The Corning ad was pretty interesting, other than the fact that it disregards computing power to do all the fancy graphics they show and the video via wireless phone probably won't be able to scale due to bandwidth issues, but the ad was great, a step beyond Minority Report even.
While acting can help overcome typical responses, I don't think that sales would be much of a position for me. I'm never sure what people around me are really feeling/thinking. What a lot of people have inborn, is a very learned skill for me. On the other hand, it's pretty easy to pick up people being untruthful around me whereas normal folks seem to fall hook line and sinker, not sure why that is, but to me the deception seems obvious.
I can work a cocktail party if I'm trying to get something done, but take away a goal and I really find it hard to deal with trivial chit-chat. I'm pretty sure that's from aspergers, but I could be wrong.
As noted that is beside the case and doesn't have anything to do with the whole situation; however, you also forgot that in order to be published the school or the researcher also has to pay the journal hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on the journal.
Well, I've worked for two companies that went out of business because of patent trolls. The first one didn't get through litigation before going bankrupt, the second won, but didn't have enough money to go back to court to have the injunction lifted that the original judge placed on the product.
As for getting more ridiculous, I still can't believe that one-click checkout survived and was upheld as a valid patent.
Federal reserve is a part of the government. I believe it's a common misconception that it isn't a part of the government because it's an independent agency and word of mouth isn't that hot about specifics. I had the understanding that it wasn't a part of the government until I took an economics class where the instructor mentioned that it was and I did a little digging.
So the blurb here was all the information that was actually published in that article. Does a brief comment that adds no information actually need to be posted as a story? I thought they were going to put out some numbers. The article headline seems to be misleading in that there doesn't seem to be any actual content, unless I'm missing something.
Were they really so certain that keyboards would be done away with in order to go back to a pen based system? Computers with keyboards were out at the time, and while not consumer products, I can't imagine someone familiar with computers not understanding how useful they were/are. The computer I used in the military was designed in 1965, and while severely limited, is still recognizable as a computer. So, their glimpse into the future doesn't really seem to be that significant.
Seems reputable, but that really wasn't the question. They question was, "Why are people saying that this video is from Microsoft?", to which the answer was, that the article said it was.
Hmmm, no I wouldn't say learn nothing. The question of whether or not the government should be investing is a different issue that the taxpayers should have an interest in deciding. I don't know the specifics in the case; however, many governments offer incentives and grants to businesses in the gamble that they will provide jobs and taxable income in the future. Heck, the Federal government provided and investment to the banking community because they felt that the failure of many in the banking community would be bad for its citizens and of course the bottom line, taxes.
The government in this case was trying to get a 700k payback a year for the foreseeable future from an investment of 500k. Looking at it that way, it does seem like a pipe dream. On the other hand, government grants and loans are sometimes preferable to the alternative where the only people that can afford to invest reap the rewards.
Learning from mistakes is a normal function of human existence. Although, it sucks gambling on something and losing, to me, it's really not that bad. On the other hand, if this had been a scheme to funnel money into someone's pocket purely with the intention of giving them money with no hope of a return, that's another issue entirely. The impression I had after reading the article was that the money wasn't just wasted, that the manager of the company was wrong in his assessment of how much funding it would take and convinced the government to invest based on those numbers. Sure there probably should have been more due diligence, but at the same time, it doesn't appear that there was malicious intent.
In my last company, I personally invested over 250K and several years of my life trying to develop a viable company. Unfortunately, due to a number of issues, probably most of them mine, but there were some outside influences as well, the company no longer exists. I could spend my time crying over the fact that had I never have attempted to start a new company and invested that money elsewhere that I would be far richer than I am today, but that seems a bit pointless at this time. I tried, I gambled and I lost, but I don't really regret making the attempt. Also, the loss of 500K by an entire community rather than by an individual doesn't sound like a huge loss to me.
Again, whether or not the government should be investing is a different issue, but having the investment fail is always a possibility, especially with the payback they were looking for.
Yeah it was kinda interesting to see Microsoft showing Tux throwing stones at windows and Tux trying to elevate himself to windows height. Definitely a windows centric view. Frankly, I don't care about taking down windows, I use use the proper tool to do the proper job. I tend not to use a hammer when a screwdriver is called for after all. I may bitch at times about the loose handle and the way the hammer keeps being chipped away every time it hits a nail, but that has nothing to do with the screwdriver. I mean, I use a lot of different programming languages as well, it's the fanboy base that extols the virtues of one language above all others.
As far as trying to scare Linux, wasn't microsoft trying to destroy Linux by spreading FUD? Also, why did they leave out funding the SCO lawsuit against Linux/IBM?
Heh, looks like the video was created by a windows fanboy saying the windows is better and linux is trying to play catchup. In my mind, for the things Linux is good at, windows is the one throwing stones. For stability, control, uptime, Linux is the one microsoft is chasing. Now, gaming on the other hand, completely different issue and I like my games as well.
Not sure how you mean socialist/communist. Money doesn't belong to people really, the government can chose to flood the market with more cash and thus make the money that you hold practically useless. Since cash in the US is all fiat money, it doesn't represent anything of value and is only worth as much as the government allows it to be worth. In the current economic system, money is generated by depositing money in the bank in order to generate debt through loans. For each dollar you deposit, the banking system generates around a dollar and a half in made up money. Although it seems to go against common sense, the economy doesn't work without passing on money from one person to another either by spending or depositing in the bank or I suppose by paying taxes. If you keep cash under your mattress, it slowly, but continuously loses value. So you can't really say that you own money, since if you own it, it should be worth something as long as you don't use it, whereas with money, if you don't use it, it loses value constantly.
As far as referring to the poster as a socialist / communist, isn't that just an application of Godwin's law?
Yeah, I can see your point on that, but I think it's a matter for the citizens to take up with the people authorizing this rather than a guy that writes articles saying that the industry in the whole isn't doing enough to help out other people. That was my main point of contention. Personally, I'm in favor of spending money on research rather than a lot of projects that the government funds. Someday we need to change the economic indicators to consider other things rather than just cash flow. I think that saying we are "healthier" when we are wasting money than spending frugally has some pretty obvious flaws. Unfortunately, I don't know what kind of changes needs to be done.
I don't do enough tape to know what the market is. I was burned so badly on colorado tape drives and qebit? that I've never seriously considered it again.
Ummm, so they invested a half million and the company failed. It seems to me that more than half new businesses fail, as a matter of fact, the last time I checked new businesses have a failure rate of around 80% in the first five years of business. If your starting a new business with a new product, then the odds are stacked against you. Does that mean we stop trying to launch new products? If we stop trying to invest in new projects then I guess the only way to open up new funding is by legislating income for current product lines, which doesn't seem like a viable way to do business.
So the county invested in a new business and it failed. Chalk it up as a loss and move on. While the taxpayers might not like the way the gov is spending their taxes, cities/municipalities, counties, states and national governments do this all the time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But I'd rather fund a new startup that fails, rather than fund the good-ol boy network that siphons money off the top to fund their retirement account. It doesn't sound like the failure was due to mismanagement or corruption, just that they weren't able to continue and that it cost more than expected. This happens all the time. A half-million is a small investment and though it didn't work out this time, the only way to "win" is to make investments in the future. If all the bugs had been worked out before the company went into business there would have been no reason for the gov to invest. They gambled on a decent return and it failed. But one failure shouldn't be held up as an example to bash investing in the future, which is the slant the article seems to imply. If we don't invest in better ways of doing things, where will we end up?
Remember that business also refers to small and medium sized businesses, not just large businesses and large businesses aren't all money grubbing organizations. Most businesses are long term businesses which try to continue doing business over a period of years, not maximize profit for the next quarter ignoring long term stability. In order to stay in business, it's important to keep your employee pool stable. Any business that does not have a low turnover rate, isn't likely one that is in the game for the long haul.
Although looking from the outside in, you tend to note the businesses that are just trying to maximize short term profit, eventually those businesses will fail, or I hope they do at least. There used to be a time that engineers would buy HP equipment, but management decided selling ink for more than the equivalent cost of gold was the best place to be. As such, I don't know any engineers that advocate for hp anymore.
Looks like a fairly extensive list. The hurd.gnu.org website directs installation instructions to the debian site. Digging through that I found the following list.
Installation Guide for 32-bit PC (i386) Installation Guide for 64-bit PC (amd64) Installation Guide for EABI ARM Installation Guide for PowerPC Installation Guide for SPARC Installation Guide for Intel Itanium IA-64 Installation Guide for MIPS (little endian) Installation Guide for kFreeBSD 64-bit PC (amd64) Installation Guide for kFreeBSD 32-bit PC (i386) Installation Guide for IBM S/390 Installation Guide for MIPS (big endian)
So it appears to run on several different architectures.
Why would a tech industry be worried about proping up the rest of the country? It seems to me that a business is there to survive and to hopefully keep its own employees employed. Isn't it governments job to look after its citizens? Personally, I don't see it as any business's responsibility to take care of those that are not directly connected to it. The it is the responsibility of government. If the government wants to raise taxes on a specific sector of the work force, it has the right to do so, but asking a private company to just out of the blue start helping others isn't realistic in my opinion. You might as well get all the unions to take 25% pay cuts with the proceeds going to some charity, not likely to happen when it starts coming out of people's pockets rather than some anonymous "IT industry" There are lots of businesses out there that make money, why would you want to go after some sector just because a few businesses are "successful" Hell, if you want to do that, go after the damn banking industry, they seem to have all the money, and if they mess up the government bails them out.
I'm sure that we could lower the unemployment rate if we just didn't allow outside products into the united states, since it would kick start manufacturing again. As long as we are at it, we could ban all computer and electronics and go back to manual bookkeeping. That would drive paper prices up allowing us to hire more lumberjacks and get rid of all those pesky forests we have laying around. Sure quality of living would go down, but so what people would be employed. Heh, seriously though, I know that it costs me far less time and money to pay my bills, correspond with others, do research and get entertainment than it would be without technology. In my mind, the tech industry is doing its part to foster a better standard of living. The fact that people are out of work says more about the way government and the economic system runs than it does about tech companies destroying people's livelihoods. Tech companies are successful because people want the products they produce. The way to stay in business is by producing products and developing new products. There are plenty of tech companies that fail as well, what do we do about them? Cherry picking successful companies and saying that the industry as a whole should support give up its income and give that back to people that have no relation probably isn't the best way to go about fixing the economy. Perhaps, since the writer of the article is making money, he should be giving his income to others rather than paying his house note, rent, groceries, etc.
It seems to me, that if you're asking people who are actually innovating to give up the rewards of that innovation, you're punishing those that should be getting rewarded.
Theoretically, a micro kernel should be easier to develop for and keep one part of the kernel from messing with other parts of the kernel. I know that linux can load up modules for device drivers and other things, but, again theoretically, a micro kernel should allow far more of the kernel to be swapped out for different code than can be done with a monolithic kernel. So there should be some development advantages there.
That being said, we'll have to see how Hurd performs. Micro kernels tend to be slower because of the message passing mechanisms that they use and passing all those messages around seems to be a extremely difficult problem which requires a lot of testing and design. If they have a workable system now, it's still going to take a while to analyse how well the system performs in the real world.
As a programming challenge, it has got to have been a pretty demanding task. What it's good for currently is probably just another free kernel that can operate as a drop in replacement for the Linux kernel. Having a choice in kernels isn't a bad thing and since the architecture is quite different, it's probably not going to take developers away from the Linux kernel. In addition to that, since it's design is different, it will allow developers to think about problems in different ways, which benefits Linux in the long run, since new ideas can be incorporated into the Linux kernel as well. As another free kernel, if Hurd comes up with something new and innovative that would benefit the Linux kernel we are free to create our own version of that innovation and implement it in the kernel. As compared to some OS/kernels that lock their work up via patents.
So right now, it's a wait and see type of deal, the biggest advantage that Hurd offers currently is all in the future. We will have to see what comes from the project. Currently, unless you're interested in seeing how it works, or Linus pissed you off personally, there is no real pressing need to us Hurd.
Hmmm,
I'm not sure what projects you've worked on, but considering that the majority of the OS utilities for linux still appear to be gnu projects, I'd tend to believe that once it's released it will work. The problems with micro-kernels are pretty hard to deal with, it's a "new" technology. While they may not have support for all the hardware out there, GNU has a lot of development expertise backing them up and with a working kernel, device drivers will appear and be worked on. If I remember correctly, linux.9 was released as a somewhat workable kernel and started picking up developers at that point, before that it was just Linus's baby. Once he released it other people started working on it. Same for Hurd, I'll be downloading and studying it to see how it works, I haven't worked with a micro kernel before. But if they are saying that it's ready to work as a kernel for the GNU/Hurd system, I'm inclined to take them at their word.
It's taken me 30+ years to develop my programming skills to the point they are at now, are you going to label my knowledge as buggy and out of date because I started learning about computers and programming before you were born? I highly doubt that they spent all their time working with a 386 during the past 20 years. Most of the GNU software that I use seems to work perfectly fine with a wide range of processors. While I don't recall a specific device driver written under GNU tools, it seems to me that most of the device drivers out there for Linux and probably several flavors of BSD were compiled using GCC, which also I might point out has been around for over 20 years. Software gets updated in active projects and Hurd is an active project. I'd hesitate to compare Duke Nuke'm Forever with Hurd as nothing was produced by the Nuke'm team for years, whereas GNU has had multiple project put out and updated over the last 20 years. I don't know what the actual developers have been working on in addition to Hurd, but as a brand, GNU has my respect. Dismissing the software without looking at it and understanding the process seems a little silly.
Perhaps, I'm wrong and you actually know what you are talking about, but then again perhaps not.
Well, I think the problem you are seeing is students going to college for a degree period. The fact of the matter is that I went my entire career without a degree, yet for some reason, since the tech crash in 2000, it's very difficult to find a new position without a college degree. My conjecture is that with the number of programmers and other computer related people that were let go during the tech crash, that the number of applicants for jobs increased which caused a shift from the hiring manager looking at resumes to human resources screening resumes before passing along candidates. It's my belief that college degree is on the checklist and if you don't have a degree, then the hiring manager, ie someone that can evaluate your knowledge, won't be seeing your resume. For me, this doesn't make too much of a difference, since I'm out of the work for a living game, but I know there was a definite change pre-crash to post-crash.
Computer science degrees have been around a long time; however, I would also like to point out that computer science is not programming. Although we tend to make use of computers as a primary tool, computer science has more to do with computing than with computers. I know that a large portion of CS students go into computers, but it seems to me that CS is about more than programming. Whereas a programmer is focused on producing a final product so he/she finds the tools and applies them, looking up algorithms in order to implement them in code, the computer scientist is focused on studying the algorithms themselves, studying and improving routines. The programmer isn't focused on developing new algorithms or for the most part improving old ones, he/she is focused on delivering a product.
As far as mathematicians go, yes, mathematics helps out considerably in developing algorithms, but math is predominately focused on continuous number systems whereas computer science focuses on discrete systems. Paraphrasing Donald Knuth, when I'm thinking about a problem, sometimes it helps to stop thinking like a computer scientist and start thinking like a mathematician, whereas other times it helps to do the opposite. The thing is that computer science is not math and math is not computer science, there actually is a difference between the two fields.
Back to the main point, the study of computer science to me is far more in depth than most of the training that is offered by colleges out there. Trying develop a series of courses for computer science and cram it into a 4 year degree means that you basically lightly graze a variety of topics, but as far as I have seen, most courses focus on memorization than on actually thinking about the problems. In mathematics, at the lower levels it's more about memorization, but as you reach the upper levels students are required to think about proofs and how to actually formulate their own proofs, ie thinking rather than memorization. In computer science they are covering so much material that students don't really have time to sit down and digest information that they have been given and figure things out on their own. Problems within computer science tend to either focus on trivial problems that have been solved hundreds of times before or are projects that don't allow time to figure things out and force the students to look for as many shortcuts as possible in order to produce the required output. Put another way, as computer professionals, a lot of us spend far more than 40 hours a week working on computer issues, we work full time and then in our off hours we code more, look at technical sites, read up on new material etc. How is a college student, carrying a full 18 credit hour course load with only 10-12 hours a week available to study computer science going to be able to keep up and go beyond that to actually think about what they are studying and then go even further and actually start coming up with their own ideas? As someone with 30 years in the business, the programming assignments in school are negligible;
Heh, Perhaps you should become a mathematician, move out to bum-f**k, Montana, live in a shack and start mailing care packages to people.
Seriously though, what possible reason is there to get rid of the internet connection? If you are on Slashdot, I'm going to make the assumption that you are technically inclined. If so, the internet offers the only real form of information that you will find. I suppose it depends on what you are using it for. If you find that you are spending too much time online browsing websites just to pass the time, restrict yourself from those types of websites and/or restrict your time online. If you just don't see how time online is of any value, then by all means drop your internet connection as it is just a money sink. On the other hand, if you value the internet and time spent online there, don't drop your personal connection and just access from work, as that means that your social/entertainment access will increase at work and frankly, work time should be spent working and not getting entertainment.
Personally, myself, I chose not to have a landline phone nor do I have any type of broadcast television coming into my house, however, the internet provides my communications, research requirements and entertainment. Internet access is definitely in my top 10 crucial things to have. That being said, I still have a life away from the computer.
What's the real reason for giving up internet access? What possible reason is there to drop service?
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The Corning ad was pretty interesting, other than the fact that it disregards computing power to do all the fancy graphics they show and the video via wireless phone probably won't be able to scale due to bandwidth issues, but the ad was great, a step beyond Minority Report even.
I'm a bit lost by your statement. What am I misunderstanding?
While acting can help overcome typical responses, I don't think that sales would be much of a position for me. I'm never sure what people around me are really feeling/thinking. What a lot of people have inborn, is a very learned skill for me. On the other hand, it's pretty easy to pick up people being untruthful around me whereas normal folks seem to fall hook line and sinker, not sure why that is, but to me the deception seems obvious.
I can work a cocktail party if I'm trying to get something done, but take away a goal and I really find it hard to deal with trivial chit-chat. I'm pretty sure that's from aspergers, but I could be wrong.
Didn't the NSA produce a Linux distribution before they got slapped down for being anti-competitive?
As noted that is beside the case and doesn't have anything to do with the whole situation; however, you also forgot that in order to be published the school or the researcher also has to pay the journal hundreds or thousands of dollars, depending on the journal.
Well, I've worked for two companies that went out of business because of patent trolls. The first one didn't get through litigation before going bankrupt, the second won, but didn't have enough money to go back to court to have the injunction lifted that the original judge placed on the product.
As for getting more ridiculous, I still can't believe that one-click checkout survived and was upheld as a valid patent.
Federal reserve is a part of the government. I believe it's a common misconception that it isn't a part of the government because it's an independent agency and word of mouth isn't that hot about specifics. I had the understanding that it wasn't a part of the government until I took an economics class where the instructor mentioned that it was and I did a little digging.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_System
So the blurb here was all the information that was actually published in that article. Does a brief comment that adds no information actually need to be posted as a story? I thought they were going to put out some numbers. The article headline seems to be misleading in that there doesn't seem to be any actual content, unless I'm missing something.
Were they really so certain that keyboards would be done away with in order to go back to a pen based system? Computers with keyboards were out at the time, and while not consumer products, I can't imagine someone familiar with computers not understanding how useful they were/are. The computer I used in the military was designed in 1965, and while severely limited, is still recognizable as a computer. So, their glimpse into the future doesn't really seem to be that significant.
Seems reputable, but that really wasn't the question. They question was, "Why are people saying that this video is from Microsoft?", to which the answer was, that the article said it was.
Hmmm, no I wouldn't say learn nothing. The question of whether or not the government should be investing is a different issue that the taxpayers should have an interest in deciding. I don't know the specifics in the case; however, many governments offer incentives and grants to businesses in the gamble that they will provide jobs and taxable income in the future. Heck, the Federal government provided and investment to the banking community because they felt that the failure of many in the banking community would be bad for its citizens and of course the bottom line, taxes.
The government in this case was trying to get a 700k payback a year for the foreseeable future from an investment of 500k. Looking at it that way, it does seem like a pipe dream. On the other hand, government grants and loans are sometimes preferable to the alternative where the only people that can afford to invest reap the rewards.
Learning from mistakes is a normal function of human existence. Although, it sucks gambling on something and losing, to me, it's really not that bad. On the other hand, if this had been a scheme to funnel money into someone's pocket purely with the intention of giving them money with no hope of a return, that's another issue entirely. The impression I had after reading the article was that the money wasn't just wasted, that the manager of the company was wrong in his assessment of how much funding it would take and convinced the government to invest based on those numbers. Sure there probably should have been more due diligence, but at the same time, it doesn't appear that there was malicious intent.
In my last company, I personally invested over 250K and several years of my life trying to develop a viable company. Unfortunately, due to a number of issues, probably most of them mine, but there were some outside influences as well, the company no longer exists. I could spend my time crying over the fact that had I never have attempted to start a new company and invested that money elsewhere that I would be far richer than I am today, but that seems a bit pointless at this time. I tried, I gambled and I lost, but I don't really regret making the attempt. Also, the loss of 500K by an entire community rather than by an individual doesn't sound like a huge loss to me.
Again, whether or not the government should be investing is a different issue, but having the investment fail is always a possibility, especially with the payback they were looking for.
Yeah, probably a bad idea to have your enemy help attach the wings, grin.
If you RTFA you'll see that the Linux foundation made a call for video submissions for the 20th and Microsoft sent in that submission.
Yeah it was kinda interesting to see Microsoft showing Tux throwing stones at windows and Tux trying to elevate himself to windows height. Definitely a windows centric view. Frankly, I don't care about taking down windows, I use use the proper tool to do the proper job. I tend not to use a hammer when a screwdriver is called for after all. I may bitch at times about the loose handle and the way the hammer keeps being chipped away every time it hits a nail, but that has nothing to do with the screwdriver. I mean, I use a lot of different programming languages as well, it's the fanboy base that extols the virtues of one language above all others.
As far as trying to scare Linux, wasn't microsoft trying to destroy Linux by spreading FUD? Also, why did they leave out funding the SCO lawsuit against Linux/IBM?
Heh, looks like the video was created by a windows fanboy saying the windows is better and linux is trying to play catchup. In my mind, for the things Linux is good at, windows is the one throwing stones. For stability, control, uptime, Linux is the one microsoft is chasing. Now, gaming on the other hand, completely different issue and I like my games as well.
Not sure how you mean socialist/communist. Money doesn't belong to people really, the government can chose to flood the market with more cash and thus make the money that you hold practically useless. Since cash in the US is all fiat money, it doesn't represent anything of value and is only worth as much as the government allows it to be worth. In the current economic system, money is generated by depositing money in the bank in order to generate debt through loans. For each dollar you deposit, the banking system generates around a dollar and a half in made up money. Although it seems to go against common sense, the economy doesn't work without passing on money from one person to another either by spending or depositing in the bank or I suppose by paying taxes. If you keep cash under your mattress, it slowly, but continuously loses value. So you can't really say that you own money, since if you own it, it should be worth something as long as you don't use it, whereas with money, if you don't use it, it loses value constantly.
As far as referring to the poster as a socialist / communist, isn't that just an application of Godwin's law?
Yeah, I can see your point on that, but I think it's a matter for the citizens to take up with the people authorizing this rather than a guy that writes articles saying that the industry in the whole isn't doing enough to help out other people. That was my main point of contention. Personally, I'm in favor of spending money on research rather than a lot of projects that the government funds. Someday we need to change the economic indicators to consider other things rather than just cash flow. I think that saying we are "healthier" when we are wasting money than spending frugally has some pretty obvious flaws. Unfortunately, I don't know what kind of changes needs to be done.
I don't do enough tape to know what the market is. I was burned so badly on colorado tape drives and qebit? that I've never seriously considered it again.
Ummm, so they invested a half million and the company failed. It seems to me that more than half new businesses fail, as a matter of fact, the last time I checked new businesses have a failure rate of around 80% in the first five years of business. If your starting a new business with a new product, then the odds are stacked against you. Does that mean we stop trying to launch new products? If we stop trying to invest in new projects then I guess the only way to open up new funding is by legislating income for current product lines, which doesn't seem like a viable way to do business.
So the county invested in a new business and it failed. Chalk it up as a loss and move on. While the taxpayers might not like the way the gov is spending their taxes, cities/municipalities, counties, states and national governments do this all the time. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But I'd rather fund a new startup that fails, rather than fund the good-ol boy network that siphons money off the top to fund their retirement account. It doesn't sound like the failure was due to mismanagement or corruption, just that they weren't able to continue and that it cost more than expected. This happens all the time. A half-million is a small investment and though it didn't work out this time, the only way to "win" is to make investments in the future. If all the bugs had been worked out before the company went into business there would have been no reason for the gov to invest. They gambled on a decent return and it failed. But one failure shouldn't be held up as an example to bash investing in the future, which is the slant the article seems to imply. If we don't invest in better ways of doing things, where will we end up?
Remember that business also refers to small and medium sized businesses, not just large businesses and large businesses aren't all money grubbing organizations. Most businesses are long term businesses which try to continue doing business over a period of years, not maximize profit for the next quarter ignoring long term stability. In order to stay in business, it's important to keep your employee pool stable. Any business that does not have a low turnover rate, isn't likely one that is in the game for the long haul.
Although looking from the outside in, you tend to note the businesses that are just trying to maximize short term profit, eventually those businesses will fail, or I hope they do at least. There used to be a time that engineers would buy HP equipment, but management decided selling ink for more than the equivalent cost of gold was the best place to be. As such, I don't know any engineers that advocate for hp anymore.
Looks like a fairly extensive list. The hurd.gnu.org website directs installation instructions to the debian site. Digging through that I found the following list.
Installation Guide for 32-bit PC (i386)
Installation Guide for 64-bit PC (amd64)
Installation Guide for EABI ARM
Installation Guide for PowerPC
Installation Guide for SPARC
Installation Guide for Intel Itanium IA-64
Installation Guide for MIPS (little endian)
Installation Guide for kFreeBSD 64-bit PC (amd64)
Installation Guide for kFreeBSD 32-bit PC (i386)
Installation Guide for IBM S/390
Installation Guide for MIPS (big endian)
So it appears to run on several different architectures.
Why would a tech industry be worried about proping up the rest of the country? It seems to me that a business is there to survive and to hopefully keep its own employees employed. Isn't it governments job to look after its citizens? Personally, I don't see it as any business's responsibility to take care of those that are not directly connected to it. The it is the responsibility of government. If the government wants to raise taxes on a specific sector of the work force, it has the right to do so, but asking a private company to just out of the blue start helping others isn't realistic in my opinion. You might as well get all the unions to take 25% pay cuts with the proceeds going to some charity, not likely to happen when it starts coming out of people's pockets rather than some anonymous "IT industry" There are lots of businesses out there that make money, why would you want to go after some sector just because a few businesses are "successful" Hell, if you want to do that, go after the damn banking industry, they seem to have all the money, and if they mess up the government bails them out.
I'm sure that we could lower the unemployment rate if we just didn't allow outside products into the united states, since it would kick start manufacturing again. As long as we are at it, we could ban all computer and electronics and go back to manual bookkeeping. That would drive paper prices up allowing us to hire more lumberjacks and get rid of all those pesky forests we have laying around. Sure quality of living would go down, but so what people would be employed. Heh, seriously though, I know that it costs me far less time and money to pay my bills, correspond with others, do research and get entertainment than it would be without technology. In my mind, the tech industry is doing its part to foster a better standard of living. The fact that people are out of work says more about the way government and the economic system runs than it does about tech companies destroying people's livelihoods. Tech companies are successful because people want the products they produce. The way to stay in business is by producing products and developing new products. There are plenty of tech companies that fail as well, what do we do about them? Cherry picking successful companies and saying that the industry as a whole should support give up its income and give that back to people that have no relation probably isn't the best way to go about fixing the economy. Perhaps, since the writer of the article is making money, he should be giving his income to others rather than paying his house note, rent, groceries, etc.
It seems to me, that if you're asking people who are actually innovating to give up the rewards of that innovation, you're punishing those that should be getting rewarded.
Theoretically, a micro kernel should be easier to develop for and keep one part of the kernel from messing with other parts of the kernel. I know that linux can load up modules for device drivers and other things, but, again theoretically, a micro kernel should allow far more of the kernel to be swapped out for different code than can be done with a monolithic kernel. So there should be some development advantages there.
That being said, we'll have to see how Hurd performs. Micro kernels tend to be slower because of the message passing mechanisms that they use and passing all those messages around seems to be a extremely difficult problem which requires a lot of testing and design. If they have a workable system now, it's still going to take a while to analyse how well the system performs in the real world.
As a programming challenge, it has got to have been a pretty demanding task. What it's good for currently is probably just another free kernel that can operate as a drop in replacement for the Linux kernel. Having a choice in kernels isn't a bad thing and since the architecture is quite different, it's probably not going to take developers away from the Linux kernel. In addition to that, since it's design is different, it will allow developers to think about problems in different ways, which benefits Linux in the long run, since new ideas can be incorporated into the Linux kernel as well. As another free kernel, if Hurd comes up with something new and innovative that would benefit the Linux kernel we are free to create our own version of that innovation and implement it in the kernel. As compared to some OS/kernels that lock their work up via patents.
So right now, it's a wait and see type of deal, the biggest advantage that Hurd offers currently is all in the future. We will have to see what comes from the project. Currently, unless you're interested in seeing how it works, or Linus pissed you off personally, there is no real pressing need to us Hurd.
Hmmm, .9 was released as a somewhat workable kernel and started picking up developers at that point, before that it was just Linus's baby. Once he released it other people started working on it. Same for Hurd, I'll be downloading and studying it to see how it works, I haven't worked with a micro kernel before. But if they are saying that it's ready to work as a kernel for the GNU/Hurd system, I'm inclined to take them at their word.
I'm not sure what projects you've worked on, but considering that the majority of the OS utilities for linux still appear to be gnu projects, I'd tend to believe that once it's released it will work. The problems with micro-kernels are pretty hard to deal with, it's a "new" technology. While they may not have support for all the hardware out there, GNU has a lot of development expertise backing them up and with a working kernel, device drivers will appear and be worked on. If I remember correctly, linux
It's taken me 30+ years to develop my programming skills to the point they are at now, are you going to label my knowledge as buggy and out of date because I started learning about computers and programming before you were born? I highly doubt that they spent all their time working with a 386 during the past 20 years. Most of the GNU software that I use seems to work perfectly fine with a wide range of processors. While I don't recall a specific device driver written under GNU tools, it seems to me that most of the device drivers out there for Linux and probably several flavors of BSD were compiled using GCC, which also I might point out has been around for over 20 years. Software gets updated in active projects and Hurd is an active project. I'd hesitate to compare Duke Nuke'm Forever with Hurd as nothing was produced by the Nuke'm team for years, whereas GNU has had multiple project put out and updated over the last 20 years. I don't know what the actual developers have been working on in addition to Hurd, but as a brand, GNU has my respect. Dismissing the software without looking at it and understanding the process seems a little silly.
Perhaps, I'm wrong and you actually know what you are talking about, but then again perhaps not.
Well, I think the problem you are seeing is students going to college for a degree period. The fact of the matter is that I went my entire career without a degree, yet for some reason, since the tech crash in 2000, it's very difficult to find a new position without a college degree. My conjecture is that with the number of programmers and other computer related people that were let go during the tech crash, that the number of applicants for jobs increased which caused a shift from the hiring manager looking at resumes to human resources screening resumes before passing along candidates. It's my belief that college degree is on the checklist and if you don't have a degree, then the hiring manager, ie someone that can evaluate your knowledge, won't be seeing your resume. For me, this doesn't make too much of a difference, since I'm out of the work for a living game, but I know there was a definite change pre-crash to post-crash.
Computer science degrees have been around a long time; however, I would also like to point out that computer science is not programming. Although we tend to make use of computers as a primary tool, computer science has more to do with computing than with computers. I know that a large portion of CS students go into computers, but it seems to me that CS is about more than programming. Whereas a programmer is focused on producing a final product so he/she finds the tools and applies them, looking up algorithms in order to implement them in code, the computer scientist is focused on studying the algorithms themselves, studying and improving routines. The programmer isn't focused on developing new algorithms or for the most part improving old ones, he/she is focused on delivering a product.
As far as mathematicians go, yes, mathematics helps out considerably in developing algorithms, but math is predominately focused on continuous number systems whereas computer science focuses on discrete systems. Paraphrasing Donald Knuth, when I'm thinking about a problem, sometimes it helps to stop thinking like a computer scientist and start thinking like a mathematician, whereas other times it helps to do the opposite. The thing is that computer science is not math and math is not computer science, there actually is a difference between the two fields.
Back to the main point, the study of computer science to me is far more in depth than most of the training that is offered by colleges out there. Trying develop a series of courses for computer science and cram it into a 4 year degree means that you basically lightly graze a variety of topics, but as far as I have seen, most courses focus on memorization than on actually thinking about the problems. In mathematics, at the lower levels it's more about memorization, but as you reach the upper levels students are required to think about proofs and how to actually formulate their own proofs, ie thinking rather than memorization. In computer science they are covering so much material that students don't really have time to sit down and digest information that they have been given and figure things out on their own. Problems within computer science tend to either focus on trivial problems that have been solved hundreds of times before or are projects that don't allow time to figure things out and force the students to look for as many shortcuts as possible in order to produce the required output. Put another way, as computer professionals, a lot of us spend far more than 40 hours a week working on computer issues, we work full time and then in our off hours we code more, look at technical sites, read up on new material etc. How is a college student, carrying a full 18 credit hour course load with only 10-12 hours a week available to study computer science going to be able to keep up and go beyond that to actually think about what they are studying and then go even further and actually start coming up with their own ideas? As someone with 30 years in the business, the programming assignments in school are negligible;
Heh,
Perhaps you should become a mathematician, move out to bum-f**k, Montana, live in a shack and start mailing care packages to people.
Seriously though, what possible reason is there to get rid of the internet connection? If you are on Slashdot, I'm going to make the assumption that you are technically inclined. If so, the internet offers the only real form of information that you will find. I suppose it depends on what you are using it for. If you find that you are spending too much time online browsing websites just to pass the time, restrict yourself from those types of websites and/or restrict your time online. If you just don't see how time online is of any value, then by all means drop your internet connection as it is just a money sink. On the other hand, if you value the internet and time spent online there, don't drop your personal connection and just access from work, as that means that your social/entertainment access will increase at work and frankly, work time should be spent working and not getting entertainment.
Personally, myself, I chose not to have a landline phone nor do I have any type of broadcast television coming into my house, however, the internet provides my communications, research requirements and entertainment. Internet access is definitely in my top 10 crucial things to have. That being said, I still have a life away from the computer.
What's the real reason for giving up internet access? What possible reason is there to drop service?