"Timing is everything, and so is quality. MS-DOS sucked, as did its predecessors-- all based on a rewrite of DEC's RT11 called CP/M. UCSD p-System sucked worse although a nice learning platform. Even PICK on the original PC SUCKED. That Apple used 6502s, then 68Ks, etc, was a war that they ultimately lost when they switched to Intel processor families."
The brilliance of CP/M was not about if it looked or felt like RT-11, it was that the OS was layered with an invariant part and a BIOS so that the OS could be transported. This leap allowed it to be ported to a multitude of non-PC compatible machines that never could or would run DOS That was Gary's contribution and it has improved OS design ever since.
When it suited Microsoft and IBM to steal Apple's GUI, they wrote the CUA standards document which codified what what was good about the Apple GUI paradigm. WIndows, NT, and OS/2 were primarily CUA compliant. These standards held for many years until Microsoft lost their minds and invented the ribbon. User's comfort went right out the window(tm) and people had to completely retrain as the software became instantly mysterious and unusable. Perhaps something similar will happen now about the tablet paradigm.
Years ago I worked at Western Bancorp. It was the holding company that supported the data processing for 23 banks including First Interstate Bank. We used ACP as the transactional engine running on IBM 370/195 systems. It had better runtime characteristics then the usual IBM stuff. I haven't heard it mentioned for quite a while.
As a polite person I initially edited the/etc/motd file on one of my early servers to say, "Welcome to blah blah blah..." A friend pointed out that if you wish to protect a system, it is best to have the motd say, "For authorized use only...go away" so that if someone gains access, they have been informed they are not welcome. Now in this case, they just weren't paying attention. I have read a number of books about mysql, all of which tell you IN UPPER CASE to set the root password on mysql right away after installation. The developer who put that system together must have been pretty new to mysql. The hackers show no mercy.
After Sonoma County dried up in terms of jobs for technical people, we moved to San Jose in hopes of earning a living in a place where there was technology happening. The real estate prices were high, I was unable to find work, and eventually I had to bail. Now I live in a city that only has one software company, but the weather is nice and the traffic doesn't turn ugly during commute time. I don 't miss the smog, the traffic, or the arrogant people. The Internet has freed us to work where we like and the Silicon Valley is just somewhere I drive through on the way to the North Bay. I don't miss it, except for weird stuff warehouse:-)
They have a complete monopoly on the sale of "WIndows" and certain awful server software and browser. Fortunately for everyone else, people are learning that alternative operating systems work all right too, especially when Windows is so expensive.
I agree with previous posters that this is a grievous breach of trust by Amazon. I understand that Amazon wanted to remove their liability for having sold something they didn't have rights to, but I strongly believe that they have breached our trust and this should have been done differently. Lets assume for a moment that it is true that 1984 was unlicensed and this was the right thing to do. The fact that this capability exists means that an amazon employee could vengefully delete all content from every kindle everywhere. No single point of control should exist with that much power. Humans cannot be trusted with that much authority. All it takes is one disgruntled employee and poof. Microsoft's authenticode went poof when verisign issued a rogue certificate. It is only a matter of time till this happens. I am unconvinced that enough control exists to protect us from this liability. I just bought a kindle and I am very conflicted now. The capability to inventory the kindle probably exists too, and can they fetch documents you have loaded onto your kindle from your PC or using the email link? As for returning books for a refund... If you want a refund, you could delete it yourself and they could verify remotely that you had deleted it. I wouldn't mind if they could inventory only the files they had sold me and not documents I loaded that were private.
What is the big deal? Fortran II was my first language (IBM 1620) and was very straightforward. It could have been algol or some other strange dialect.
While I was learning electronics from my father, he went through a major learning experience. He built a project for his employer with neat bundles of wires tied every few inches, and neatly done so it looked very nice. Of course the system didn't work. The fact the wires were bundled in such close proximity caused crosstalk between wires. In order to fix the system, he cut the cable ties and ruffled the wires into a chaotic rats nest of wires. The system came right up and worked perfectly. As a Virgo, I like neat, and what I just described is distasteful, but this is a true story. For what it's worth.
You are of course entitled to your opinion, but I resent you calling my considered opinion BS. Writing a fully capable and efficient application for the iPhone would mean embracing the frameworks provided by Apple and those frameworks are not transportable. To not use the frameworks would be to go back fifteen years and have to write everything from scratch instead of leveraging off functionality provided by the frameworks. It would be like going back to raw sockets after having enjoyed Python's internet support. By the time you fold in all the multimedia components and the communications components and the database as well as your business logic, that is way too much to code by hand and do the required QA as opposed to making use of the provided functionality which is what contemporary developers do.
After many years in the software industry, one of the more obvious things I have learned is to write applications to be portable so that you can take advantage of opportunities to support different platforms. This is one of the ways a smart developer can earn back the time and money invested in an application. A number of my clients have had their software chosen to be ported onto a new platform for its rollout. For the people that know Mac programming already, handling the iPhone may not be that big a leap. Simply put, an iPhone app written with Apple's tools is not going to port easily to any other platform. If the apps could be written in Java, developers could leverage the ubiquitous Java environment to provide the desired portability. Apple decided not to support Java on the iPhone. That means that by design, they want developers to lock their applications to the iPhone environment. This means that if you write an iPhone application and Apple decides not to allow it in the App Store, you will not be able to port your software to an alternate platform without a total re-write. I decided not to play "Engineering Poker" with Apple as I cannot afford to invest enough time writing a quality application when it is a roll of the dice whether it will be accepted, updates may not be accepted and users might blame me, and the user's are Apple's clients and not mine. I just don't feel the love from Apple that platform vendors used to show for their developers, who are in a sense, their partners. Microsoft and Apple both look an their developers as customers instead of channel partners, and they are ignoring synergy that has made others wealthy in the past.
I have found errors in assemblers before during intense debugging. When the C doesn't do what you want, and the results in the debugger don't make sense, you have to toss all your assumptions and will yourself to see the non-obvious. I found bugs in the Intel assembler and the PharLap assembler in certain addressing modes that were not commonly used by assembly coders. These language tools are just that, Tools. When you are a serious software engineer, you are responsible down to the bit level for efficiency and reliability. It doesn't happen often, but when you are scratching your head and going around in circles, you have to check it down to the bits.
I attached the drives to my Macs with a firewire cable configured in mirrored mode. I was using TimeMachine. Things work for a while, then the drive stops responding.
The drives were powered with an APC power system and were not allowed to get hot. They were not in continuous use but simply used for backup.
When the product showed up on the shelves at my local store, I was very excited about the FW800 and dual drive mirrored functionality. I bought one for each of my computers as a "safe place" for my data. The data remained safe until the drives just quit within several months.
I cannot imagine what I might have done wrong with them other than depend on them to do what they were advertised to do.
I bought eight of the mirrored drives from WD that have two 500GB
drives that can be used in raid 0 or 1. These drives have been a major disappointment as they have all failed unexpectedly and the mirroring was of no apparent value because when the usb/fw attached unit stopped responding, it was useless whether there was a remaining platter with good data or not. These units weren't cheap and I paid about $3000 for the eight of them. I am really unhappy about this and will not be buying WD products any more. A have pile of these I am hesitant to throw away, but they are little more than doorstops now because I wouldn't trust them at all, even if I could get them going again. What a waste of money. (And my trust)
I rented one of these in 1973 while I was in the Navy so I could access the ARPA network via the TIP at fleet weather central on the baser at NAS NORVA.
Back when I owed credit cards, I became concerned I was about to go over my minutes in my plan. So I powered down my cell, but the carrier continued to bill me for incoming calls from creditors using overtime minutes and sent me a bill for hundreds of dollars. Beware.
I have spent almost my whole life working as a software engineer (troubleshooter). Each project was already over budget and late. Each wanted something smaller or faster than what had come before. Each of my solutions were groundbreaking. I never charged as much as I could have and spent most of my money tooling up for the next project. I took responsibility for my own education and continually bought technical books and development software. I cannot remember ever having an "easy" project. Each one was demanding and stressful and most resulted in very happy clients. It took years of hard study to obtain critical mass on knowledge of hardware and software to get to the point where intuitive solutions began to happen. I devoted my life to this occupation and feel very betrayed by corporations that want their software written by the cheapest talent available. I am not into process for its own sake, but part of what I strove for over the years was to learn a wide variety of skills to make my software maintainable and robust. I know there are a lot of people like me out there, but I don't know how many are employed any more. What level of technological superiority do we aspire to have if we use mundane workers to create it. Why should people pay good money for software written by drones? It has been quite a while since I worked for a company that valued its developers enough to care about their long term viability. We have to look out for ourselves or we become obsolete in a year. Almost every aspect of software development is version oriented these days. It is hard to learn anything completely before it is replaced by the next version, and you barely get started with release software before the betas for the next version hit. How is a developer to keep up with this onslaught. The next generation will be lucky if they have more than a handful of people like me. Cookie cutter programmers seem to be taking over the world. And who's fault is that?
I used to install consumer grade satellite internet. It was not simple though. The dish had to be properly aligned (crosspol/copoll) or it caused trouble at the satellite. The probability of Iran's dishes getting aligned correctly (harder than satellite tv) is iffy and someone would have to donate a properly placed satellite and relay services to the enterprise, which is not cheap. These satellites are 22K miles out and have substantial lag, but that is not an issue I guess. These dishes are easy to spot though unless very cleverly disguised. The technology is sexy though and it would be a generous gesture.
When you hold your hands together and pray, the fingerprints sign the prayer so God knows who it came from. That is why you hold your hands in front of your face in the usual pose. The prayer passes over both hands on it's way to God.
Four years ago I had enough and wanted off the MS merrygoround. I bought several Apple Macs and have been very happy. Several years ago I thought to give MS another chance and bought equipment to develop for Vista. I got suckered in by the "Vista Capable" scam and wasted my money on machines that couldn't run the version of Vista I was targeting. Since then I have used my Mac every day and have not needed to reload it once. Of course I have a dust covered PC in case I must use it, but I don't seem to need it more than once a year. The MAC OS X is stable and efficient and I have been very happy. I am not a fanboi, just a satisfied user.
Lets admit that if MS did leave the country, there would be a major impact on the amount of money spent on politicians by lobbyists promoting the MS monopoly. I am still amazed that with Windows being the ubiquitous OS, economy of scale has not occurred and Windows costs half the price of a whole computer system. EoS has brought us a 90% reduction in the price of computers since the inception of the PC, but the cost of Windows seems to increase. What is with that anyway?
It is funny (haha) to hear Steve Balmer using the word disingenuous. He might as well be in the Webster's definition of the word. Now that MS has stifled the computer industry, and made unimaginable amounts of money at the expense of a generation of domestic software engineers, it would be just like him (paranoid) to assume these news laws would actually hurt MS enough to warrant further outsourcing and relocation. If they won't spend the money producing quality software at a reasonable price, they should pay some taxes and be responsible corporate citizens and show some gratitude to the country that put personal computers on the map.
Slashdot Mirror
"Timing is everything, and so is quality. MS-DOS sucked, as did its predecessors-- all based on a rewrite of DEC's RT11 called CP/M. UCSD p-System sucked worse although a nice learning platform. Even PICK on the original PC SUCKED. That Apple used 6502s, then 68Ks, etc, was a war that they ultimately lost when they switched to Intel processor families." The brilliance of CP/M was not about if it looked or felt like RT-11, it was that the OS was layered with an invariant part and a BIOS so that the OS could be transported. This leap allowed it to be ported to a multitude of non-PC compatible machines that never could or would run DOS That was Gary's contribution and it has improved OS design ever since.
When it suited Microsoft and IBM to steal Apple's GUI, they wrote the CUA standards document which codified what what was good about the Apple GUI paradigm. WIndows, NT, and OS/2 were primarily CUA compliant. These standards held for many years until Microsoft lost their minds and invented the ribbon. User's comfort went right out the window(tm) and people had to completely retrain as the software became instantly mysterious and unusable. Perhaps something similar will happen now about the tablet paradigm.
Years ago I worked at Western Bancorp. It was the holding company that supported the data processing for 23 banks including First Interstate Bank. We used ACP as the transactional engine running on IBM 370/195 systems. It had better runtime characteristics then the usual IBM stuff. I haven't heard it mentioned for quite a while.
As a polite person I initially edited the /etc/motd file on one of my early servers to say, "Welcome to blah blah blah..." A friend pointed out that if you wish to protect a system, it is best to have the motd say, "For authorized use only...go away" so that if someone gains access, they have been informed they are not welcome. Now in this case, they just weren't paying attention. I have read a number of books about mysql, all of which tell you IN UPPER CASE to set the root password on mysql right away after installation. The developer who put that system together must have been pretty new to mysql. The hackers show no mercy.
After Sonoma County dried up in terms of jobs for technical people, we moved to San Jose in hopes of earning a living in a place where there was technology happening. The real estate prices were high, I was unable to find work, and eventually I had to bail. Now I live in a city that only has one software company, but the weather is nice and the traffic doesn't turn ugly during commute time. I don 't miss the smog, the traffic, or the arrogant people. The Internet has freed us to work where we like and the Silicon Valley is just somewhere I drive through on the way to the North Bay. I don't miss it, except for weird stuff warehouse :-)
They have a complete monopoly on the sale of "WIndows" and certain awful server software and browser. Fortunately for everyone else, people are learning that alternative operating systems work all right too, especially when Windows is so expensive.
I agree with previous posters that this is a grievous breach of trust by Amazon. I understand that Amazon wanted to remove their liability for having sold something they didn't have rights to, but I strongly believe that they have breached our trust and this should have been done differently. Lets assume for a moment that it is true that 1984 was unlicensed and this was the right thing to do. The fact that this capability exists means that an amazon employee could vengefully delete all content from every kindle everywhere. No single point of control should exist with that much power. Humans cannot be trusted with that much authority. All it takes is one disgruntled employee and poof. Microsoft's authenticode went poof when verisign issued a rogue certificate. It is only a matter of time till this happens. I am unconvinced that enough control exists to protect us from this liability. I just bought a kindle and I am very conflicted now. The capability to inventory the kindle probably exists too, and can they fetch documents you have loaded onto your kindle from your PC or using the email link? As for returning books for a refund... If you want a refund, you could delete it yourself and they could verify remotely that you had deleted it. I wouldn't mind if they could inventory only the files they had sold me and not documents I loaded that were private.
What is the big deal? Fortran II was my first language (IBM 1620) and was very straightforward. It could have been algol or some other strange dialect.
While I was learning electronics from my father, he went through a major learning experience. He built a project for his employer with neat bundles of wires tied every few inches, and neatly done so it looked very nice. Of course the system didn't work. The fact the wires were bundled in such close proximity caused crosstalk between wires. In order to fix the system, he cut the cable ties and ruffled the wires into a chaotic rats nest of wires. The system came right up and worked perfectly. As a Virgo, I like neat, and what I just described is distasteful, but this is a true story. For what it's worth.
You are of course entitled to your opinion, but I resent you calling my considered opinion BS. Writing a fully capable and efficient application for the iPhone would mean embracing the frameworks provided by Apple and those frameworks are not transportable. To not use the frameworks would be to go back fifteen years and have to write everything from scratch instead of leveraging off functionality provided by the frameworks. It would be like going back to raw sockets after having enjoyed Python's internet support. By the time you fold in all the multimedia components and the communications components and the database as well as your business logic, that is way too much to code by hand and do the required QA as opposed to making use of the provided functionality which is what contemporary developers do.
There has to be a way to link this to Sarah. I am counting on the smart slashdot users to post the elegant response and make my day :-)
After many years in the software industry, one of the more obvious things I have learned is to write applications to be portable so that you can take advantage of opportunities to support different platforms. This is one of the ways a smart developer can earn back the time and money invested in an application. A number of my clients have had their software chosen to be ported onto a new platform for its rollout. For the people that know Mac programming already, handling the iPhone may not be that big a leap. Simply put, an iPhone app written with Apple's tools is not going to port easily to any other platform. If the apps could be written in Java, developers could leverage the ubiquitous Java environment to provide the desired portability. Apple decided not to support Java on the iPhone. That means that by design, they want developers to lock their applications to the iPhone environment. This means that if you write an iPhone application and Apple decides not to allow it in the App Store, you will not be able to port your software to an alternate platform without a total re-write. I decided not to play "Engineering Poker" with Apple as I cannot afford to invest enough time writing a quality application when it is a roll of the dice whether it will be accepted, updates may not be accepted and users might blame me, and the user's are Apple's clients and not mine. I just don't feel the love from Apple that platform vendors used to show for their developers, who are in a sense, their partners. Microsoft and Apple both look an their developers as customers instead of channel partners, and they are ignoring synergy that has made others wealthy in the past.
I have found errors in assemblers before during intense debugging. When the C doesn't do what you want, and the results in the debugger don't make sense, you have to toss all your assumptions and will yourself to see the non-obvious. I found bugs in the Intel assembler and the PharLap assembler in certain addressing modes that were not commonly used by assembly coders. These language tools are just that, Tools. When you are a serious software engineer, you are responsible down to the bit level for efficiency and reliability. It doesn't happen often, but when you are scratching your head and going around in circles, you have to check it down to the bits.
I attached the drives to my Macs with a firewire cable configured in mirrored mode. I was using TimeMachine. Things work for a while, then the drive stops responding. The drives were powered with an APC power system and were not allowed to get hot. They were not in continuous use but simply used for backup. When the product showed up on the shelves at my local store, I was very excited about the FW800 and dual drive mirrored functionality. I bought one for each of my computers as a "safe place" for my data. The data remained safe until the drives just quit within several months. I cannot imagine what I might have done wrong with them other than depend on them to do what they were advertised to do.
I bought eight of the mirrored drives from WD that have two 500GB drives that can be used in raid 0 or 1. These drives have been a major disappointment as they have all failed unexpectedly and the mirroring was of no apparent value because when the usb/fw attached unit stopped responding, it was useless whether there was a remaining platter with good data or not. These units weren't cheap and I paid about $3000 for the eight of them. I am really unhappy about this and will not be buying WD products any more. A have pile of these I am hesitant to throw away, but they are little more than doorstops now because I wouldn't trust them at all, even if I could get them going again. What a waste of money. (And my trust)
I rented one of these in 1973 while I was in the Navy so I could access the ARPA network via the TIP at fleet weather central on the baser at NAS NORVA.
What I remember about the compuserve era was 28.8 modems and serious delays when downloading. Nowdays my Internet connection is 1000 times faster.
Back when I owed credit cards, I became concerned I was about to go over my minutes in my plan. So I powered down my cell, but the carrier continued to bill me for incoming calls from creditors using overtime minutes and sent me a bill for hundreds of dollars. Beware.
I have spent almost my whole life working as a software engineer (troubleshooter). Each project was already over budget and late. Each wanted something smaller or faster than what had come before. Each of my solutions were groundbreaking. I never charged as much as I could have and spent most of my money tooling up for the next project. I took responsibility for my own education and continually bought technical books and development software. I cannot remember ever having an "easy" project. Each one was demanding and stressful and most resulted in very happy clients. It took years of hard study to obtain critical mass on knowledge of hardware and software to get to the point where intuitive solutions began to happen. I devoted my life to this occupation and feel very betrayed by corporations that want their software written by the cheapest talent available. I am not into process for its own sake, but part of what I strove for over the years was to learn a wide variety of skills to make my software maintainable and robust. I know there are a lot of people like me out there, but I don't know how many are employed any more. What level of technological superiority do we aspire to have if we use mundane workers to create it. Why should people pay good money for software written by drones? It has been quite a while since I worked for a company that valued its developers enough to care about their long term viability. We have to look out for ourselves or we become obsolete in a year. Almost every aspect of software development is version oriented these days. It is hard to learn anything completely before it is replaced by the next version, and you barely get started with release software before the betas for the next version hit. How is a developer to keep up with this onslaught. The next generation will be lucky if they have more than a handful of people like me. Cookie cutter programmers seem to be taking over the world. And who's fault is that?
I used to install consumer grade satellite internet. It was not simple though. The dish had to be properly aligned (crosspol/copoll) or it caused trouble at the satellite. The probability of Iran's dishes getting aligned correctly (harder than satellite tv) is iffy and someone would have to donate a properly placed satellite and relay services to the enterprise, which is not cheap. These satellites are 22K miles out and have substantial lag, but that is not an issue I guess. These dishes are easy to spot though unless very cleverly disguised. The technology is sexy though and it would be a generous gesture.
When you hold your hands together and pray, the fingerprints sign the prayer so God knows who it came from. That is why you hold your hands in front of your face in the usual pose. The prayer passes over both hands on it's way to God.
This is the first practical idea in this thread I have seen for many postings. :-)
Four years ago I had enough and wanted off the MS merrygoround. I bought several Apple Macs and have been very happy. Several years ago I thought to give MS another chance and bought equipment to develop for Vista. I got suckered in by the "Vista Capable" scam and wasted my money on machines that couldn't run the version of Vista I was targeting. Since then I have used my Mac every day and have not needed to reload it once. Of course I have a dust covered PC in case I must use it, but I don't seem to need it more than once a year. The MAC OS X is stable and efficient and I have been very happy. I am not a fanboi, just a satisfied user.
Lets admit that if MS did leave the country, there would be a major impact on the amount of money spent on politicians by lobbyists promoting the MS monopoly. I am still amazed that with Windows being the ubiquitous OS, economy of scale has not occurred and Windows costs half the price of a whole computer system. EoS has brought us a 90% reduction in the price of computers since the inception of the PC, but the cost of Windows seems to increase. What is with that anyway?
It is funny (haha) to hear Steve Balmer using the word disingenuous. He might as well be in the Webster's definition of the word. Now that MS has stifled the computer industry, and made unimaginable amounts of money at the expense of a generation of domestic software engineers, it would be just like him (paranoid) to assume these news laws would actually hurt MS enough to warrant further outsourcing and relocation. If they won't spend the money producing quality software at a reasonable price, they should pay some taxes and be responsible corporate citizens and show some gratitude to the country that put personal computers on the map.