The 486/486sx was a yield issue. Many dies had good CPUs and bad FPUs, so they simply make it possible to cut off the FPU and sell the result as an SX. A die with a bad CPU, of course, could not be rescued. And owing to process variations the speed of dies from different batches was different. In the days before binning, you would buy in a batch of eproms (say) and test them; some were safe up to 350ns, some were not, and we would always put the 350 ones into systems for the most inaccessible customers. Once grading and binning was underway, these were sold as 350 or 250 eproms at a premium.
I would not be at all surprised if the Enterprise drives come from some kind of top bin for whatever drive tests are performed. HP will not mind spending a few extra dollars to reduce its warranty costs, when it is making so much more margin anyway.
The sad fact is that the commercial drug companies nowadays focus on what is profitable, not what is useful. Hence their well known lack of interest in vaccines, which work too well, and interest in very expensive anti-tumor drugs which give only a few months of life but whose usage is subject to emotional blackmail.
Medical research, like research into climate change and many fundamental technologies, is something that should always be Government funded to protect it from commercial pressures.
If God was the Big Banger, who created her? And so ad infinitum.
Incidentally, if you ever happen to spend time with some real theologians, rather than Bible-addled thumpers, they will be among the first to point out the infinite regress in the idea that the Universe came into being through the agency of a "God". The really big philosophical question is "why is there anything at all", and "God did it" cannot be the answer because the next question is "Why is there anything at all, including the God you just postulated?".
For some modern theologians, the other big question is "where do concepts like truth and justice come from?". (Philosophers may claim ownership of these problems too).
Do they matter? If you are concerned about the kind of society you inhabit, I think they do.
Agreeing with you 100%, I note that the world is full of people who don't understand Karl Popper. They do not understand the difference between falsifying an hypothesis (Popper) and falsifying a theory.
Falsifying the Newtonian (implied) hypothesis that spacetime was flat merely added a correction term into the Newtonian laws of motion. Falsifying the theory of phlogiston was a major first step to modern chemistry. The GP is confused as to the difference. Nobody bothers to try to "disprove" Newtonian mechanics when designing a car, because they are a good enough truth for almost all terrestrial engineering. Whereas anyone who doesn't try to disprove the Phlogiston model won't get far with chemical engineering.
Evolution is very definitely in Newtonian mechanics territory; no biochemist, drugs researcher or animal breeder is ever going to fail in their goals through a blind belief in evolution, no matter how complicated the details become at the molecular and ecosystem level.
My feeling about BSD was that the magic bullet was that it was adopted by universities. You may be right and had this not happened they would have adopted something else, but I suspect that the something else would have been more fragmented.
64k? You had 64k? When the price fell on SRAM we built a 32k expansion board for our TI9900 based industrial computers and we thought Christmas had arrived already. That was the first multitasking kernel I ever worked on. I still have to remind myself that just one of those controlled an automated test and measurement plant that literally caused engineers to stand open-mouthed and then ask "how did you do that?". Nowadays, we would use a network of controllers to handle that job. Something did go a bit wrong, somewhere.
Well, no, having "days" for people is a slightly strange idea when you think about it. But then I think naming buildings after people, or towns, is a bit odd too. I was more concerned to suggest that sometimes there really is a fork in history which is the work of just a small number of people, whereas elsewhere there's a kind of inevitability. The fork, of course, can be good or bad.
Completely and utterly off-topic, had the Germans not had Hitler, for instance, the German military might have found another front man to run the country. At some point they would probably have started a war of expansion to reclaim their losses of WW1. That might have been a "normal" war run by sane people. The outcome might have been very different for German Jews, but not much different for the French or the Poles. The world today might look rather similar, but with the EU much more obviously a German economic state. However, but for Unix, computer systems might have stayed fragmented and proprietary. It's very hard to predict the outcome - personal computers might have stayed very limited systems, the Internet might never have started its enormous spread. The world banking system might have become far less computer-centric. It is entirely possible that K&R were simply extremely lucky, or simply very bright, and whether the results of their work were overall a good or a bad thing is, in my view, far too early to call.
Fleming's discovery would have gone nowhere had not Florey and Chain worked out how to produce the stuff, and had not US chemical engineers worked out how to make it in volume. Hitler would not even be a footnote in history but for Napoleon and Peter the Great, and some truly foolish decisions made after WW1 by the victors. Personally I don't totally subscribe to the "Great man" theory of history. If Sculley hadn't messed up Apple, Jobs would today be known as a film exec.
But K&R actually built something almost from the ground up using rather primitive tools, and today the children and bastard children of their ideas are running six machines in my house. (Possibly 7 if, as I suspect, the solar panel inverter supervisor is BSD based).
I entirely agree about Einstein, though. Physics is much more of a collaborative effort than the media like to pretend. The fact is that we could have developed all modern technology without the Theory of Relativity, using empirical rules. Quantum mechanics, however, is actually necessary for the furtherance of chemistry and modern materials (including things like IC substrates). But there is really no one father of quantum mechanics.
Obituary in The Guardian
on
Dennis Ritchie Day
·
· Score: 3, Informative
OK, a number of people contacted the Guardian before this, but however it happened they got the point and gave him a full page on the Saturday edition. I hope that goes some way to make up for Google having to help rescue Bletchley Park.
Do you know what is involved in designing narrow-band optical filters?
Unfortunately there is no magic technology for this. Optical notch filters have quite high attenuation at all frequencies. Put 4 of those in succession, and you will have what are practically blackout goggles at all frequencies.
In Europe you would not be able to patent the idea because you actually have to present a workable technology. You might get away with it in the USA.
The landlord makes money either because (a) he inherited it and cannot find a better return on investment, or (b) the system is fixed to keep his interest artificially low, whereas the renter does not have the same access to cheap credit and so would have to pay more on a mortgage.
I know what you mean but you have it backward. Ford was trolled by the Apples of his day (the low volume high cost carmakers) who claimed to have patented everything from the wheel up. He had to spend years and a lot of money fighting them. He won, and the car was democratised. Whatever his faults, Henry Ford ought to have some special place as a Slashdot hero, because in a sense he "open sourced" the motor car.
In WW2 ground controllers for the British Air Force were almost all women. I was told (by someone who had good reason to know) that there was a debate about whether to have women radio operators in the aircraft. There were two reasons: One was more reliable communication, the other was to prevent the Germans spoofing aircraft radio operators. A number of women operators were asked for their views and immediately volunteered to fly (a very dangerous occupation). Despite this, the proposal was turned down. The attitudes at the time were truly backward; there were women pilots who were allowed to deliver aircraft to their bases, but they were not allowed to fly with guns loaded - a quite incomprehensible decision since some of them were shot down by enemy action without a chance of fighting back.
Well, that's an admission. Since Ritchie was one of the pioneers of what has evolved to be the technology that powers most servers and almost all mobile devices, you could argue that he is of much more relevance to this article than your post. After all, it is about two companies fighting over technologies for which he was one of the major founders.
In fact, the first IC engines rapidly adopted poppet valves many years before steam engines did. Sleeve valves were worked on extensively but could not compete with poppets, which were eventually adopted for railroad engines. And the steam piston engine was in any case superseded by the steam turbine.
The piston IC engine has one enormous advantage over the Wankel; it has many design degrees of freedom. The pump (piston/cylinder) has a large degree of independence from the valve system, the design of the combustion space has a considerable independence over the pump design, and the crank and con rod design also has a considerable degree of independence over the pump. This meant that, for the first hundred years till computer aided engineering really got going, it was much easier to develop a piston engine. If the Wankel had been invented in the 19th century, it would have been superseded by the piston engine for this simple reason; the technology of the day did not have the metallurgy or the maths to develop a Wankel.
The sheer amount of development in piston engines makes it just about impossible to commercialise anything else. Piston engines have been designed to cover the range from sub-1cc model engines to engines with cylinders in the cubic meter range. Although they have a lot of parts, those parts are mostly small and simple and can be made at very high speed on automated machinery. The 4-valve slipper piston engine with variable valve timing can produce roughly the same power to weight ratio as a Wankel with better fuel efficiency, and can also be designed (as in the Toyota Prius) for extreme ease of starting and high efficiency with a long life.
If the Wankel had come first things might be different, just as if Dr. Diesel had preceded Herr Benz the gasoline engine might have forever been relegated to motorcycles. But it didn't.
I think it is an attempt to combine features of JS and Erlang to get concurrency. Why? Because after reading an Erlang primer I decided to code a version of the messaging system in Java, and the result is something like this.
Lots of people like molten boron oxide. It is the best flux that there is for brazing. Hand made bicycle frames, upmarket plumbing fixtures, a whole lot of things go together better with a little boric acid.
What do you think happens to the boron when it captures a neutron? It gives off an alpha particle and changes to lithium. Your neutron shielding material would disintegrate very rapidly indeed.
You have it exactly backwards. If you were right, why was there so much innovation in the UK in WW2, when there were food and fuel shortages? In fact, if the economy is at a lower base and the costs of labor are lower, it is cheaper to adapt. If people are simply used to very expensive living standards, they will resist change. A good example is that the US was more affected than Europe by oil price rises - because the average European house is half the size of the average US house, the average European car uses half as much fuel - so individuals were actually less affected.
The idea that only an oil-intensive economy is capable of adaptation is laughable.
The bimetal is for structural integrity not corrosion prevention. Boatbuilders who have to use an aluminum superstructure on a steel hull (usually for stability reasons) will normally isolate them using an insulating gasket and insulated bolts, or a gap filling adhesive with standoffs. This is to prevent the problem described by tragedy above, but is not as strong as an AlFe bond. The hull of course does not get electrically charged (it is in seawater, Dummkopf...), it is current flows due to differences in surface potential that cause the problems.
That's a starting point. A decent university library, though obviously not "Oral Roberts University", will have whole shelves on the subject of Biblical origins.
Bereshit is in Torah because, as well as the creation myths, it also includes the stories of the beginnings of the Hebrew people - Abraham, Isaac. I should have made clear that I was referring to the earlier part of Genesis up to the retelling of Gilgamesh (Noah), and not the later parts. For that I apologise.
It depends which Jesus. The one who said he came, not to bring peace but a sword, or the one who apparently delivered the Sermon on the Mount.
However, without getting into serious Biblical criticism, Jesus did say one thing which turned out to be 100% accurate. He said he would be followed by false prophets who would claim that they had the true story. And that pretty much sums up the history of Western civilisation with the exception of the Unitarians, the Quakers and a few other sects who don't pretend to have a revelation.
Slashdot Mirror
I would not be at all surprised if the Enterprise drives come from some kind of top bin for whatever drive tests are performed. HP will not mind spending a few extra dollars to reduce its warranty costs, when it is making so much more margin anyway.
Medical research, like research into climate change and many fundamental technologies, is something that should always be Government funded to protect it from commercial pressures.
Incidentally, if you ever happen to spend time with some real theologians, rather than Bible-addled thumpers, they will be among the first to point out the infinite regress in the idea that the Universe came into being through the agency of a "God". The really big philosophical question is "why is there anything at all", and "God did it" cannot be the answer because the next question is "Why is there anything at all, including the God you just postulated?".
For some modern theologians, the other big question is "where do concepts like truth and justice come from?". (Philosophers may claim ownership of these problems too).
Do they matter? If you are concerned about the kind of society you inhabit, I think they do.
Falsifying the Newtonian (implied) hypothesis that spacetime was flat merely added a correction term into the Newtonian laws of motion. Falsifying the theory of phlogiston was a major first step to modern chemistry. The GP is confused as to the difference. Nobody bothers to try to "disprove" Newtonian mechanics when designing a car, because they are a good enough truth for almost all terrestrial engineering. Whereas anyone who doesn't try to disprove the Phlogiston model won't get far with chemical engineering.
Evolution is very definitely in Newtonian mechanics territory; no biochemist, drugs researcher or animal breeder is ever going to fail in their goals through a blind belief in evolution, no matter how complicated the details become at the molecular and ecosystem level.
64k? You had 64k? When the price fell on SRAM we built a 32k expansion board for our TI9900 based industrial computers and we thought Christmas had arrived already. That was the first multitasking kernel I ever worked on. I still have to remind myself that just one of those controlled an automated test and measurement plant that literally caused engineers to stand open-mouthed and then ask "how did you do that?". Nowadays, we would use a network of controllers to handle that job. Something did go a bit wrong, somewhere.
Completely and utterly off-topic, had the Germans not had Hitler, for instance, the German military might have found another front man to run the country. At some point they would probably have started a war of expansion to reclaim their losses of WW1. That might have been a "normal" war run by sane people. The outcome might have been very different for German Jews, but not much different for the French or the Poles. The world today might look rather similar, but with the EU much more obviously a German economic state.
However, but for Unix, computer systems might have stayed fragmented and proprietary. It's very hard to predict the outcome - personal computers might have stayed very limited systems, the Internet might never have started its enormous spread. The world banking system might have become far less computer-centric. It is entirely possible that K&R were simply extremely lucky, or simply very bright, and whether the results of their work were overall a good or a bad thing is, in my view, far too early to call.
But K&R actually built something almost from the ground up using rather primitive tools, and today the children and bastard children of their ideas are running six machines in my house. (Possibly 7 if, as I suspect, the solar panel inverter supervisor is BSD based).
I entirely agree about Einstein, though. Physics is much more of a collaborative effort than the media like to pretend. The fact is that we could have developed all modern technology without the Theory of Relativity, using empirical rules. Quantum mechanics, however, is actually necessary for the furtherance of chemistry and modern materials (including things like IC substrates). But there is really no one father of quantum mechanics.
OK, a number of people contacted the Guardian before this, but however it happened they got the point and gave him a full page on the Saturday edition. I hope that goes some way to make up for Google having to help rescue Bletchley Park.
His raw material is heavily laced with a load of polonium and thinly plated on the outside. No detectable radiation from the Po.
Unfortunately there is no magic technology for this. Optical notch filters have quite high attenuation at all frequencies. Put 4 of those in succession, and you will have what are practically blackout goggles at all frequencies.
In Europe you would not be able to patent the idea because you actually have to present a workable technology. You might get away with it in the USA.
The landlord makes money either because (a) he inherited it and cannot find a better return on investment, or (b) the system is fixed to keep his interest artificially low, whereas the renter does not have the same access to cheap credit and so would have to pay more on a mortgage.
I know what you mean but you have it backward. Ford was trolled by the Apples of his day (the low volume high cost carmakers) who claimed to have patented everything from the wheel up. He had to spend years and a lot of money fighting them. He won, and the car was democratised. Whatever his faults, Henry Ford ought to have some special place as a Slashdot hero, because in a sense he "open sourced" the motor car.
In WW2 ground controllers for the British Air Force were almost all women. I was told (by someone who had good reason to know) that there was a debate about whether to have women radio operators in the aircraft. There were two reasons: One was more reliable communication, the other was to prevent the Germans spoofing aircraft radio operators. A number of women operators were asked for their views and immediately volunteered to fly (a very dangerous occupation). Despite this, the proposal was turned down. The attitudes at the time were truly backward; there were women pilots who were allowed to deliver aircraft to their bases, but they were not allowed to fly with guns loaded - a quite incomprehensible decision since some of them were shot down by enemy action without a chance of fighting back.
Well, that's an admission. Since Ritchie was one of the pioneers of what has evolved to be the technology that powers most servers and almost all mobile devices, you could argue that he is of much more relevance to this article than your post. After all, it is about two companies fighting over technologies for which he was one of the major founders.
The piston IC engine has one enormous advantage over the Wankel; it has many design degrees of freedom. The pump (piston/cylinder) has a large degree of independence from the valve system, the design of the combustion space has a considerable independence over the pump design, and the crank and con rod design also has a considerable degree of independence over the pump. This meant that, for the first hundred years till computer aided engineering really got going, it was much easier to develop a piston engine. If the Wankel had been invented in the 19th century, it would have been superseded by the piston engine for this simple reason; the technology of the day did not have the metallurgy or the maths to develop a Wankel.
If the Wankel had come first things might be different, just as if Dr. Diesel had preceded Herr Benz the gasoline engine might have forever been relegated to motorcycles. But it didn't.
I think it is an attempt to combine features of JS and Erlang to get concurrency. Why? Because after reading an Erlang primer I decided to code a version of the messaging system in Java, and the result is something like this.
Lots of people like molten boron oxide. It is the best flux that there is for brazing. Hand made bicycle frames, upmarket plumbing fixtures, a whole lot of things go together better with a little boric acid.
What do you think happens to the boron when it captures a neutron? It gives off an alpha particle and changes to lithium. Your neutron shielding material would disintegrate very rapidly indeed.
A post from the Soviet Union prior to 1990 has somehow tunneled through time to appear on Slashdot in 2011. Impressive...
That, or the poster is a complete idiot.
The idea that only an oil-intensive economy is capable of adaptation is laughable.
In fact, this could be interesting for the regulators.
The bimetal is for structural integrity not corrosion prevention. Boatbuilders who have to use an aluminum superstructure on a steel hull (usually for stability reasons) will normally isolate them using an insulating gasket and insulated bolts, or a gap filling adhesive with standoffs. This is to prevent the problem described by tragedy above, but is not as strong as an AlFe bond. The hull of course does not get electrically charged (it is in seawater, Dummkopf...), it is current flows due to differences in surface potential that cause the problems.
Bereshit is in Torah because, as well as the creation myths, it also includes the stories of the beginnings of the Hebrew people - Abraham, Isaac. I should have made clear that I was referring to the earlier part of Genesis up to the retelling of Gilgamesh (Noah), and not the later parts. For that I apologise.
However, without getting into serious Biblical criticism, Jesus did say one thing which turned out to be 100% accurate. He said he would be followed by false prophets who would claim that they had the true story. And that pretty much sums up the history of Western civilisation with the exception of the Unitarians, the Quakers and a few other sects who don't pretend to have a revelation.