If licensed like DOS, it would have every bit as many compatibility problems.

Oh, not as bad, at least at first. The companies licensing MacOS would have had to make suitable hardware, and Apple could have held their feet to the fire to get compatibility and quality.

In those days, there was so much pent-up demand for Mac laptops that there were companies that would buy a Mac, crack it open and pull out the ROMs, build a laptop with the ROMs, and provide some sort of docking station so the original Mac would not be useless. This was about the most expensive way to make a laptop ever, but it was the only legal way to do it. Apple took forever to release a laptop product, and when they did, it was not what the customers wanted (heavy due to the lead-acid battery for one thing). Third-party Macs could have cost significantly more than generic "beige box" PCs and customers would have paid happily.

The thing is, Apple was charging crazy money for Macs. If Apple had adopted the Microsoft model, they would have had to accept lower margins on each Mac, and made it up on volume. Third-party Macs would have cost less than Apple official Macs but still would have sold a lot and buried the DOS-on-x86 PC. Apple was marking up Macs by about 100%... They were successfully getting a 50% margin on each Mac. Nobody else got away with that kind of markup, before or since.

It was great for Apple while it worked. But eventually Windows got to the point where it was kind of usable. And a Compaq running Windows would cost less than half what Apple was getting for a Mac. Hastings's Law: Adequate and cheaper tends to win against better but more expensive. Windows sales took off and Apple nearly died.

What saved Apple was the PowerBook, a laptop that really was what customers wanted. And a string of other successful products. And now Apple is doing very well. But IMHO, Apple could have had success like Microsoft in the 1990's had they adopted the Microsoft strategy of licensing to everyone and making a small profit on a huge volume; instead they nearly went out of business.

Even now, Apple isn't getting anything close to 50% margins on Macs. Those days are over.

Consider trying QNX, the message-passing real time OS, for this. This is a message passing problem, and Linux doesn't do message passing well. QNX has a scheduler optimized for message passing. You should be able to handle the UDP front end and fan-out without any problems. You can give the front-end process a higher priority than the other processes, which should let you get all the UDP packets into the fan-out program without losing any. That's what real-time OSs are for.

Trying to do anything high-performance with CPython's threads is hopeless. Watch this presentation on performance issues with Python's Global Interpreter Lock, Python has an internal scheduler, and it behaves very badly under load.

So each Python process should be single-thread. Have as many as you need, set up to get work via MsgReceive and reply by MsgReply. Don't set them up as "resource managers".

Python under QNX is being used by the robotics community, where real-time matters for some things, but not others.

QNX - great technology, marketing operation from hell.

That level of control probably belongs at the cluster management level. We need to do less in the OS, not more. For big data centers, images are loaded into virtual machines, network switches are configured to create a software defined network, connections are made between storage servers and compute nodes, and then the job runs. None of this is managed at the single-machine OS level.

With some VM system like Xen managing the hardware on each machine, the client OS can be minimal. It doesn't need drivers, users, accounts, file systems, etc. If you're running in an Amazon AWS instance, at least 90% of Linux is just dead weight. Job management runs on some other machine that's managing the server farm.

There is a serious bipartisian proposal in Congress to reduce the tax deduction for advertising. Call your Congressional representative and tell them you support the elimination of tax deductions for advertising.

Because the US savings rate is so low (most people are spending almost all they earn), advertising does not increase demand. It just moves it around a bit. All advertising does is increase prices. There are many products, from movies to medications, where the advertising cost exceeds the cost of production. Let's put the brakes on advertising.

Basic economics should also tell you that certain jobs have a value ceiling, and above that ceiling, you either go without, or you find someone willing to work at or below the value ceiling.

We used to have kids employed part time by businesses to do things like police the trash in the parking lot, wash down sidewalks, and so on. But the value to the business is not worth what they'd have to pay in order to get the job done, and so now there is trash in parking lots, and crappy sidewalks, and you contract someone to come in once a week or so with a strew sweeper, because it's cheaper than hiring a junior high/middle school or high school teenager at an adult wage to do the work. Unless you have the "family business/employ your kid for whatever you want" loophole, a lot of that stuff just doesn't get done.

For technical stuff, you either get the equivalent of a migrant farm worker, or day laborer from home depot, and you either get an H1-B to make it legal, or you contract it out to a third party to make it legal, in the same way that a lot of farm workers, or the guys hanging out in the Home Depot aren't legal (and are paid under the table). But what you don't do is hire someone in at a wage higher than the value of the work to the company. You stay at or below the value ceiling at all times, or you might as well be flushing money down the toilet, since your business is not going to make it.

...that Nokia engineers have historically built products no one wants to buy, while Xbox engineers make game consoles that people actually buy.

I suppose we could retask the former Nokia engineers with making game consoles no one wants to buy, instead of phones no one wants to buy.

But frankly, Microsoft has already announced that 12,500, or roughly 70% of the 18,000 people being laid off, are primarily factory workers assembling dumb phones and feature phones, which are both low margin, and selling poorly, and they are predominantly not employed in the U.S. anyway.

The remaining 5,500 people are redundancies of the kind you get when you smash a 127,000 employee company together with a 90,000 employee company to get a 217,000 employee company, and then decide that 2.5% of them are duplicate effort which is not necessary.

I think it's more likely that more people are becoming obese because of exactly one factor: age. They are living artificially prolonged lifetimes due to access to adequate food and to medicine. It's easier to get fat when you are 50 than when you are 30 because of the natural changes in your metabolism.

You chose to selectively read instead of consuming the whole message. If you are going to be programming for scientific purposes, math is essential for doing that type of programming.

I can't speak for everybody, of course, but I DO let price dictate if I buy a book or not, even if it's an author I love. And if it's a debut author, or one I haven't read before, I'm unlikely to be thrilled with paying $8+ for a book.

The vast majority of the books I read are on the Kindle. The vast majority of those books are either carefully-chosen self-published authors or books either Amazon and/or the publisher is selling for no more than $6. Publishers that want to continue to insist on "charging" more than $10 for a book are collecting precisely $0 of my reading dollars. (Meaning that they'll collect the same amount of money from me pricing e-books at a $1B/copy.)

Self-publishing is really the way to go these days for new authors. The average traditionally-published manuscript makes $0, as the average manuscript isn't picked up by a publisher at all. And the ones that do get published receive far less support from publishers than they used to, as they have so many imprints now that the effort that can be expended on a random debut author is just about zilch; they get a few review copies sent out, minimal editing services, and maybe a short blurb in a trade rag. With that limp level of support, it's not surprising few debut authors clear their initial advance, when they are only clearing 15% royalties.

Contrast that with the 70% (of a lower price) Amazon is offering on anybody that chooses to post a book. The only additional effort authors must expend is doing their own cover and editing. They were already largely responsible for their own promotion anyway, so that doesn't really change.

In the "good 'ol days" publishers served a real function. They provided substantial editing support, decent promotional effort, and were, in any case, the only game in town. Now the number of books published per year by the traditional publishers has gone up, and the services they provide authors have gone down. They have reduced themselves to nothing more than middlemen between authors and retailers. Nowhere but books and music do we tolerate the middlemen taking such a large chunk of the available money for little more than distribution.

It's not just about Wikipedia. Mr. Barry's press agent claims he is also suing the National Post (Canada) for publishing a critical article, "The world according to Yank: Montrealer with checkered past gets Nobel nod, or does he?"

The reason math helps a whole lot in programming is that it teaches essential critical thinking skills. Some people are good at critical thinking skills without taking math. The _majority_ ,however, require some type of education to help mold their methods of thinking. Many, even with a whole lot of training do poorly with critical thinking skills.

Claiming that you have never used math in programming simply demonstrates that you are not programming for scientific purposes (writing a GUI for a CAD program is not the same as writing the underlying math structures). That's fine, and most surely is not intended as an insult. As with above, you are not everyone, and math has many benefits.

I say this as a person who has a degree in Math, and took everything possible in College for math (hated statistical math, but diff-eq was great). I don't sit and run differential equations all day, but do very well helping Engineers and Scientists that _do_ run heavy mathematical models. Hell, when I was in college the only way to learn computers was by being in a math program.

yeah yeah, get off my lawn!

:-)

You make it sound like starving people are getting fat too.

If they are becoming obese, the particular individual has a surplus of caloric intake, if only for this year or month. This is not to say that they have proper nutrition. So I am not at all clear that the fact that there is obesity in the third world is confounding evidence.

First, you use the same "most" claim without any proof. Second, "most" can be proven by reading court transcripts. Sampling studies have been done, so "most" is surely provable. "Is it worth the time and effort required to go through all court data?" is a valid question, but something you need to ask since you used the same terminology based on some anecdotal information. Lastly, the propagandists are easy to find. Look at who funds particular groups and you will find answers. Their information is also easy to find, read articles submitted to nearly every source, listen to interviews on mass media, etc... This is not rocket science, you refusing to do any work at all.

Level 3 Communications is (or at least was) a really great company to work with. When the company I worked for was a huge customer of theirs, they did anything and everything to satisfy us. The claim of them volunteering to install 10GE cards really does sound like something they'd just do to make a large customer happy.

I really miss working with them.

From the summary:

U.S. and U.K. news organizations are studiously trying to spread the blame

WTF? Is this intended to somehow suggest that the USA and/or UK share some portion of blame?

The article linked in that part of the summary is a CNN article making the case that shoulder-fired missiles cannot reach 33,000 feet, so it must have been military gear. That's it... it even notes that both Russia and the Ukraine have such missiles.

This is news, and a news organization is reporting on it. Go figure. "trying to spread the blame"? "studiously", even! Really?