Posts by Doctor Syntax 40470 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Jun 2014
If you're reading a site like this I thing we can assume you've heard of the GPL. Forget the pun about copyleft. GPL is founded on copyright. Every line of code of software made available under the GPLs is subject to copyright and it's entirely due to that that such software's authors are able to impose the conditions of those licences. It is not at all about profit.
This all gets more broken when I drop the "in my organization" part of the premise.
Again this doesn't need AI to do that. All it needs is a new internet format and protocol for exchanging calendar information so that ordinary rules-based software can try to find an optimal solution.
What's that? .ics files and WebDAV?
Nothing new under the sun. And that includes solutions searching for a problem, even an already solved problem.
AFAICS there have been two technical trends, pushing for maximum power and pushing for minimum cost per user.
Initially there was only the mainframe, expensive and defining power. The second trend started by connecting dumb terminals to the mainframe so the expensive computing power could be brought to many users. Then, as mainframes became bigger and hairier the minis appeared, workstations, desktop PCs*, laptops, tablets and phones. In the meantime the drive for more computing power evolved into the hyper-scale server and the supercomputer. In between these two diverging trends there was room for all manner of variations, some successful long term, some not.
Alongside these trends has been a to and fro battle for control between centralised management and users and another between selling services (bureaux and cloud) and box-shifters. Both will likely continue.
* No, the IBM and its descendants are not the only PCs. They weren't even the first.
"In Jobs' own words, he saw three amazing technologies that day, but he was so dazzled by one of them that he missed the other two. He was so impressed by the GUI that he missed the object-oriented graphical programming language, Smalltalk, and the Alto's built-in ubiquitous networking, Ethernet."
Wisely he passed on another technology, the underlying hardware. There's a series on YT about reconditioning an Alto which drives down to the H/W implementation which was a mass of TTL (obviously that could have been integrated for mas production) and the memory chips of the day, probably 1Kbit. The basis was a clock ticking round a ring of separate H/W functions - disk controller, ethernet, display, etc. all implemented in H/W - no smart peripherals. One of the H/W functions was the actually programmable machine that ran the S/W. Was it some implementation of object oriented H/W to underlie the OO S/W? No, it was an emulation of an existing mini, the Nova.
"On the Lisp machines, your code wasn't trapped inside frozen blocks. You could just edit the live running code and the changes would take effect immediately. "
Can you think of a more productive environment for malware? If we have a malware problem now, just think what it would be like in Lisp.
Unix and its derivatives have survived remarkably well. The supercomputer in your pocket runs one of them. Not only was Unix not marketed by AT&T, marketing it was illegal. It spread because on its merits in spite of lack of marteling - or possibly because of it, the forbidden fruit syndrome.
SOHO's design life was for two years, with enough consumables on board for another four years. Engineers have managed to eke this out to 28 years and counting.
You can imagine the pitch: "Yes, the design life is only a couple of years. That design fuel load is just a x2 safety factor.. We've no expectation of actually using it all. Trust us."
"I wasn't allowed to muck about with the required voltages"
Sad when parents take that attitude. There's nothing like the warm glow of a row of heaters. The rather hotter glow from the anode of one of a pair of 807s that had gone unstable was a different matter. The solution to that was a spare, swap them round to find a stable combination. Repeat every few months as required.
Both views are OK. The Pi and the like are fine at a higher level of integration but being able to fangle things at a lower level is something to be treasured too. I suppose it's a bit like software. High level abstractions such as SQL and assembler both have their place. OTOH the Z80 was the last assembly language I wrote in.
Don't forget the other invention that made our times what they are: the lightweight rechargeable battery. And I don't mean for all those electronic gadgets.
Right now I've got one battery recharging and another to follow it. They're for the cordless pruner that I'm going to need to trim the branches the gales have partly blown out of a conifer. They also power a few other cordless gardening tools and a drills. There's another charger and battery, almost but not quite interchangeable for other cordless tools and a third almost but not quite identical battery for the cordless vacuum cleaner. I can't imagine why the EU spent so long faffing about a standard for phone chargers while ignoring the heavy stuff.
And a merry Christmas to you all (Where's the Santa icon?)
If, as has been suspected, W12 is a subscription service it's more likely to be the death knell. I suppose Microsoft might boil the frog a little more slowly - still a perpetual licence but it will do even less without a 365 subscription. The one after that will be full-on Windows 365, neatly avoiding having a Windows 13. You know they'll never introduce a W13, don't you.
You seem to think that Linux provides a difficult user experience, It doesn't. You can set things up so it provides a similar user experience to Microsoft before the latter went off the rails with a few actual improvements that Microsoft took uears to catch up on. Useful things such as multiple virtual desktops. And you can have the long terms consistency.
You do realise who the shareholders are, don't you? They're people who are members of pension funds and they like.
Maybe you are one, yourself. If you're in a company pension scheme you should check what shares it holds. You could always present yourself at the prison gates and tell them you're guilty as charged.
Copyright owners have been reselling stuff to their customers for years as new media were developed - shellac, vinyl, cassette, CD. They've got into the habit of just doing thatand it's going to take a long time for them to grasp that the customers are now able to fight back because storage is cheap.
"the room is going to be full of He gas"
That depends on how much He is involved and how the room is ventilated. However if the He is vented into space containing the patient it might manage to asphyxiate them without needing to fill the room.
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