You'll probably have cooling problems, due to lack of convection. Low air pressure can also cause problems with cooling and head crashes. Vibration from the launch can also destroy delicate hardware, or make it malfunction.
It's kind of hard to do when the company's legal weasels insist on nuking all email older than 30 days. I understand the reason for the policy but I think it's short-sighted.
Sometimes the proper approach is to line up the old guard against the wall. Some systems of law and regulation become so complex, entrenched and counterproductive that radical action is required to solve the problem.
It wouldn't work. Why do you think we have processors with two or three levels of cache? There is a serious speed/bandwidth mismatch between the processor and the main memory system. There are ways of increasing main memory bandwidth, but they are very expensive. There's no point in adding more processors if they are going to spend 95% of their time stalled, waiting for cache lines to be filled.
I live in one. Actually, it's an apartment. The electrical circuits are fed by two separate phases of a three-phase distribution system. About half of the circuits are on one phase, the rest are on another phase.
I found out about it during a power outage where they lost one of the phases. The site electrician and the tech from the power company both confirmed that the complex used a three-phase distribution system and that I was one of the lucky people that was connected to more than one phase.
I can think of a number of reasons why a designer wouldn't choose the "every file a directory" option.
Files should be atomic objects.
Some streams/attributes require special handling.
Put complexity in the OS, not user code.
Implementation efficiency.
I like UNIX. I've been using it for many years. That said, I don't think that UNIX, or the POSIX model, is sacred. It is just one way of doing things, and not necessarily the best way.
I expect that in the not too distant future, electronic devices will be widely used to assist people with sensory or neurological defects, and to enhance "normal" people. Some people have natural gifts that allow them to remember and reproduce, images, music, the spoken word, etc. What happens to "intellectual property" and "no pictures or recording allowed" when these artificial sensory augmentations become common? Is the RIAA going to ban me from concerts or sue me because my audio processor implant has a memory chip? What if I wear a computerized vision correction/enhancement device?
It isn't just transmitters. Back in the stone age of commercial aviation, they discovered that local oscillator radiation from super-heterodyne radio receivers was capable of jamming navigation receivers. Just tune your FM radio to a frequency that is 10.7 MHz less than the active VOR.
Tell your dad to check NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System database. He should be familiar with it. There are many, many, reports of passenger electronics devices causing problems with aircraft systems.
It was the marketing weasels at Intel who told the world that parity memory was obsolete, not the engineers. The OEMs quickly jumped on the bandwagon.
Yes, there are innumerable "greedy assholes" in the PC industry that will happily shave a dollar off the production cost, knowing that the customer will get stuck with the bill for decreased quality and reliability. It's the "Mad Man Muntz" school of engineering.
The end user does not have the equipment, or the device data, to properly test DRAM. You can run memtest86 and find the gross problems, but it will not find the more subtle problems, like sensitivity to timing, temperature and supply voltages.
The greedy assholes running the PC industry should be shot. They are the ones that said that end-users didn't need parity memory anymore because RAM quality was so good. They say end-users don't need ECC. All along, they've been more concerned about their profit margins than the reliability of their products. They aren't the ones who get stuck with a flakey computer that crashes every day, or silently corrupts the user's data, with no indication of the true cause of the problem. They just pocket the money and pass the costs to the end-user. If untested DRAM floods the market, the problem will just get worse.
The cost of ECC memory is trivial in comparison to the time and cost involved in dealing with the consequences of flakey memory.
The problem is that it costs money to keep those tapes in a warehouse. Every year that passes, the tapes deteriorate a little bit, and it becomes harder to find tape transports that can read them. Many scientific projects have produced libraries that have tens of thousands of tapes. Tapes don't last forever.
I've always looked at them as a generalization of OS/2's extended attributes or Mac OS's resource fork. Why should files be limited to a linear stream of bytes, with any attributes or metadata stored in the parent directory?
Assume the rock has 2E24 Joules of kinetic energy. You shoot it with your astro-blaster pistol, breaking it up into a billion pieces. The pieces still have 2E24 Joules of kinetic energy. What happens when they hit the Earth's atmosphere? Almost all of that kinetic energy is converted to heat. That's about 2 billion megatons of thermal energy in a big pulse.
That depends on state law. If I see you commit a felony, in most states I can arrest you and detain you until the police arrive. Many states authorize merchants to detain suspected shoplifters. Usually this requires that a store employee witnesses the crime, not just because a buzzer went off. See here.
The idea that the number of reported bugs should be proportional to the installed base, other things being equal, is incorrect. Assuming reported faults are repaired, the software's failure rate declines as a function of total hours of use. The obvious faults are detected quickly, the more subtle faults are detected more slowly, the really obscure faults may only be detected after years of use. This means if product A is used by twenty times as many people as product B, it will initially have more reported failures than product B, but the correction of those faults in the software will result in a more reliable product than product B, reducing the failure rate. The reliability of product B follows the same curve, just at a slower speed, due to the smaller number of users. There are a finite number of defects in the software. That number can be estimated based on factors such as complexity, lines of code, language, programmer skill and experience, etc. It is not dependent on the installed base.
See:
Musa, J.D., A. Iannino and K. Okumoto, Software Reliability: Measurement, Prediction, Application, Professional Edition: Software Engineering Series, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY., 1990.
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You'll probably have cooling problems, due to lack of convection. Low air pressure can also cause problems with cooling and head crashes. Vibration from the launch can also destroy delicate hardware, or make it malfunction.
It's kind of hard to do when the company's legal weasels insist on nuking all email older than 30 days. I understand the reason for the policy but I think it's short-sighted.
Who told the student to use Microsoft Office? No school system should require students to submit their work in a proprietary file format.
Sometimes the proper approach is to line up the old guard against the wall. Some systems of law and regulation become so complex, entrenched and counterproductive that radical action is required to solve the problem.
They have the Consumer Electronics Association.
Hollywood was created because of new technology, and the desire to evade Edison's efforts to enforce his patents.
L. Ron Hubbard was noted for continuing to write and publish after he had died.
The trick is to get paid like a "big shot business man", not to dress like one.
Esperanto is a wee bit older than "the seventies".
It wouldn't work. Why do you think we have processors with two or three levels of cache? There is a serious speed/bandwidth mismatch between the processor and the main memory system. There are ways of increasing main memory bandwidth, but they are very expensive. There's no point in adding more processors if they are going to spend 95% of their time stalled, waiting for cache lines to be filled.
I found out about it during a power outage where they lost one of the phases. The site electrician and the tech from the power company both confirmed that the complex used a three-phase distribution system and that I was one of the lucky people that was connected to more than one phase.
I like UNIX. I've been using it for many years. That said, I don't think that UNIX, or the POSIX model, is sacred. It is just one way of doing things, and not necessarily the best way.
I expect that in the not too distant future, electronic devices will be widely used to assist people with sensory or neurological defects, and to enhance "normal" people. Some people have natural gifts that allow them to remember and reproduce, images, music, the spoken word, etc. What happens to "intellectual property" and "no pictures or recording allowed" when these artificial sensory augmentations become common? Is the RIAA going to ban me from concerts or sue me because my audio processor implant has a memory chip? What if I wear a computerized vision correction/enhancement device?
It isn't just transmitters. Back in the stone age of commercial aviation, they discovered that local oscillator radiation from super-heterodyne radio receivers was capable of jamming navigation receivers. Just tune your FM radio to a frequency that is 10.7 MHz less than the active VOR.
Tell your dad to check NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System database. He should be familiar with it. There are many, many, reports of passenger electronics devices causing problems with aircraft systems.
Yes, there are innumerable "greedy assholes" in the PC industry that will happily shave a dollar off the production cost, knowing that the customer will get stuck with the bill for decreased quality and reliability. It's the "Mad Man Muntz" school of engineering.
I've read that there is actually a market for the stuff. Applications like digital answering machines, where a few stuck bits will never be noticed.
The greedy assholes running the PC industry should be shot. They are the ones that said that end-users didn't need parity memory anymore because RAM quality was so good. They say end-users don't need ECC. All along, they've been more concerned about their profit margins than the reliability of their products. They aren't the ones who get stuck with a flakey computer that crashes every day, or silently corrupts the user's data, with no indication of the true cause of the problem. They just pocket the money and pass the costs to the end-user. If untested DRAM floods the market, the problem will just get worse.
The cost of ECC memory is trivial in comparison to the time and cost involved in dealing with the consequences of flakey memory.
The problem is that it costs money to keep those tapes in a warehouse. Every year that passes, the tapes deteriorate a little bit, and it becomes harder to find tape transports that can read them. Many scientific projects have produced libraries that have tens of thousands of tapes. Tapes don't last forever.
I know people who could use this today. What would you rather have, a warehouse full of mag tapes, or a handful of holographic disks on a bookshelf?
I've always looked at them as a generalization of OS/2's extended attributes or Mac OS's resource fork. Why should files be limited to a linear stream of bytes, with any attributes or metadata stored in the parent directory?
Assume the rock has 2E24 Joules of kinetic energy. You shoot it with your astro-blaster pistol, breaking it up into a billion pieces. The pieces still have 2E24 Joules of kinetic energy. What happens when they hit the Earth's atmosphere? Almost all of that kinetic energy is converted to heat. That's about 2 billion megatons of thermal energy in a big pulse.
That depends on state law. If I see you commit a felony, in most states I can arrest you and detain you until the police arrive. Many states authorize merchants to detain suspected shoplifters. Usually this requires that a store employee witnesses the crime, not just because a buzzer went off. See here.
Streams are actually a nice feature. The fact that the operating system doesn't provide adequate tools to deal with them is a separate issue.
See:
Musa, J.D., A. Iannino and K. Okumoto, Software Reliability: Measurement, Prediction, Application, Professional Edition: Software Engineering Series, McGraw-Hill, New York, NY., 1990.