Many frogs are able to hibernate. I have seen frogs in the swamps in Fairbanks, Alaska, where the ground is permanently frozen. During the summer the top few feet thaw, and this eems to be enough for these frogs, or their eggs, to survive from year to year.
The message seems to be that in the real world (whoops, that should be Real World) being as stupid as the next guy is far more important than any sort of competetive advantage. The nail that sticks up gets hammered down, and all that.
Since little companies seem to manage to upset big ones' applecarts from time to time, I'm sure that's true at the big companies, where bureaucracy is more important than profits. This same effect might be connected to HP's decision to dump their calculator division?
Re:Spelling/Grammer Nazis...
on
Looking At Gobe
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· Score: 3, Insightful
... she continually gets crap over her spelling and grammer.
Don't you think that learning the basic, grade-school-levels skills like spelling and grammer would be a more appropriate reaction than this whining? If you don't like being accused of bad grammer, learn to use good grammer. If you don't like constructive criticism about your spelling, learn to spell. No, a spelling checker won't help... did you really want to say affect or effect?
I like the fact that they're at least trying to do something though..
There you hit the nail on the head. They look good, never mind whether this will have any effect, let alone a salubrious one.
This is necessary first to calm the unthinkingly nervous, and second to cover their asses in the incredibly unlikely event that a terrorist does try to do harm.
This won't do much to calm the thinking nervous; a little thought will suggest that terrorists have upped their planning horizon far beyond the spur-of-the-moment 60's -- style ``carry in some guns and wing a few people and take some hostages and fly to Libya'' stuff that this would help with.
This policy wouldn't have hindered Timothy McVeigh, nor the unibomber, nor the September 11 hijackers, nor the next group of terrorists. What will discourage terrorists is swift, destructive retaliation against their cause, so that every terrorist act clearly sets back their cause.
I think that most of the domestic response to the recent events have been nothing but c.y.a. window dressing, with the same sort of logic and effectivness as gun control: none. See here and here and here
and here among other references, for some ideas about that.
Treating honest folks like criminals only aids the criminals in the long run; it gives us the illusion that we are on the same side as them, because we and the criminals have a common enemy in the government. Take a look here for some discussion of how governments can go very wrong indeed.
Yes, same for me except the girlfriend part. This is really sad, bad news. I still have an HP41CX. The battery connections have corroded through, so I'm not using it until I can get it fixed. I'll need to replace the copper-coated plastic with some copper sheet.
I suspect that the problem isn't that HP couldn't peddle their machines, but rather that the entire calculator market is on the way out. With a Palm M100 going for about the same price as a midrange TI and cheaper than an HP49, why buy the HP? Just load an emulator into a palm and away you go, in rpn or whatever. It makes sense, but it just won't be the same.
Indeed, Microsoft has made a spot on judgment of the management problem in open source : things eventually happen in open source projects, but not at a pace that anyone can control. Indeed, the management techniques that can be applied to closed source projects can allow people to define deadlines - whereas no such deadlines can be imposed (if one is honest) in the open source world.
It is true that closed-source projects can make one sort of deadline and stick to it. That's the "we'll ship by" sort of deadline. That's not the kind of deadline that knowledgeable users generally need.
The sort of deadline that open-source projects can generally meet is the "we'll get a nightly build up every night" and the "we won't call it version 1.0 until we're ready" sorts. These will do just fine for knowledgeable users. No closed-source company can meet this kind of commitment.
Notice that the one thing that for-profit, closed-source developers cannot do no matter how hard they try is ship bugfree software on a hard schedule. No one can. What they can do is ship version 1.0 when they said they would, and charge you for the service pack, and then charge you again when version 2.0 comes out with the features that you paid for in version 1.0 actually working.
Here's where the libre software is so wonderful. The total cost of ownership may be higher, lower or just the same as the closed source stuff, but the total benefits of ownership are generally much higher.
Folks like to say that you get what you pay for, and that's almost true: when you buy something you won't get any more than you pay for. The payment makes an upper bound on what you get. That isn't true when someone gives you something. The initial cost of $0.0 makes a lower bound on the value.
With libre software you get what the developers claim they're delivering, and sometimes a lot more. You don't have to wait for a deadline or an official release to start using the latest version of GNUfoo; you can keep trying it and start using it when you say it's ready.
Ask yourself: is it really an advantage for the closed-source companies to ship buggy crap that isn't ready, so they can meet a deadline? It is for them; it lets them gouge you and make a payroll. Is making a deadline that way really good for the customer?
Re:Fascinating, but not practical, here's why:
on
Ternary Computing
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· Score: 3, Informative
Now, add another bit, and you have to use a trinary distribution, which I'm sure exists but isn't very common (and not surprisingly, I can't recall that one either).
Well, I don't think that the probability is really much worse. Instead of binomial, we have in general multinomial, and here trinomial: pdf=(n!/(x_i!*x_j!*x_k!))(p_i^{x_i}*p_j^{x_j)*p_k^ {x_k)).
See Berger's Statistical Decision Theory and Bayesian Analysis. Or hereor here.
There are some hardware problems; I posted a possible solution. (It's a joke, mostly!)
A more serious problem is mentioned by anohter poster: floating point is where we really, really care about speed and efficiency, and it seems that binary has that sewn up.
... we'll never see large scale use of ternary computing. There's just too much overhead involved in switching over the way of doing things at such a fundamental level.
Quite right. This is the only argument against it which doesn't have an answer, I suspect.
Don't get hung up on transistors.
on
Ternary Computing
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· Score: 5, Interesting
As long as we're turning the world on its ear, lets go all the way, and use triacs. We implement it (the tri-state gate, that is) like an inverter, more-or-less. These have two (non-linear ) on states plus off, and are just right for implementing an inverter. They'd probably be great for trinary logic, too.
I just dug out my old physical electronis book (Micro Electronics, by Jacob Millman, First edition), and can't find them in there, so here's a slightly less academic reference.
There might be some problems with trying to get the clock speed high enough to compete with the Intel/AMD marketing, though; it says that they can be triggered into conduction by high dV/dt.
10) Why do you use Microsoft Windows
by Anonymous Coward
If you are so anti-corporation, and so anti-Microsoft, to the point of publically criticizing them and their practices, why does the Consumer Project on Technology, and specifically you, Mr. Love, choose to use Microsoft Windows on your office and home machines?
Jamie Love:
Well, our office uses just about everything. We have Windows boxes, Linux boxes, Macs and Suns. For a while I moved the CPT unit entirely to Linux, to have a Microsoft free environment to see how that would work. We did this for more than a year for everything. Recently I switched some machines back, and now I use an IBM lap top with Windows as my main machine. I decided to switch back for several reasons. First, I had lost touch with what Microsoft was up too, and I needed to know that. Second, I wanted to use a large number of new devices that I couldn't get to work on my Linux box. Third, I was having trouble sharing my Linux documents with colleagues using MS Office, due to the typical Microsoft anticompetitive practices. And I was pretty unhappy with the progress in the various GPL office productivity tools, with the exception of the GNOME spreadsheet program, which was pretty good. I didn't see much work by AOL in improving the Linux version of Netscape, and wasn't happy when Microsoft invested in Corel and they seemed to be dumping the Linux apps. Recently I went back and tried a few current Linux distributions, and am deciding what to do on that front right now, wondering why Sun can't make Star Office an easier install. I've used lots of different computers over time. My first one didn't have a monitor, only a printer, and my first personal computer was a Commodore 64, which I used to dial into an IBM mainframe. I like computers and computing, and I like Linux a lot, but I am not that happy with the current state of client applications, and a bit frustrated tying to use various PDAs, scanners, cameras, printers, etc, with my Linux box.
This seems like a combination of legitimate curiosity (what's MS up to?) and legitimate frustration with little snags. He's tried Linux, likes it, and hasn't given up on it. This doesn't sound like much of an argument against open source or Libre software in general; just one guy isn't quite ready to trash his last Windows cd yet.
Any economist (as long as they're not a big C conservative) will tell you the same thing - higher wages in one area lead to more jobs in other areas since the people getting more tend to spend more.
WRONG! No economist would say anything so simple and definite.
What I might say is that artificially inflated wages in one area (inflated, say, by a union) will impoverish everyone, though the nonunion workers would certainly be hurt far wose than the union workers with the artificially high wages . Higher wages due to higher productivity (raised, say, by the employer's capital expenditure) will have the effect you describe.
I took a union shop leader's training course once, and was shocked by the ``screw your employer'' attitude. It soured me on unions in a big way. This was the American Federation of Teachers, by the way, hardly a notorious bunch of militants.
Linus is said to have started from scratch, built something that worked (little, and poorly, but worked), and then thrown it out to a world which just happened to have been waiting for exactly that.
I think that this is the key: give folks something that sort of works, to fire their imagination and get them to commit, and then (assuming that there really are folks who care passionately about getting this hypothetical project working) it'll take off.
If you are proposing the 123rd super-duper-programmer's editor, don't count on folks getting all fired up. The first really usable version of Unix which could run on a PC without sending a month's pay to SCO got a lot of folks really excited.
It's nice to know how to do matrix multiplication using dynamic programming, but I've never used it.
You've never used it; I've never heard of it. I know about dynamic programming; it's a recursive method for doing calculus-of-variations stuff. I know about matrix multiplication, too. How do you use the first to do the second? Could you point me to a reference, please?
West pled guilty to a misdemeanor, rather than risk getting a felony conviction. For poor folks without a lawyer (or without the money to keep the lawyer on the case month after month after month), this is the normal thing to do when one is innocent and wrongly accused of a felony. It is also the normal course of action for crooks who are rightly accused. He pled guilty, but we still haven't a clue whether this is a case of a crooked DA trying to avoid looking bad, or a crooked cracker getting off easy.
The biggest problem here is that we really don't know who to believe. Given the choice between believing a U.S. district attorney and some slightly scummy small-time crook, we really don't know which to take. The U.S. government has a long history of bad behavior. (Think about the secret experiments (also here and here) in the '50s, in which people were exposed to radiation... the ones for which the government began making restitution recently, when reports began to emerge. Think about J. Edgar Hoover's FBI. Think about the entire Justice Department over the last eight years. Think abou the IRS since its inception.) There just isn't any room to automatically assume that a responsible government employee isn't trying to cover up a mistake at West's expense, just because he can.
The good scenario here is that West is a petty crook who's getting a break because it's his first offence. The bad scenario is that the DA realised that if he dropped this, he'd look like an idiot, so he's threatened a poor innocent guy into pleading guilty to a crime he didn't commit, just to save the DA some embarassment. And it looks as if we'll never be sure.
The first rocket range in Alaska is at Poker Flats. Poker Flats hasn't launched any orbital rockets, but they have launched a good many ``sounding rockets'' which carry instrument packages into the upper atmosphere.
One of the neatest things about having a rocket range affiliated with the University is that students can design and launch a suborbital rocket in the ASRP.
Your sig line mentioned that someone should do a paper on windows instability. Here is one of them. It's the third in a series.
One portion which shocked me was:
Our final piece of analysis concerns operating system crashes. Occasionally, during our UNIX study, tests resulted in OS crashes. During this Windows NT study, the operating system remained solid and did not crash as a result of testing. We should note, however, that an early version of the fuzz tool for Windows NT did result in occasional OS crashes. The tool contained a bug that generated mouse events only in the top left corner of the screen. For some reason, these events would occasionally crash Windows NT 4.0, although not in a repeatable fashion.
They crashed a unix os? Wow! That doesn't match up with my limited experience. The only way I've ever done that was by trying to do stupid things as root, like running mindi with a buggy kernel. I wouldn't have thought that this would be a problem for a normal user.
Here is something which didn't surprise me at all:
Our 1995 study found that applications based on open source had better reliability than those of the commercial vendors. Following that study, we noted a subsequent overall improvement in software reliability (by our measure). But, as long as vendors and, more importantly, purchasers value features over reliability, our hope for more reliable applications remains muted.
Microway also sells these toys. If you want Alpha, look here. If your budget runs more to Athlons, look here. Unfortunately, you will have to choose between 8 and 16 CPUs on the low end here; they don't have a 10 CPU Athlon cluster.
You should think a bit about whether the extra abilities of the Alpha boxes are worth the extra bucks for your application. One thing which I think that I remember about the Alphas is that they use a crossbar switch to link the several processors on a motherboard to memory, et cetera. This should give better throughput. They also have huge caches which should help with big matrices. I think that if you have lots of little problems which should be run in parallel, more nodes with lower price and capability per node might be the way to go.
I remember back in the days of the XT, Microway used to sell math coprocessor and video boards for PCs which cost more than the box you hooked them to, along with high-grade compilers which would put that hardware to work. They were once the place to get hardware and software for doing seroius number-crunching on a PC.
How will the new Mozilla license scheme affect developers who want to use Mozilla code in creating and distributing proprietary applications?
Not at all; developers creating and distributing proprietary software incorporating Mozilla code will be able to continue to use that code under MPL or NPL terms and conditions, exactly as they have been doing all along.
They tell us that you can still use the code under the NPL, just as always. See the FAQ for some details; talk to your lawyer for legal advice.
The important point here is that Netscape thinks that you can indeed use their code to make proprietary applications. If your lawyer tells you that you can't, you should have him communicate his reasons to Netscape. I'm sure that they would appreciate the feedback.
I think that Netscape is being a good deal more generous than I would be with my code. As always, if you don't like the license, don't use the code, and don't release your code under a license you don't like.
Getting off topic now: By the way, for the folks who point to a BSD license as a cure-all, I have a question: is it true that BSD licensed code may be re-released under the GPL, just as it may be re-released under a closed-source license?
Government should do things which can't be done by private enterprise, but which would be welfare-enhancing if done (that's a relatively restrictive criterion, compared to what is actually used today to determine what gov't should do).
Given that we accept that proposition, it might make sense for gov't to build communications infrastructure, which we have seen that private capital is doing slowly, if at all.
If they do this, I think tht they should then make the infrastructure available to any private outfit which wants to run an isp/telco. Ideally, it should be rented to several, which citizens could choose between.
Notice that the reason that we aren't seeing broadband made available seems to be as much due to regulatory difficulties as to high costs. The telcos have their network and monopoly as artifacts of the current and past regulatory environment. They can use this to chop the legs off of anyone who tries to compete using the telco system, and no-one can afford to build their own system when the telcos have an existing system which is at least partially amortized.
So, having started to ``manage'' our economy, we need more government intervention to ``fix'' the problems we caused.
1) installing modified GPL code on a machine for a customer to evaluate -- RMS has told me that if the customer controls the machine, it is distribution, but if the code modifier controls the machine, it is not.
I guess I just don't get it. You are required to make source code available upon request to anyone to whom you have distributed the binary. If you can modify and redistribute, surely you have the source code? How can this be a problem? Remember, it's only for them that want it. You aren't required to force it down the customer's throat. I don't have source code to most of the apps running on my laptop, but that doesn't mean that Mandrake is violating anything. They make the source available, I don't want it. 2) Distributing binaries ahead of source (i.e. to subcontractors). RMS has made it clear to me that this is verboten. He sympathized with our plight, but could find no way that the GPL would permit this.
Again, what's the problem? If the subcontractors ask, you give them the url for the sources, or just burn them onto a CD or two and drop them into the mail. If you can modify, this must be possible.
Perhaps the problem is that you want to keep secrets? That's perfectly respectable, but that's not what this license is all about.
Quite seriously, the GPL does impose some serious burdens on distributors. Fortunately, these can all be overcome by distributing only in source code form. Configure and make are slick enough that this is entirely practical for me, and I'm certainly no programmer. I can't set this stuff up myself, but I have no trouble using it to install big projects like R .
That the buildings lasted as long as they did is a testament to the engineers who designed and built them. {SNIP} Complaining that the buildings "only" stood for about an hour or so seems silly to me.
Me too. I think that in a situation like that, the buildings should only be expected to stand long enough to clear the entire, fully occupied building via stairs.
Stories we've seen here suggest that wasn't so. People have spoken of being in the stairwells nearly an hour; they we're said to only be wide enough to accomodate two abreast. These are the same stairwells that the firemen needed to travel up.
Yes, it's wonderful how well they did hold up. If they had had more stairs, that time might have been enough.
Re:And here comes Carnivore...
on
More WTC News
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· Score: 2
I could learn martial arts well, with a bunch of buddy's, get onto the plane, kill a few people with some well placed jabs, and take control.
GASP! We hadn't thought of that... OH NO! Let's ban martial arts; yeah, that's the ticket! Reg'lar guys don't need that sissy Asian stuff anyhow.
On a more serious note, as long as I can carry wooden pencils onto the plane, I won't miss my knife. The pencil lets me write notes to my confederates, too, right up until the moment I use it to kill a stewardess and sucker the pilot into opening the door.
As you say, even stripped and bound, determined people can still be dangerous.
1. US Citizens have not had war in their own continent/country for a few, what, hundred years.
Actually, it's right about 60 years. Pearl Harbor was bombed in either 39 or 40, Kiska and Attu (U.S. territory) were occupied by the Japanese about a year later.
Live in fear of the US reaction and what that will do for the world.
The Palestinians are often held up as an example of an aggrieved people, so I'll continue to use them as an example. They have accepted a "government" of murders and have dedicated themselves to ensuring that there can never be peace and that they will never be welcomed in Israel. They have also refused to settle in and build new lives for themselves elsewhere. I don't see much evidence of loving forgivness there.
Compare American reactions to past attacks to the Palestinian reactions. A few years after Pearl Harbor, we imposed a government on Japan which they liked well enough to keep, and paid for the rebuilding of their economy. We behaved similarly with the European Axis powers and the Marshal plan.
I have no idea where you live, but if it is in one the countries which are automatically suspect such as Libya, Iraq and Afganistan, American reactions are probably the least of your daily worries.
Some of thing things I believe are more important when thinking about a programming language:
1) Amenable to use by team of programmers
2) Viability over a period of time (5-10 years).
3) Large developer base
4) Cross platform - not because I think cross-platform is a good thing by itself; rather, I think its important to avoid being locked-in to a single hardware or Operating System vendor.
5) Mature IDE, debugging tools, and compilers.
6) Wide applicability
1) Is lisp less amenable to use by a team? Can't you implement one object while I implement another? I'm asking because I don't know; all my programming has been for my own research.
2) Lisp has been around since the 1950's, in one form or another. I find that I can read lisp code from the Lisp 1.5 programmer's manual, which originated in 1965. Our kids will probably still be able to in another 30 years.
3) How large is large enough? Is: "language of choice for 10^7 illiterate script-kiddies" a stronger recommendation than: "there are a sufficient number of competent programmers who are proficient in the language and familiar with the problem domain"? Notice that second statement is probably not true for any of the languages discussed, for most problem domains.
4) Except for the Microsoft offerings, pretty much everything is cross platform. Think gcc and cmucl, for easy examples.
5) I really don't know what an IDE is. I gather it is something other than emacs, since emacs supports nearly every language, some wonderfully well (try ESS for R). I really can't comment on this one at all; perhaps someone else could?
As for mature compilers, again, I think all of the languages mentioned so far are in fair shape there. Java and c can both use the same back end in gcc, and so does gcl.
6) Technically, all the languages mentioned are Turing-complete... But wide applicability means being suitable, instead of merely capable. I am not familiar with java and c++, but lisp and c (and Fortran) seem to be equally capable for the bits of number crunching I do. Lisp is wonderfully more flexible, and the debug/wish-i'd-done-it-differently/change it/debug/repeat cycle seems a good deal shorter in Lisp than the other two, for me at least.
After going over the above, it looks to me as if personal choice and the resources immediately at hand are really the only reasons to pick lisp over c over c++ over java over lisp.
Emacs has a great outline mode, and emacs together with latex and reftex beats the pants off Word. The reason that I stopped using Office was that it was so terribly limiting. I had gotten to be a bit of an expert with it, and it just wouldn't do what I wanted easily if it would do it at all.
So far, I haven't had any trouble importing.doc and.xls files using staroffice 5.2, including some really large complex stuff. Staroffice 5.1 was a REALLY different matter, though; much worse. So, I use Staroffice whene I need to get some data out of a proprietary format, and Emacs for writing papers, letters, and so on. It's a huge improvement.
Slashdot Mirror
Many frogs are able to hibernate. I have seen frogs in the swamps in Fairbanks, Alaska, where the ground is permanently frozen. During the summer the top few feet thaw, and this eems to be enough for these frogs, or their eggs, to survive from year to year.
Since little companies seem to manage to upset big ones' applecarts from time to time, I'm sure that's true at the big companies, where bureaucracy is more important than profits. This same effect might be connected to HP's decision to dump their calculator division?
Don't you think that learning the basic, grade-school-levels skills like spelling and grammer would be a more appropriate reaction than this whining? If you don't like being accused of bad grammer, learn to use good grammer. If you don't like constructive criticism about your spelling, learn to spell. No, a spelling checker won't help ... did you really want to say affect or effect?
There you hit the nail on the head. They look good, never mind whether this will have any effect, let alone a salubrious one.
This is necessary first to calm the unthinkingly nervous, and second to cover their asses in the incredibly unlikely event that a terrorist does try to do harm.
This won't do much to calm the thinking nervous; a little thought will suggest that terrorists have upped their planning horizon far beyond the spur-of-the-moment 60's -- style ``carry in some guns and wing a few people and take some hostages and fly to Libya'' stuff that this would help with.
This policy wouldn't have hindered Timothy McVeigh, nor the unibomber, nor the September 11 hijackers, nor the next group of terrorists. What will discourage terrorists is swift, destructive retaliation against their cause, so that every terrorist act clearly sets back their cause.
I think that most of the domestic response to the recent events have been nothing but c.y.a. window dressing, with the same sort of logic and effectivness as gun control: none. See here and here and here and here among other references, for some ideas about that.
Treating honest folks like criminals only aids the criminals in the long run; it gives us the illusion that we are on the same side as them, because we and the criminals have a common enemy in the government. Take a look here for some discussion of how governments can go very wrong indeed.
Yes, same for me except the girlfriend part. This is really sad, bad news. I still have an HP41CX. The battery connections have corroded through, so I'm not using it until I can get it fixed. I'll need to replace the copper-coated plastic with some copper sheet.
I suspect that the problem isn't that HP couldn't peddle their machines, but rather that the entire calculator market is on the way out. With a Palm M100 going for about the same price as a midrange TI and cheaper than an HP49, why buy the HP? Just load an emulator into a palm and away you go, in rpn or whatever. It makes sense, but it just won't be the same.
It is true that closed-source projects can make one sort of deadline and stick to it. That's the "we'll ship by" sort of deadline. That's not the kind of deadline that knowledgeable users generally need.
The sort of deadline that open-source projects can generally meet is the "we'll get a nightly build up every night" and the "we won't call it version 1.0 until we're ready" sorts. These will do just fine for knowledgeable users. No closed-source company can meet this kind of commitment.
Notice that the one thing that for-profit, closed-source developers cannot do no matter how hard they try is ship bugfree software on a hard schedule. No one can. What they can do is ship version 1.0 when they said they would, and charge you for the service pack, and then charge you again when version 2.0 comes out with the features that you paid for in version 1.0 actually working.
Here's where the libre software is so wonderful. The total cost of ownership may be higher, lower or just the same as the closed source stuff, but the total benefits of ownership are generally much higher.
Folks like to say that you get what you pay for, and that's almost true: when you buy something you won't get any more than you pay for. The payment makes an upper bound on what you get. That isn't true when someone gives you something. The initial cost of $0.0 makes a lower bound on the value.
With libre software you get what the developers claim they're delivering, and sometimes a lot more. You don't have to wait for a deadline or an official release to start using the latest version of GNUfoo; you can keep trying it and start using it when you say it's ready.
Ask yourself: is it really an advantage for the closed-source companies to ship buggy crap that isn't ready, so they can meet a deadline? It is for them; it lets them gouge you and make a payroll. Is making a deadline that way really good for the customer?
Now, add another bit, and you have to use a trinary distribution, which I'm sure exists but isn't very common (and not surprisingly, I can't recall that one either).
^ {x_k)).
. (It's a joke, mostly!)
... we'll never see large scale use of ternary computing. There's just too much overhead involved in switching over the way of doing things at such a fundamental level.
Well, I don't think that the probability is really much worse. Instead of binomial, we have in general multinomial, and here trinomial: pdf=(n!/(x_i!*x_j!*x_k!))(p_i^{x_i}*p_j^{x_j)*p_k
See Berger's Statistical Decision Theory and Bayesian Analysis. Or here or here.
There are some hardware problems; I posted a possible solution
A more serious problem is mentioned by anohter poster: floating point is where we really, really care about speed and efficiency, and it seems that binary has that sewn up.
Quite right. This is the only argument against it which doesn't have an answer, I suspect.
As long as we're turning the world on its ear, lets go all the way, and use triacs. We implement it (the tri-state gate, that is) like an inverter, more-or-less. These have two (non-linear ) on states plus off, and are just right for implementing an inverter. They'd probably be great for trinary logic, too.
I just dug out my old physical electronis book (Micro Electronics, by Jacob Millman, First edition), and can't find them in there, so here's a slightly less academic reference.
There might be some problems with trying to get the clock speed high enough to compete with the Intel/AMD marketing, though; it says that they can be triggered into conduction by high dV/dt.
Here's what the man said:
10) Why do you use Microsoft Windows
by Anonymous Coward
If you are so anti-corporation, and so anti-Microsoft, to the point of publically criticizing them and their practices, why does the Consumer Project on Technology, and specifically you, Mr. Love, choose to use Microsoft Windows on your office and home machines?
Jamie Love:
Well, our office uses just about everything. We have Windows boxes, Linux boxes, Macs and Suns. For a while I moved the CPT unit entirely to Linux, to have a Microsoft free environment to see how that would work. We did this for more than a year for everything. Recently I switched some machines back, and now I use an IBM lap top with Windows as my main machine. I decided to switch back for several reasons. First, I had lost touch with what Microsoft was up too, and I needed to know that. Second, I wanted to use a large number of new devices that I couldn't get to work on my Linux box. Third, I was having trouble sharing my Linux documents with colleagues using MS Office, due to the typical Microsoft anticompetitive practices. And I was pretty unhappy with the progress in the various GPL office productivity tools, with the exception of the GNOME spreadsheet program, which was pretty good. I didn't see much work by AOL in improving the Linux version of Netscape, and wasn't happy when Microsoft invested in Corel and they seemed to be dumping the Linux apps. Recently I went back and tried a few current Linux distributions, and am deciding what to do on that front right now, wondering why Sun can't make Star Office an easier install. I've used lots of different computers over time. My first one didn't have a monitor, only a printer, and my first personal computer was a Commodore 64, which I used to dial into an IBM mainframe. I like computers and computing, and I like Linux a lot, but I am not that happy with the current state of client applications, and a bit frustrated tying to use various PDAs, scanners, cameras, printers, etc, with my Linux box.
This seems like a combination of legitimate curiosity (what's MS up to?) and legitimate frustration with little snags. He's tried Linux, likes it, and hasn't given up on it. This doesn't sound like much of an argument against open source or Libre software in general; just one guy isn't quite ready to trash his last Windows cd yet.
WRONG! No economist would say anything so simple and definite.
What I might say is that artificially inflated wages in one area (inflated, say, by a union) will impoverish everyone, though the nonunion workers would certainly be hurt far wose than the union workers with the artificially high wages . Higher wages due to higher productivity (raised, say, by the employer's capital expenditure) will have the effect you describe.
I took a union shop leader's training course once, and was shocked by the ``screw your employer'' attitude. It soured me on unions in a big way. This was the American Federation of Teachers, by the way, hardly a notorious bunch of militants.
Linus is said to have started from scratch, built something that worked (little, and poorly, but worked), and then thrown it out to a world which just happened to have been waiting for exactly that.
I think that this is the key: give folks something that sort of works, to fire their imagination and get them to commit, and then (assuming that there really are folks who care passionately about getting this hypothetical project working) it'll take off.
If you are proposing the 123rd super-duper-programmer's editor, don't count on folks getting all fired up. The first really usable version of Unix which could run on a PC without sending a month's pay to SCO got a lot of folks really excited.
You've never used it; I've never heard of it. I know about dynamic programming; it's a recursive method for doing calculus-of-variations stuff. I know about matrix multiplication, too. How do you use the first to do the second? Could you point me to a reference, please?
The biggest problem here is that we really don't know who to believe. Given the choice between believing a U.S. district attorney and some slightly scummy small-time crook, we really don't know which to take. The U.S. government has a long history of bad behavior. (Think about the secret experiments (also here and here) in the '50s, in which people were exposed to radiation
The good scenario here is that West is a petty crook who's getting a break because it's his first offence. The bad scenario is that the DA realised that if he dropped this, he'd look like an idiot, so he's threatened a poor innocent guy into pleading guilty to a crime he didn't commit, just to save the DA some embarassment. And it looks as if we'll never be sure.
The range is operated by the University of Alaska's Geophysical Institute, which studies Space Physics and Aeronomy among other things.
One of the neatest things about having a rocket range affiliated with the University is that students can design and launch a suborbital rocket in the ASRP.
One portion which shocked me was:
They crashed a unix os? Wow! That doesn't match up with my limited experience. The only way I've ever done that was by trying to do stupid things as root, like running mindi with a buggy kernel. I wouldn't have thought that this would be a problem for a normal user.
Here is something which didn't surprise me at all:
Mine, too.
You should think a bit about whether the extra abilities of the Alpha boxes are worth the extra bucks for your application. One thing which I think that I remember about the Alphas is that they use a crossbar switch to link the several processors on a motherboard to memory, et cetera. This should give better throughput. They also have huge caches which should help with big matrices. I think that if you have lots of little problems which should be run in parallel, more nodes with lower price and capability per node might be the way to go.
I remember back in the days of the XT, Microway used to sell math coprocessor and video boards for PCs which cost more than the box you hooked them to, along with high-grade compilers which would put that hardware to work. They were once the place to get hardware and software for doing seroius number-crunching on a PC.
They tell us that you can still use the code under the NPL, just as always. See the FAQ for some details; talk to your lawyer for legal advice.
The important point here is that Netscape thinks that you can indeed use their code to make proprietary applications. If your lawyer tells you that you can't, you should have him communicate his reasons to Netscape. I'm sure that they would appreciate the feedback.
I think that Netscape is being a good deal more generous than I would be with my code. As always, if you don't like the license, don't use the code, and don't release your code under a license you don't like.
Getting off topic now: By the way, for the folks who point to a BSD license as a cure-all, I have a question: is it true that BSD licensed code may be re-released under the GPL, just as it may be re-released under a closed-source license?
Given that we accept that proposition, it might make sense for gov't to build communications infrastructure, which we have seen that private capital is doing slowly, if at all.
If they do this, I think tht they should then make the infrastructure available to any private outfit which wants to run an isp/telco. Ideally, it should be rented to several, which citizens could choose between.
Notice that the reason that we aren't seeing broadband made available seems to be as much due to regulatory difficulties as to high costs. The telcos have their network and monopoly as artifacts of the current and past regulatory environment. They can use this to chop the legs off of anyone who tries to compete using the telco system, and no-one can afford to build their own system when the telcos have an existing system which is at least partially amortized.
So, having started to ``manage'' our economy, we need more government intervention to ``fix'' the problems we caused.
Again, what's the problem? If the subcontractors ask, you give them the url for the sources, or just burn them onto a CD or two and drop them into the mail. If you can modify, this must be possible.
Perhaps the problem is that you want to keep secrets? That's perfectly respectable, but that's not what this license is all about.
Quite seriously, the GPL does impose some serious burdens on distributors. Fortunately, these can all be overcome by distributing only in source code form. Configure and make are slick enough that this is entirely practical for me, and I'm certainly no programmer. I can't set this stuff up myself, but I have no trouble using it to install big projects like R .
{SNIP}
Complaining that the buildings "only" stood for about an hour or so seems silly to me.
Me too. I think that in a situation like that, the buildings should only be expected to stand long enough to clear the entire, fully occupied building via stairs.
Stories we've seen here suggest that wasn't so. People have spoken of being in the stairwells nearly an hour; they we're said to only be wide enough to accomodate two abreast. These are the same stairwells that the firemen needed to travel up.
Yes, it's wonderful how well they did hold up. If they had had more stairs, that time might have been enough.
GASP! We hadn't thought of that ... OH NO! Let's ban martial arts; yeah, that's the ticket! Reg'lar guys don't need that sissy Asian stuff anyhow.
On a more serious note, as long as I can carry wooden pencils onto the plane, I won't miss my knife. The pencil lets me write notes to my confederates, too, right up until the moment I use it to kill a stewardess and sucker the pilot into opening the door.
As you say, even stripped and bound, determined people can still be dangerous.
Actually, it's right about 60 years. Pearl Harbor was bombed in either 39 or 40, Kiska and Attu (U.S. territory) were occupied by the Japanese about a year later.
Live in fear of the US reaction and what that will do for the world.
The Palestinians are often held up as an example of an aggrieved people, so I'll continue to use them as an example. They have accepted a "government" of murders and have dedicated themselves to ensuring that there can never be peace and that they will never be welcomed in Israel. They have also refused to settle in and build new lives for themselves elsewhere. I don't see much evidence of loving forgivness there.
Compare American reactions to past attacks to the Palestinian reactions. A few years after Pearl Harbor, we imposed a government on Japan which they liked well enough to keep, and paid for the rebuilding of their economy. We behaved similarly with the European Axis powers and the Marshal plan.
I have no idea where you live, but if it is in one the countries which are automatically suspect such as Libya, Iraq and Afganistan, American reactions are probably the least of your daily worries.
1) Is lisp less amenable to use by a team? Can't you implement one object while I implement another? I'm asking because I don't know; all my programming has been for my own research.
2) Lisp has been around since the 1950's, in one form or another. I find that I can read lisp code from the Lisp 1.5 programmer's manual, which originated in 1965. Our kids will probably still be able to in another 30 years.
3) How large is large enough? Is: "language of choice for 10^7 illiterate script-kiddies" a stronger recommendation than: "there are a sufficient number of competent programmers who are proficient in the language and familiar with the problem domain"? Notice that second statement is probably not true for any of the languages discussed, for most problem domains.
4) Except for the Microsoft offerings, pretty much everything is cross platform. Think gcc and cmucl, for easy examples.
5) I really don't know what an IDE is. I gather it is something other than emacs, since emacs supports nearly every language, some wonderfully well (try ESS for R). I really can't comment on this one at all; perhaps someone else could?
As for mature compilers, again, I think all of the languages mentioned so far are in fair shape there. Java and c can both use the same back end in gcc, and so does gcl.
6) Technically, all the languages mentioned are Turing-complete
After going over the above, it looks to me as if personal choice and the resources immediately at hand are really the only reasons to pick lisp over c over c++ over java over lisp.
has the development time and the code size also fallen along with the run time?
Emacs has a great outline mode, and emacs together with latex and reftex beats the pants off Word. The reason that I stopped using Office was that it was so terribly limiting. I had gotten to be a bit of an expert with it, and it just wouldn't do what I wanted easily if it would do it at all.
.doc and .xls files using staroffice 5.2, including some really large complex stuff. Staroffice 5.1 was a REALLY different matter, though; much worse. So, I use Staroffice whene I need to get some data out of a proprietary format, and Emacs for writing papers, letters, and so on. It's a huge improvement.
So far, I haven't had any trouble importing