeks of operation, our OS/2 v2.11 machines would begin executing once-per-day tasks several times during a day, and after several such executions, the computers would crash. Further analysis showed that those tasks were being executed every 1h09m54s. I spent a day trying to manipulate that number into something meaningful, and gave up in frustration. We assumed that our own code was to blame, and rewrote it several times (to no avail).
After rewriting our code seemed to have no effect, we decided to install the latest set of O/S patches on our machines. On a Sunday, we moved between machines that were scattered over a several hundred acre manufacturing facility.
Black Monday
Seven weeks and one day later, the facility started building units. Within hours, the OS/2 systems started showing the symptoms that led to the crash, in the exact order in which we upgraded them!
The coincidence was too much to escape notice, so we called IBM Technical support. Their Level 1 guy spent about five minutes talking to us before he realized this was a deep O/S problem, and we were kicked to Level 2 support. The Level 2 person heard our version of the events ("The machine flakes out and every 1h09m54s executes a task that should only happen once a day"), and asked, "are the machines crashing 49.7 days after being rebooted?"
BINGO!
Apparently, someone inside IBM had noticed this problem a few weeks before we did, and had the patch in final testing when we called. (I think the patch was #XR2011 or #XR2014). However, since we were a customer, our bug report took priority over theirs.
The Problem
Someone used an unsigned 32 bit integer to record the number of milliseconds since the O/S was booted. That number rolls over after 49 days, 17 hours, 2 minutes, 47.296 seconds. The symptoms we saw began the day previous to crash day due to the rollover that occured when our code scheduled a task for "tomorrow".
The Moral
It's too bad that Microsoft and IBM were not on speaking terms at this point. If they had still been working together, MS would have had a fix two years ago.
Russ B.
The remaining question: what movie clip would be most appropriate?
Although it is tempting to answer "the longest one you can find", this has the negative side effect of making part of their point for them.
Don't get me wrong, though - this is extremely useful information for the Defense Lawyers to have in their posession.
If the defense never uses the information, you lose the time spent calculating the answer. If they need it to counter a plaintiff's claim, they have it at their fingertips. The VHS tape cost is what will kill the suit.
Just my two bits, of course...
Agreed. I was 10 years old and addicted to Star Wars, so I sat through the whole thing. I wondered why my parents left the room within minutes of the show's beginning - It was Star Wars! How could they leave?
Then, I lived through the "Instruction Manual" holo-video for the kid's Life Day gift.
It seems it would be funny to have a faltering instruction droid use the assembly tools to repair itself instead of explain the incredibly complex gizmo. Some of my best laughs have come from poorly written documentation.
But at age 10, I was suddenly VERY afraid that the Radio Shack 150-in-1 Science Kit that I had begged to get for Christmas would be as frustrating at that wookie kid's gift was. Fortunately, Radio Shack pulled through.
This show ... did not.
Yes, Virginia, it's THAT BAD.
In the final code, ReleaseMutex() is not called when Index == MAX_TIMES.
That kind of reduction causes hard-to-track bugs :(