lonelygirl15... am I the only person on/. who has never heard of lonelygirl15 or seen any videos of her? Then again I don't spend all day on YouLube.com.
My Yaris 4wD does 80 mpg on general driving, I could probably get 100mpg if I drove more carefully. I also recall Dahatsu selling a Charade Diesel in the early 1990s with a claimed 100mpg/100mpg (but not at the same time). Google need to set their sights a bit higher.
> Computer science is about algorithms and computability theory and such.
That's true in the proper meaning of the term but many CS courses are in reality CE or SE courses and do not in reality require the broad, in depth maths background.
Don't get me wrong about mathematics, two of my computing heros are Alan Turing and Charles Hoare and one can't help but admire some of the mathematicians involved in encryption. But here were are talking about branches of mathematics where you may use a computer as a tool to speed up computation.
I wonder if this CS is a branch of mathematics approach also puts people off. Personally I think there is much less mathematics going on at the programming level than college lecturers like to think. It is like the old saw that a dog that catches a ball is solving a 2nd order differential equation in real time. No its not, it is catching a ball. Similarly a program is more a logical story than some mathematical adventure.
It may gall college profs who are still trying to foist formal methods on people but setting a high mathematical barrier to entry on CS courses and having a high maths content is a bad thing.
As an example I have a first in Microelectronics from a British University (a course which had a large syllabus covering 'C' and machine language) but only just scraped the 'C' grade needed in mathematics as an entrance to this course despite having 'A's in Electronics and Computing. I doubt I have used any maths much beyond British 'O' level standard since and certainly the maths knowledge required as entry to a degree level CS course is too wide and deep. It is all geared up to people going onto research rather than the real world. You don't need to be an expert in set theory to write the level of SQL required by most applications.
My old company (the OSF) had a visit from RMS once. He spent the whole week with some wierd GNU logo stuck to his forehead which I think frightened my boss. I hope, like Linux, he's more user friendly these days.
What I don't understand is why this had taken so long. Andrew Ford, in his book Spinning the Web published in 1994 said that he got his experience of building websites from a project with the British Library to put the Domesday book online. If so, then the Electronic Domesday book has taken longer to complete than the original.
> I'm no Windows programmer, but clearly the partners are going to have to make changes if their software is incompatible with Vista.
which would be fair enough if Vista introduces new functionality that is of major benefit to everyone. So far it seems like a GUI upgrade to compete with Mac and erm. DRM. Imposing a $180 billion dollar tax on third parties seems a bit harsh. Surely they could have dropped the GUI upgrade and rolled the DRM stuff into a service pack for XP to keep the content providers happy? Just a thought.
> ubsequently, when programmes are uploaded at race meetings they are compared with the reference copy to ensure no changes to the approved software have been made.
Well that's going to be really hard isn't it, just check the versions into CVS Visual Sauce Safe.
Lets hope the power control software isn't buggy and doesn't run on Windows (okay okay I'm karma whoring now!). I would hate to have my head blown off by a dentist sporting a phased plasma drill in the 40 watt range. Sounds far fetched but Canada's Therac-25 radiation therapy machine zapped some cancer sufferers killing three. I seem to recall there was a similar failure with a laser surgery machine in France which blinded some people but I couldn't find a reference, the French probably covered it up.
There is some logic to this. In addition it is hard to believe that we can recover 100% of the hydrocarbons that were laid down from C02 being fixed out of the atmosphere, also the sun is not as strong as 400 million years ago so we should not go back as far as the atmospheric conditions at the start of animal life on earth. Well that is the good news for the animals that survive climate change.
The bad news, the little ice age was an average change of -0.8C and caused a lot of disruption to economic activity, an average change of +2C to +6C over a 200 year period will likely be serious.
> In 2003 another English newspaper tested a 75-mpg Toyota diesel.
That is probably the Yaris. I have one and it does go a long long way. It is also pretty fast with a top speed of 110 mph and good handling.
I generally fill up around once a month, which is nice with diesek prices in France around 1.1 euros per liter (close to $7/gallon - gas/petrol costs more). I generally get around 550 miles on a seven point five gallon tank... most driving on country roads with some motorway driving to 80 mph. Journeys usually around 30-50 miles. If I drove a bit more frugally I could probably get over 100 mpg. I do very few short journeys though - generally walk or take my bicycle.
> What's to guarantee that the person a company finds on Myspace or Livejournal - I don't know much about Facebook - is the same person they're actually considering employing?
As someone who has actually had a responsible job and been in the hiring process I will let you into a secret. Either you use a bit of intelligence to cross-check that the person posting the views is the person being interviewed (same email, same pseudo, same home address etc) or when you interview the person you ask them:
Do you have a website? Do you have interested in manufacture of biological weapons? What is your homepage URL? etc...
With MySpace it is usually obvious that the girl with her knickers round her ankles dogging in the local car-park is the girl in the pinstripe across the desk... and in this case was the clincher that got her the job.:-)
In the UK (and possibly elsewhere) a bigger bar to getting a job can be incorrect information in the Police Criminal Records Database (errors in up to 10% of records they say) as personel departments trust this kind of information more than a search on Google.
NT 3.51 would BSOD all the time if you pushed it, it didn't get stable till sp6 went out the door. NT 4.0, yes I agree moving the graphics code back into the OS space probably made it more unreliable for server systems but if your graphics sub-system has just crashed it is still pretty crucial for a desktop system.
> Basically, a 15% performance hit is nothing on a modern system if it gains you stability, security and functionality.
It is still 15%... your gains in stability, security and functionality are a big if. In general you get an OS that is just 15% slower which is hard to sell.
> Virtually all of these postings have come from people who don't have a clue what a microkernel is or what one can do.
Okay, I spent 2 years working as a engineer in the OSF's Research Institute developing Mach 3.0 from 1991. Let me answer Linus's question in a simple fashion. What Mach 3.0 bought you over Mach 2.5 or Mach 2.0 was a 12% performance hit as every call to the OS had to make a User Space -> Kernel -> User Space hit. This was true on x86, Moto and any other processor architecture available to us at the time. Not one of our customers found this an acceptable price to pay and I very much doubt they would today. One of the reasons Microsoft moved a lot of functionality into the Kernel between NT 3.5 and NT4.0 was performances (NT being, at its origins a uK based OS).
What of the advantages ?
Is porting easier? No not really, the machine dependent code in Mach 2.5 and Mach 3.0 was already well abstracted.
You could run two OS personalities at once, for example you could have an Apple OS and Unix running at the same time. But why would any real world clients want to do this?
Problems in the OS personality wouldn't bring down the uKernel - but they might stop you doing any useful work while you reboot the OS personality.
Other things like distributed operating systems (and associated fault tolerance) were perhaps aided by the uK design and this is a path that, in my humble opinion, the OSF should have pursued with greater zeal than they did. Back in 1991 we had a Mach 3.0 based system that ran a uK across an array of x86 nodes but had different parts of the OS - say IO or memory management running on different nodes. From a user standpoint all the machines (in reality bog standard 386 machines linked by FDDI) looked like a single computer running a Unix like OS.
I remember discussing Linux with my colleagues back in 1993, some were impressed and thought the nascent OS model was very powerful, others dismissed it as a toy with no real future. I suspect Tannenbaum was also amongst the poo=pooers and has become pretty annoyed about how things have turned out.
Interesting article. The only qualm is that the ANPR also targets cars suspected of being linked with crime. This may explain why more blacks are pulled as "intelligence" may have been put into the system linking their cars with crime. This intelligence is human generated and subject to race bias. GIGO. The journalists didn't seem to pick up on this.
Of course it may be that blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime linked to cars.
According to this article Baby boom and bust stocks and shares are looking like a poor long term investment as the baby boomer generation works itself out of the system. The Bboomers will sell their retirement plans to pay for their old age which will cause a drop in share prices of maybe 50%. The salvation may be a new breed of investors from the developing world - although not if the US blocks the sale of American companies to China.
Of course this is slightly tangential as to whether there is a tech stock bubble.
True but I'm thinking of Jo Schmoe putting a few pics up on his personal interest website.
But it is all going a bit too far if you ask me. If someone starts turning out reproduction works then they should pay royalties and I can even accept that calendars, art books or posters should be covered but there is a point where fare use must apply. That would seem to cover something like a low res photograph on the Web... commercial site or not.
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lonelygirl15... am I the only person on /. who has never heard of lonelygirl15 or seen any videos of her? Then again I don't spend all day on YouLube.com.
IIS is such a lot of toxic waste are you really surprised that it leaks onto the Interweb.
My Yaris 4wD does 80 mpg on general driving, I could probably get 100mpg if I drove more carefully. I also recall Dahatsu selling a Charade Diesel in the early 1990s with a claimed 100mpg/100mpg (but not at the same time). Google need to set their sights a bit higher.
> Computer science is about algorithms and computability theory and such.
That's true in the proper meaning of the term but many CS courses are in reality CE or SE courses and do not in reality require the broad, in depth maths background.
Don't get me wrong about mathematics, two of my computing heros are Alan Turing and Charles Hoare and one can't help but admire some of the mathematicians involved in encryption. But here were are talking about branches of mathematics where you may use a computer as a tool to speed up computation.
I wonder if this CS is a branch of mathematics approach also puts people off. Personally I think there is much less mathematics going on at the programming level than college lecturers like to think. It is like the old saw that a dog that catches a ball is solving a 2nd order differential equation in real time. No its not, it is catching a ball. Similarly a program is more a logical story than some mathematical adventure.
It may gall college profs who are still trying to foist formal methods on people but setting a high mathematical barrier to entry on CS courses and having a high maths content is a bad thing.
As an example I have a first in Microelectronics from a British University (a course which had a large syllabus covering 'C' and machine language) but only just scraped the 'C' grade needed in mathematics as an entrance to this course despite having 'A's in Electronics and Computing. I doubt I have used any maths much beyond British 'O' level standard since and certainly the maths knowledge required as entry to a degree level CS course is too wide and deep. It is all geared up to people going onto research rather than the real world. You don't need to be an expert in set theory to write the level of SQL required by most applications.
My old company (the OSF) had a visit from RMS once. He spent the whole week with some wierd GNU logo stuck to his forehead which I think frightened my boss. I hope, like Linux, he's more user friendly these days.
What I don't understand is why this had taken so long. Andrew Ford, in his book Spinning the Web published in 1994 said that he got his experience of building websites from a project with the British Library to put the Domesday book online. If so, then the Electronic Domesday book has taken longer to complete than the original.
> IT managers hit the roof when the option was added
All you pr0n are belong to us!
> I'm no Windows programmer, but clearly the partners are going to have to make changes if their software is incompatible with Vista.
which would be fair enough if Vista introduces new functionality that is of major benefit to everyone. So far it seems like a GUI upgrade to compete with Mac and erm. DRM. Imposing a $180 billion dollar tax on third parties seems a bit harsh. Surely they could have dropped the GUI upgrade and rolled the DRM stuff into a service pack for XP to keep the content providers happy? Just a thought.
The quoted Wikipedia document doesn't exactly give one confidence that it will be a useable open standard.
> Google has a really clear 3 year plan, and it's pretty freaking awesome - here's how it goes:
You forgot no. 4:-
4. Profits!!!
> ubsequently, when programmes are uploaded at race meetings they are compared with the reference copy to ensure no changes to the approved software have been made.
Well that's going to be really hard isn't it, just check the versions into CVS Visual Sauce Safe.
Lets hope the power control software isn't buggy and doesn't run on Windows (okay okay I'm karma whoring now!). I would hate to have my head blown off by a dentist sporting a phased plasma drill in the 40 watt range. Sounds far fetched but Canada's Therac-25 radiation therapy machine zapped some cancer sufferers killing three. I seem to recall there was a similar failure with a laser surgery machine in France which blinded some people but I couldn't find a reference, the French probably covered it up.
thanks for the corrections... all the calculations were in English gallons so obviously you need to factor them down a wee bit for the US etc.
There is some logic to this. In addition it is hard to believe that we can recover 100% of the hydrocarbons that were laid down from C02 being fixed out of the atmosphere, also the sun is not as strong as 400 million years ago so we should not go back as far as the atmospheric conditions at the start of animal life on earth. Well that is the good news for the animals that survive climate change.
The bad news, the little ice age was an average change of -0.8C and caused a lot of disruption to economic activity, an average change of +2C to +6C over a 200 year period will likely be serious.
> In 2003 another English newspaper tested a 75-mpg Toyota diesel.
That is probably the Yaris. I have one and it does go a long long way. It is also pretty fast with a top speed of 110 mph and good handling.
I generally fill up around once a month, which is nice with diesek prices in France around 1.1 euros per liter (close to $7/gallon - gas/petrol costs more). I generally get around 550 miles on a seven point five gallon tank... most driving on country roads with some motorway driving to 80 mph. Journeys usually around 30-50 miles. If I drove a bit more frugally I could probably get over 100 mpg. I do very few short journeys though - generally walk or take my bicycle.
> Prof. Wirth always said: "Make everything as simple as possible but not simpler"
I think you will find that quote is usually attributed to Albert Einstein not some Swiss guy.
> What's to guarantee that the person a company finds on Myspace or Livejournal - I don't know much about Facebook - is the same person they're actually considering employing?
:-)
As someone who has actually had a responsible job and been in the hiring process I will let you into a secret. Either you use a bit of intelligence to cross-check that the person posting the views is the person being interviewed (same email, same pseudo, same home address etc) or when you interview the person you ask them:
Do you have a website?
Do you have interested in manufacture of biological weapons?
What is your homepage URL?
etc...
With MySpace it is usually obvious that the girl with her knickers round her ankles dogging in the local car-park is the girl in the pinstripe across the desk... and in this case was the clincher that got her the job.
In the UK (and possibly elsewhere) a bigger bar to getting a job can be incorrect information in the Police Criminal Records Database (errors in up to 10% of records they say) as personel departments trust this kind of information more than a search on Google.
NT 3.51 would BSOD all the time if you pushed it, it didn't get stable till sp6 went out the door. NT 4.0, yes I agree moving the graphics code back into the OS space probably made it more unreliable for server systems but if your graphics sub-system has just crashed it is still pretty crucial for a desktop system.
If the choice is between XP or XP 15% slower but it has a lot of the OS code running at user level then it is hard to sell.
> Basically, a 15% performance hit is nothing on a modern system if it gains you stability, security and functionality.
It is still 15%... your gains in stability, security and functionality are a big if. In general you get an OS that is just 15% slower which is hard to sell.
> Virtually all of these postings have come from people who don't have a clue what a microkernel is or what one can do.
Okay, I spent 2 years working as a engineer in the OSF's Research Institute developing Mach 3.0 from 1991. Let me answer Linus's question in a simple fashion. What Mach 3.0 bought you over Mach 2.5 or Mach 2.0 was a 12% performance hit as every call to the OS had to make a User Space -> Kernel -> User Space hit. This was true on x86, Moto and any other processor architecture available to us at the time. Not one of our customers found this an acceptable price to pay and I very much doubt they would today. One of the reasons Microsoft moved a lot of functionality into the Kernel between NT 3.5 and NT4.0 was performances (NT being, at its origins a uK based OS).
What of the advantages ?
Is porting easier? No not really, the machine dependent code in Mach 2.5 and Mach 3.0 was already well abstracted.
You could run two OS personalities at once, for example you could have an Apple OS and Unix running at the same time. But why would any real world clients want to do this?
Problems in the OS personality wouldn't bring down the uKernel - but they might stop you doing any useful work while you reboot the OS personality.
Other things like distributed operating systems (and associated fault tolerance) were perhaps aided by the uK design and this is a path that, in my humble opinion, the OSF should have pursued with greater zeal than they did. Back in 1991 we had a Mach 3.0 based system that ran a uK across an array of x86 nodes but had different parts of the OS - say IO or memory management running on different nodes. From a user standpoint all the machines (in reality bog standard 386 machines linked by FDDI) looked like a single computer running a Unix like OS.
I remember discussing Linux with my colleagues back in 1993, some were impressed and thought the nascent OS model was very powerful, others dismissed it as a toy with no real future. I suspect Tannenbaum was also amongst the poo=pooers and has become pretty annoyed about how things have turned out.
Interesting article. The only qualm is that the ANPR also targets cars suspected of being linked with crime. This may explain why more blacks are pulled as "intelligence" may have been put into the system linking their cars with crime. This intelligence is human generated and subject to race bias. GIGO. The journalists didn't seem to pick up on this.
Of course it may be that blacks commit a disproportionate amount of crime linked to cars.
Of course this is slightly tangential as to whether there is a tech stock bubble.
True but I'm thinking of Jo Schmoe putting a few pics up on his personal interest website.
But it is all going a bit too far if you ask me. If someone starts turning out reproduction works then they should pay royalties and I can even accept that calendars, art books or posters should be covered but there is a point where fare use must apply. That would seem to cover something like a low res photograph on the Web... commercial site or not.