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When Rich Barton was at Microsoft, he pulled off something that, despite government and investor pressure over the years, never happens. He spun out a company. That company, Expedia, which Barton founded in 1996, later went public with Barton as CEO. In 2003 Barry Diller’s USA Interactive acquired it for $3.6 billion. Since then Barton has co-founded real estate data company Zillow and job search startup Glassdoor, and he’s invested in a handful of others. An interview with Expedia founder Rich Barton, who was not assimilated by the Borg.
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Hell finally froze over yesterday, so Apple announced a new Mac Pro at WWDC. At first glance, the new machine was as mysterious as it was terrifying to me and many other creative pros who have been waiting for ages for this thing to drop. But now that Apple has a full site page for the new machine and I’ve gotten some info from people familiar with its internals and with OS X 10.9, the Mac Pro has becomes less of a mystery. But that’s also what’s freaking us out. Darth Mac: I find your lack of internal expansion disturbing.
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From the outside, it would appear I was on the textbook path of programming. Started making websites at 15. Took programming and web design classes in my tech-oriented high school. Was accepted into my first choice school and majored in Computer Engineering. Had great internships at a tech giant. Wrote code that was used by millions of people. Graduated with distinction. Cofounded a software startup. And yet despite doing everything right, I didn’t think of myself as a good programmer. ...Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Code.
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I made a first person exploration game in minecraft which I’m using to study how human beings gain and store spatial knowledge. This post outlines the processes involved in making and getting data for analysis from a minecraft server. A little bit of background first: my PhD thesis is on modeling human behavior in simulations of crowds. More specifically it’s about modeling crowds that are evacuating buildings during fires, terrorist attacks or something similar. As a part of my thesis, I’ve been planning to develop a model of spatial knowledge and exploratory behavior of humans; this could be invaluable in structuring buildings in a way so that evacuation is quick, efficient and relatively painless. Sorry, your Companion Cube cannot accompany you in the event of an actual emergency.
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RIP VMS.
It was the first Gigabyte scale OS I ever came across and the last one to be fully documented on paper so it holds a special place in my personal history of computing.
It will be interesting to see if its progeny go on to dominate the Terabyte era as well or if something genuinely conceptually new emerges.
"The secret of happiness is freedom, and the secret of freedom, courage."
Thucydides (B.C. 460-400)
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Sad news. Future generations will miss it, and they won't even know.
In my opinion, the last OS to be documented at all I have been missing the Digital Command Language for decades
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YvesDaoust wrote: Digital Command Language A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...
I worked for a defense contractor. We had a project which required strict FORTRAN-77 adherence. We were using VAX FORTRAN on a microVAX-II running VAX/VMS 4.0. There were a couple VAX FORTRAN features we wanted to use during development that weren't FORTRAN-77. I wrote a preprocessor in DCL that converted the VAX FORTRAN constructs into equivalent FORTRAN-77. Roughly a third of the final product was code generated by this preprocessor.
Software Zen: delete this;
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Read the linked article and looked at the referenced roadmap. Having said that, can anyone provide an article from HP that says they are EOLing OpenVMS? The roadmap says "Standard Support at least through...".
Can someone provide non-legal speak with an actual press release type article?
Both my current and previous work sites use OpenVMS.
Thanks,
Tim
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Support will be provided until 2020. See the last entry on this[^] page.
/ravi
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Thanks... sent the information on.
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I still actively develop for VMS for a customer. The hardware has all turned into virtual machines running on (ironicly) HP servers. I spent most of the 80's and 90's coding Ada, C, C++, and (my personal favorite) VAX assembler. Two things I really miss that the Windows World never had: 1) the absolute consistency of the OS and run-time. Things worked exactly as you expected them to. 2) The fabulous documentation set. Everything explained, examples given, every return code and side effect documented. Fantastic OS for its time.
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You are welcome When I was an employee I managed to get a few things into the doc set to make it easier to find some documentation related to System Services.
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Sorry, I was in the field in Texas. I submitted a lot of documentation SPRs and spent a lot of time in the VMSNotes Notes conference.
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I still have a MicroVAX 3100-80 (and parts of the Orange Wall) sitting next to me.
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The REALLY old-timers in VMS land have the blue wall. I also miss working on VMS very much. It was (is) truly a terrific system.
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As a former DEC employee, I'm glad K.O. isn't around to see this, even if he was a hardware guy.
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I wish HP would rip out LMS and release VMS as open source software.
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JavaScript needs no introduction. So, instead of writing you a walkthrough for Javascript’s past, we’d like to take a peek into the future. The future is called Harmony. Harmony is the name given to the next version of the infamous client scripting language by the ECMA Committee. The ECMA is an international non-profit standards organization responsible for maintaining the JavaScript standard (known officially as ECMAScript). Harmony would officially be the 6th version of JavaScript, the 5th being the one currently in use, that was published in 2009. JavaScript, the soon-to-be good parts.
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In this article we’ll review new developer WinRT features that’ll be released in the upcoming Windows 8 release (dubbed “Windows 8.1” / “Windows Blue”). Microsoft recently announced that during June 2013’s BUILD conference a developer preview of Windows 8.1 will be released for download. In the meanwhile many Windows 8.1 “leaked” images are available online. These “leaked” images allows us to get a sneak preview of the featuresets that’ll be announced in BUILD conference. For the length of this article we’ll go over those features. Which of these APIs looks interesting to you?
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We—the undersigned—want to change how web standards committees create and prioritize new features. We believe that this is critical to the long-term health of the web. We aim to tighten the feedback loop between the editors of web standards and web developers. Today, most new features require months or years of standardization, followed by careful implementation by browser vendors, only then followed by developer feedback and iteration. We prefer to enable feature development and iteration in JavaScript, followed by implementation in browsers and standardization. A code-first approach to new web standarads?
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I thought I'd mix things up a bit today and give my readers a quiz. The C language is perhaps the most popular computer language in existence, but it's also quite odd, and because of that often poorly understood. I'd like to give you a quiz to see how much you know about some of the odd but useful corners of the language. School's nearly out for summer. Here's a pop quiz.
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From Bjorn Freeman-Benson’s talk Airplanes, Spaceships, and Missiles: Engineering Lessons from Famous Projects. Bjorn is discussing the ferrite core memory of the Apollo guidance system: "These are very, very robust memory systems. … But the problem is that they actually have weight to them. Core memory actually weighs a bunch, so when you’re writing your program for the lunar module … every line of code that you wrote had a consequence in weight. And you could measure how heavy your code was at the end of a compile line." Memory on Apollo: Bits, bytes, ounces and pounds.
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Happy Nerd Christmas! Apple CEO Tim Cook got you a new operating system for the iPhone and iPad. It looks different. It works differently. It has a host of new features and design elements–from full multitasking to the Pandora-like iTunes Radio. It organizes your pictures, has remarkable new AirDrop sharing features, automatically updates your apps, and overall lets you do just about everything more quickly and efficiently. What's this? Flat design? Where have I seen that before...?
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