The approach used by Erlang is interesting as it is totally dependent on message passing between processes to achieve parallelism and synchronisation. To get real time performance, the message passing must be very efficient. Messaging approaches are well suited to parallelism where the parallel process are themselves CPU and data intensive, which is why they work well for cryptography and image processing. From this point of view alone, a parallel architecture using GPUs with very fast intermodule channels looks like a good bet.
The original Inmos Transputer was designed to solve such problems and relied on fast inter-processor links, and the AMD Hypertransport bus is a modern derivative.
So I disagree with you. The processing hardware is not so much the problem. If GPUs are small, cheap and address lots of memory, so long as they have the necessary instruction sets they will do the job. The issue to focus on is still interprocessor (and hence interprocess) links. This is how hardware affects parallelism.
I have on and off worked with multiprocessor systems since the early 80s, and always it has been fastest and most effective to rely on data channels rather than horrible kludges like shared memory with mutex locks. The code can be made clean and can be tested in a wide range of environments. I am probably too near retirement now to work seriously with Erlang, but it looks like a sound platform.
You cannot safely charge a battery of the power levels needed througfh a diode. It will overcharge and outgas. You need at least a shunt regulator, and preferably an advanced charger (which maintains the batteries as well as charging them.)
However, the economics are awful. I check them every six months, and have been doing so since 2004. Although the prices of photovoltaics are coming down, my current estimate is that (admittedly in the UK where sun is limited) $1000 of the latest Kyocera PV cells will generate about $250 of electricity at current prices in their lifetime. During this time I will go through approx. $1600 of lead acid batteries (assuming a 5 year life). So my $250 of electricity will cost me a total including the electronics and the wiring of around $2500. (It scales because twice the cells means I need twice the batteries to store the output, so a bigger plant is no more economic.)
My guess is that at curent price decline, in about 5 years I should be able to use lithium cells with a 10 year life at comparaible cost, and the PV cost will have halved, so I may be looking at around $1250 for what by then may be $500 of electricity. Perhaps in 10 years it will make sense.
My suggestion: buy shares in either a nuclear energy company or a company building big wind generators. Seriously. Then you can tell people you are doing something positive instead of making a gesture.
I'm replying to you because you are engaging rather than frothing at the mouth like some others.
Please remember that this is in the UK, not the US. Despite the best efforts of our politicians, we are not the US and we do have cultural differences.
You can't strip away the rights of people to engage in consensual acts, and photograph them if they so choose, on the basis that someone, somewhere, is having crimes committed against their person. It's completely irrational.
Actually I doubt that under UK law (or the individual laws of many US States) people do have such rights. The extreme Pelagianism of US Law simply has no place in Europe. At the bottom of it all is the definition of "consensual".
Pelagianism, the root of Protestantism, believes that people are responsible for their own decisions every minute of the day. It points inevitably to the death penalty, (because in this view it is always a conscious decision borne of "sin" to commit murder) and the idea that provided people agree to do something that does not affect others, that makes it permissible. (Of course US lawmakers then get into a total tangle over, say, abortion...but I guess you may believe that US law can be irrational too.)
The anti-Pelagian trend in Europe accepts that often people do not do things that they want to do although apparently they consent. Therefore, for instance, the law may intervene when a man beats up a woman even though she declines to press charges, on the basis that her consent was not voluntary and that her silence arises from fear rather than consent. Domestic violence in Europe is not a consensual act. I do not know the legal position in the US, but I would be surprised if individual States did not have laws about it.
At which point does violent sex turn into a criminal act? At what point do pictures cease to be a matter of private titillation and become evidence of a crime? That is the issue that lawmakers have to deal with.
The extreme position taken by many posters on this thread is that, in effect, sexual violence is permissible provided that you cannot find someone to testify against it, and that therefore it is permissible to sell pictures of what may be criminal acts for gain. I cannot see that as being a rational position, and it is in fact quite illegal under English law for a criminal to profit in this way from a crime.
I notice that many posters are in fact talking about cartoons and unreal violence. In my original post I was clearly (I thought) referring to material which was photographic and therefore a recording of real world acts. But this seems to have been missed by the "libertarians".
Is an idiot, and this is the reason. We have a major problem in Europe with the abuse and exoploitation of women, many effectively slaves brought in from the former Soviet Union and China (I bet that the Chinese watchers will try and mod this out of sight, but yes, some of your nationals in the UK do engage in people smuggling and some of them are violent pimps. So are some of our own - but I digress.)
While there is a market for violent pornography or child pornography, criminals will supply it. In doing so I doubt they will consider the civil rights of those forced to take part.
That is why, to my mind, even though it may be of limited effectiveness, it is right to make possession of this material illegal. Anything you can do to destroy or disrupt the market is attacking the revenue stream that makes the criminals do it in the first place. If you cannot persuade people that they should not pay other people to abuse, rape and beat strangers for their entertainment - then more stringent sanctions are needed.
The situation is rather different from, say, drug legislation. Poor farmers grow drugs in Colombia and Afghanistan because they pay better and travel better than vegetables. They don't care if rich Westerners want to die early from hepatitis. Here, people are being physically maltreated and the rich Westerners suffer no unpleasant consequences at all (or if they do, it's because they enjoy being whipped - it takes all sorts.)
Those who saw bits of the Mosley tape will be aware that he apparently paid money to beat (and be beaten by) prostitutes, and may wonder what compulsion the prostitutes were under to put up with this kind of treatment. How much money would it take for you to do that willingly? I just can't easily express how proud I am of the fact that, during the 1930s, my father and his Jewish friends threw bricks at Mosley's father.
I think the real problem is still, as you say, that many programmers do not think about boundary and error conditions, and furthermore they do not write comments about the right things.
Unit testing has its place when designing bits of code for the first time, but experienced programmers will know how to deal with things like (for instance) missing parameters on returned web forms, passed-in classes that have not been initialised, and possible arithmetic overflow/divide by zero.
The commonest problems that I see in the field are:
Comments that tell me things that are absolutely obvious, while awkward workarounds are uncommented.
Excessive levels of abstraction, where overlaid interfaces and extended classes are used to conceal the fact that the programmer has really done almost no work and is in fact just passing some data straight into a library.
Overly complex error handling methods that actually confuse the real source of an error (e.g. in Java creating loads of Exception classes that still just end up writing a short comment to stdout).
Error handling that is not around properly modularised code blocks so that the trapped error is not actually relevant to the main business of the block.
I suspect that anybody intelligent enough to have ideas about how code should be documented and tested that make any kind of sense, is also likely to produce readable and testable code. People without those skills will not use testing and documentation efficiently.
At the end of the day there is no substitute for designing a proper end of the line test suite, and applying it to the application as a whole, with sufficiently good error handling that bugs can be traced.
I should add before anybody objects that I KNOW that updating a running kernel is different from updating a higher level layer. My point is that telephony servers do need to be up for years, therefore the ability to patch the kernel as well as the OTP is valuable. Although telephony mainframes may be up for years, Linux boxes typically aren't (not if they want to stay current.) This technology can presumably project Linux into the six-nines availability range. But, if the MS patent comment is right, not in the US.
Erlang/OTP (Open Telephony Platform) already has the ability to roll out updates onto server nodes without a reboot. To everybody above who has said this is a nonexistent problem, or has pontificated about how simple it is to load balance telephony servers (it isn't): if you are right, then why did Ericsson need to invent it?
The ejabberd IM server is written in Erlang, and it repays study. This is a small language which can do things like extract patterns from bit arrays in a single line, and at the other end of the scale can drive large server networks with uptime measured in years.
Fortunately, any Microsoft patent taken out in 2002 on 1980s Swedish technology is unlikely to work in Europe.
If you do, the solar sail will have a control panel with buttons that are too small for adult fingers. It will have useless "design" that will make it harder to use. And after a year, you will have to trade up to a new solar sail because the old one will be obsolete and kids will laugh at you for using it.
This is a pretty accurate analogy. For the terminally thick, Anna Merikin is pointing out that we use banks to store money which we can withdraw anywhere, and that in some sense they are "our" dollars even though the actual bills that get handed over are not the ones we paid in (in the 21st century of course they are bit streams just like audio)
Completely OT, and responding to Anna Merikin's journal, you have misunderstood DNA quite a bit. Comparison of human to chimp is not based on books containing mostly the same words. Genes are higher level than words; they either encode proteins (equivalent, say, to a class in OO), or they regulate (equivalent perhaps to a functional specification in a functional language.)
If we found that two programs had 98.5% of their classes almost indistinguishably similar, and 98.5% of their functions had the same behaviour and signature, any change in the order, or which classes occurred in which files, would not be a strong argument that they were different programs.
No, you are missing my point. I start out by pointing out that Hawking is not particularly qualified to discus the probability that there is intelligent life on other planets. Then I point out a couple of reasons why we might well not detect it. The absence of detection of other intelligencies does not imply they do not exist, and so is not a counter-argument to their existence, and Hawking is not qualified to make comments on how often intelligence may arise independently.
"Assuming space technology doesn't advance much further in the future (and we all know that's pessimistic beyond belief)"
No, we don't know any such thing.
Current life technology is based ultimately on oil- or coal-derived fuels and there is no realistic prospect that we will have enough of these to support a serious space program. Point me in the direction of a single alternative technology that will provide the kind of energy required.
Even assuming such a technology, consider the effect on the atmosphere of launching through it the quantities of stuff needed to build a base somewhere that could act as a resource centre for further advance. Even the dumbest politicians won't support a project that would probably wipe out life on Earth.
The fact is that our civilisation runs on oil and coal - still. Every improvement in utilisation has been incremental; there have been no serious technical breakthroughs for over 100 years (gas engine, gas turbine and Diesel are all over 100 years old.) Our current civilisation is dependent on using up irreplaceable fuels. All the proposed technical fixes - nuclear, wind, wave - are either heavy plant (nuclear) or low energy density (wind and wave.)
Given the relationship between star size and longevity (it's inverse) we can safely say that the more likely a civilisation is to be around long enough to develop technology, the more likely it is to run out of energy before going anywhere.
"It means that the first species capable of colonizing the galaxy, WILL colonize the galaxy before any other life can get a chance to evolve" - again untrue unless seen from hindsight. The capability to expand beyond your own planet is useless if the nearest planets do not have the resources to permit further expansion. If you don't understand that, learn some military history and you will start to understand the problems of supply logistics. As Winston Churchill once remarked in WW2, when someone criticised the Egyptian government "It takes 20 Egyptians to keep one British soldier in the front line." For space colonisation, I suspect the numbers are more like millions to one.
Hawking is a theoretical physicist. His opinion on the subject is worth no more than mine, in fact possibly less, since I have probably done more biochemistry than he has. Disclaimer: I'm not pretending to be as intelligent as Hawking, just suggesting that any science graduate who has been to Cambridge or one of its equivalents is just as qualified, or more so, to speak on extra-terrestrial life than he is. Just as being a bishop does not make you an expert on evolution, being a physicist doesn't make you an expert on biology.
Now a couple of reasons why Hawking may be totally wrong.
1. We have no evidence that we as a species will ever be able to deploy enough energy or resources to move beyond this solar system. We can already foresee the end of cheap energy, and it is all we can do to lift a few tonnes to low earth orbit. It is quite possible that the Universe is so arranged that almost every possible life form is trapped in its own solar system.
2. The period in which we have emitted significant radio waves into space is barely 100 years, and more and more we are moving to very short range low power transmitters. It's quite possible that every civilisation does that and so, except for a narrow window of a hundred years or so, is effectively radio silent. You might pick up a primitive 50s and 60s AM transmitter (think Voice of America and megawatts on a narrow frequency band) but not all those Bluetooth devices.
If both of these are correct, the chance that we will detect another civilisation is extraordinarily small even if they are extremely common. In fact, the growing knowledge of carbon chemistry - graphenes and so on - and clays suggest that there are many opportunities for substrates to arise that might hold together primitive organics long enough for life to get a start. It's a subject which is getting increasingly interesting; if you take enough surface area and spread enough small molecules over it for long enough under enough variations of conditions, something is more or less bound to happen. Recent research also seems to suggest that there could be planets around smaller and so longer-lived stars which might have conditions suitable for the formation of life for much longer than the Earth will. Our own planet may be a lot less than optimal. In which case life is likely to be very common indeed, but the low energy environments in which it evolves may make it quite unsuitable for expanding from one star to another.
And why should it? The belief that there is something special about the human race which justifies its long term existence is as "religious" as any theistic religion, and no more defensible.
I could just point you to the FM, but I will try and help. The manual, btw, is quite old and I am relying on the release by Dante Alighieri, published around 1300 AD. There have as far as I know been no updates.
The firewall. It's made of burning iron, and completely blocks TCP/IP traffic. The only packages allowed through have to be carried by "Messengers", it is a kind of advanced pigeon post. No information about bandwdidth.
Many parts of Hell are at room temperature. There is a region which is almost ideal for hosting servers (continuous air currents) but it is unfortunately in the DMZ. Your best bet is to place your server in the region of the Giants, which is at a convenient temperature and is largely unpopulated. Alternatively you might want to consider extreme cooling, in which case Antenora is your best site.
You could probably power it by getting a few damned souls to operate a treadmill. I expect that Satan could easily come up with a few candidates.
You won't get data over the Styx, the outbound bandwidth is terrible. You might just possibly be able to run a fibre cable down the centre of the Earth (where there is a backdoor), but making the connection at the other end could be sheer Purgatory.
Finally, don't trust the on site IT staff. Make sure all critical work is done by external contractors. Above all, do not sign any contracts in blood or you may find yourself on the permanent staff.
The following information is not in the manual:
There is plenty of crypto in Hell but it is completely unbreakable. It is the punishment of former KGB agents and CIA analysts that they have to work on cracking it forever.
You will not need to worry about Republicans, Evangelical Christians, Islamic extremists etc. They all have their own section of Hell, and it is part of their punishment to believe that they are the only people there.
I was always against doing development on a laptop - but I now find myself doing it all the time because not only does Netbeans work much better in "wide" mode, I can usually keep something else I need down the right hand side of the screen. Like you, I use a 20 inch wide monitor as primary screen, and in fact I find this more useful in practice than using two 17 inch monitors side by side, because there are no bars in the middle.
The fact is that the quality of modern 12" widescreens is so good - high contrast and sharp pixels - that I find it comfortable to work with smaller font sizes than on the older 15 inch screens.
I noticed last week that my standard development box - Win 64 with several VMs on it - is getting less and less use.
So, to my surprise, I find that widescreen does it for me.
I lost mod points just before I saw this. A note of practicality in this thread (bbn is a complete fantasist). I'm afraid a lot of these whiny NASCAR types are going to have to face up to it - their fantasies about driving 600BHP hydorgen fueled SUVs across America are just that.
The Mitsubishi electric vehicle, on the other hand, is being to look like not being vaporware and I already want one.
Diesel-electric does not store power even for short periods. It uses a generator attached to the engine to drive a motor attached to the wheel shaft. The technical challenges of the extra stages of conversion needed to store electrical energy in the middle are considerable. Not least is that to make a light generator/engine combination you need high voltage (kilovolts) whereas electric storage is usually in batteries at tens of volts. The conversion up and down is not efficient.
It is also not that efficient for locomotives, it is just better than the slushbox alternative. Diesel electric drive was tried for ships because it seemed to offer many technical advantages, but in terms of efficiency nothing beats a low speed direct drive engine.
First, the cat wastes power because fuel has to be burned to heat it to operating temperature. My 2007 Diesel is less efficient than my 2001 Diesel for this reason (I monitor the computers and it is clear that the 2007 model has to heat the cat before the fuel consumption goes to its lowest.After about 40 miles the newer model starts to use less fuel than the older one.)
Second, modern cars have bigger engines. Even a tiny town car in Europe often now has a 100BHP engine when 20 years ago it would have been 60. More acceleration, more wasted power, plus the bigger engine just takes more power to turn over. Third, modern fuel has a lower octane rating than older fuel, and so must use a lower compression ratio - which means lower efficiency, as you find out in basic thermodynamics. Finally, air con,power steering, all need power to operate. Even the most basic model of possibly the most basic car in Europe - the Hyundia i10- has air con, power steering, and a 60HP plus engine.
Despite this, the best modern engines are remarkably good because of advances in fuel injection (both Diesel and gas), and because the timing cycles and better valve gear result in less port wastage. The real fuel consumption of that 2007 Diesel is about 80% of my 1990 non-turbo mechanically injected model of the same weight and size, which is pretty good.
You could probably disable it very effectively with a puddle in the road made from dilute PVA glue mixed with sand. Get that in the tracks and it will shortly be a stationary vehicle.
According to the article. I am a little surprised by this, because steel is quite good at blocking RF, and those satellites are up there, not down in the gutter. I am sufficiently nerdish sometimes to check the accuracy of my own GPS, and it can degrade very badly in cities. It's also a fact that the kind of places that get the best GPS reception are often the least good for cell phone reception, and vice versa. The benefits of using it for long distance tracking like stolen paintings are obvious - except that they probably travel in a windowless van - but tracking a beagle to a few metres seems a little unreliable.
Anyway, I read the article to our beagle and asked her opinion. She points out that beagles do not run away, they are called away on urgent tracking business. She feels that any human that hangs out with beagles and wants to attach tracking boxes to them is a distrustful person who possibly lacks the right spiritual qualities. She also reminds me that she can detect a beagle treat coming out of the bag across three fields, and that in any case anyone who has trouble with beagles taking off is simply not taking them for sufficiently long walks. She thinks I should notify the ASPCA before relations completely break down between this unfortunate beagle and its lazy, distrustful owner.
I refuse to use Paypal because I am not convinced it is covered by banking regulations. These may not be perfect (understatement of year to date) but are surely better than nothing. Can anybody explain to me in what way entrusting funds to Paypal offers any real and accessible legal protection against fraud?
In Europe we have Euronorms relating to data protection that must be embodied in the laws of every member state. The answer to your question is contained in those norms.
Briefly, so long as data is personally identifiable you must show that you are not retaining it longer than necessary. If I summarise or analyse data and remove information which makes it personally identifiable - names, addresses, telephone numbers, email accounts - then it is not covered.
IMHO the US stands in need of a Data Protection Act, as an amendment to the Constitution. The present Adnmninistration seems to be looking for ways of keeping track of its citizens which avoid the Constitution. Technically in Europe it is probably illegal to send personal data via GMail - because it is exporting it to a country that does not meet European standards for personal data protection.
Alvis Scorpion
on
The DIY Tank
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If you want armor that is stronger than plywood and a little more performance, consider an Alvis Scorpion. Available in street legal form, max speed 45mph, and with the governor removed can achieve over 70. The interior space is limited, it's a bit noisy, but you could use it to shunt a Hummer until it fitted into a pickup, and would probably only need to touch up the paint a bit.
BTW can anybody tell me the actual engine (and gearbox) used on the Kettering version?
Our amino acids are left handed because one of the ship's cooks who dumped their waste on our planet gave it a left-handed stir.
However, "where did the first organic matter come from" is a no brainer. There are what, 6 * 10^23 carbon atoms in a mole (roughly 16g) of methane, the simplest organic, so imagine the number in the atmosphere of the early Earth because I can't be bothered to extrapolate to billions of tonnes. We already know that graphite spontaneously occurs in nanotubes, buckyballs and now graphene, so suitable structures for collecting random small molecules by hydrogen bonding already exist. (Add many similar structures that occur in clays.) So we have an enormous number of potential small molecules getting together on substrates that will tend to align them under the wide variety of conditions of the early earth and, initially, no predators to eat them up as soon as they appear. Given this almost infinite improbability drive, the appearance of more complex organics is hardly surprising.
Slashdot Mirror
The original Inmos Transputer was designed to solve such problems and relied on fast inter-processor links, and the AMD Hypertransport bus is a modern derivative.
So I disagree with you. The processing hardware is not so much the problem. If GPUs are small, cheap and address lots of memory, so long as they have the necessary instruction sets they will do the job. The issue to focus on is still interprocessor (and hence interprocess) links. This is how hardware affects parallelism.
I have on and off worked with multiprocessor systems since the early 80s, and always it has been fastest and most effective to rely on data channels rather than horrible kludges like shared memory with mutex locks. The code can be made clean and can be tested in a wide range of environments. I am probably too near retirement now to work seriously with Erlang, but it looks like a sound platform.
However, the economics are awful. I check them every six months, and have been doing so since 2004. Although the prices of photovoltaics are coming down, my current estimate is that (admittedly in the UK where sun is limited) $1000 of the latest Kyocera PV cells will generate about $250 of electricity at current prices in their lifetime. During this time I will go through approx. $1600 of lead acid batteries (assuming a 5 year life). So my $250 of electricity will cost me a total including the electronics and the wiring of around $2500. (It scales because twice the cells means I need twice the batteries to store the output, so a bigger plant is no more economic.)
My guess is that at curent price decline, in about 5 years I should be able to use lithium cells with a 10 year life at comparaible cost, and the PV cost will have halved, so I may be looking at around $1250 for what by then may be $500 of electricity. Perhaps in 10 years it will make sense.
My suggestion: buy shares in either a nuclear energy company or a company building big wind generators. Seriously. Then you can tell people you are doing something positive instead of making a gesture.
Please remember that this is in the UK, not the US. Despite the best efforts of our politicians, we are not the US and we do have cultural differences.
Actually I doubt that under UK law (or the individual laws of many US States) people do have such rights. The extreme Pelagianism of US Law simply has no place in Europe. At the bottom of it all is the definition of "consensual".
Pelagianism, the root of Protestantism, believes that people are responsible for their own decisions every minute of the day. It points inevitably to the death penalty, (because in this view it is always a conscious decision borne of "sin" to commit murder) and the idea that provided people agree to do something that does not affect others, that makes it permissible. (Of course US lawmakers then get into a total tangle over, say, abortion...but I guess you may believe that US law can be irrational too.)
The anti-Pelagian trend in Europe accepts that often people do not do things that they want to do although apparently they consent. Therefore, for instance, the law may intervene when a man beats up a woman even though she declines to press charges, on the basis that her consent was not voluntary and that her silence arises from fear rather than consent. Domestic violence in Europe is not a consensual act. I do not know the legal position in the US, but I would be surprised if individual States did not have laws about it.
At which point does violent sex turn into a criminal act? At what point do pictures cease to be a matter of private titillation and become evidence of a crime? That is the issue that lawmakers have to deal with.
The extreme position taken by many posters on this thread is that, in effect, sexual violence is permissible provided that you cannot find someone to testify against it, and that therefore it is permissible to sell pictures of what may be criminal acts for gain. I cannot see that as being a rational position, and it is in fact quite illegal under English law for a criminal to profit in this way from a crime.
I notice that many posters are in fact talking about cartoons and unreal violence. In my original post I was clearly (I thought) referring to material which was photographic and therefore a recording of real world acts. But this seems to have been missed by the "libertarians".
While there is a market for violent pornography or child pornography, criminals will supply it. In doing so I doubt they will consider the civil rights of those forced to take part.
That is why, to my mind, even though it may be of limited effectiveness, it is right to make possession of this material illegal. Anything you can do to destroy or disrupt the market is attacking the revenue stream that makes the criminals do it in the first place. If you cannot persuade people that they should not pay other people to abuse, rape and beat strangers for their entertainment - then more stringent sanctions are needed.
The situation is rather different from, say, drug legislation. Poor farmers grow drugs in Colombia and Afghanistan because they pay better and travel better than vegetables. They don't care if rich Westerners want to die early from hepatitis. Here, people are being physically maltreated and the rich Westerners suffer no unpleasant consequences at all (or if they do, it's because they enjoy being whipped - it takes all sorts.)
Those who saw bits of the Mosley tape will be aware that he apparently paid money to beat (and be beaten by) prostitutes, and may wonder what compulsion the prostitutes were under to put up with this kind of treatment. How much money would it take for you to do that willingly? I just can't easily express how proud I am of the fact that, during the 1930s, my father and his Jewish friends threw bricks at Mosley's father.
Unit testing has its place when designing bits of code for the first time, but experienced programmers will know how to deal with things like (for instance) missing parameters on returned web forms, passed-in classes that have not been initialised, and possible arithmetic overflow/divide by zero.
The commonest problems that I see in the field are:
I suspect that anybody intelligent enough to have ideas about how code should be documented and tested that make any kind of sense, is also likely to produce readable and testable code. People without those skills will not use testing and documentation efficiently.
At the end of the day there is no substitute for designing a proper end of the line test suite, and applying it to the application as a whole, with sufficiently good error handling that bugs can be traced.
Revolutionary technologies take 15-100 years to implement successfully. (in the case of civil fusion power, possibly longer).
I should add before anybody objects that I KNOW that updating a running kernel is different from updating a higher level layer. My point is that telephony servers do need to be up for years, therefore the ability to patch the kernel as well as the OTP is valuable. Although telephony mainframes may be up for years, Linux boxes typically aren't (not if they want to stay current.) This technology can presumably project Linux into the six-nines availability range. But, if the MS patent comment is right, not in the US.
Erlang/OTP (Open Telephony Platform) already has the ability to roll out updates onto server nodes without a reboot. To everybody above who has said this is a nonexistent problem, or has pontificated about how simple it is to load balance telephony servers (it isn't): if you are right, then why did Ericsson need to invent it?
The ejabberd IM server is written in Erlang, and it repays study. This is a small language which can do things like extract patterns from bit arrays in a single line, and at the other end of the scale can drive large server networks with uptime measured in years.
Fortunately, any Microsoft patent taken out in 2002 on 1980s Swedish technology is unlikely to work in Europe.
If you do, the solar sail will have a control panel with buttons that are too small for adult fingers. It will have useless "design" that will make it harder to use. And after a year, you will have to trade up to a new solar sail because the old one will be obsolete and kids will laugh at you for using it.
Completely OT, and responding to Anna Merikin's journal, you have misunderstood DNA quite a bit. Comparison of human to chimp is not based on books containing mostly the same words. Genes are higher level than words; they either encode proteins (equivalent, say, to a class in OO), or they regulate (equivalent perhaps to a functional specification in a functional language.)
If we found that two programs had 98.5% of their classes almost indistinguishably similar, and 98.5% of their functions had the same behaviour and signature, any change in the order, or which classes occurred in which files, would not be a strong argument that they were different programs.
No, you are missing my point. I start out by pointing out that Hawking is not particularly qualified to discus the probability that there is intelligent life on other planets. Then I point out a couple of reasons why we might well not detect it. The absence of detection of other intelligencies does not imply they do not exist, and so is not a counter-argument to their existence, and Hawking is not qualified to make comments on how often intelligence may arise independently.
No, we don't know any such thing.
Current life technology is based ultimately on oil- or coal-derived fuels and there is no realistic prospect that we will have enough of these to support a serious space program. Point me in the direction of a single alternative technology that will provide the kind of energy required.
Even assuming such a technology, consider the effect on the atmosphere of launching through it the quantities of stuff needed to build a base somewhere that could act as a resource centre for further advance. Even the dumbest politicians won't support a project that would probably wipe out life on Earth.
The fact is that our civilisation runs on oil and coal - still. Every improvement in utilisation has been incremental; there have been no serious technical breakthroughs for over 100 years (gas engine, gas turbine and Diesel are all over 100 years old.) Our current civilisation is dependent on using up irreplaceable fuels. All the proposed technical fixes - nuclear, wind, wave - are either heavy plant (nuclear) or low energy density (wind and wave.)
Given the relationship between star size and longevity (it's inverse) we can safely say that the more likely a civilisation is to be around long enough to develop technology, the more likely it is to run out of energy before going anywhere.
"It means that the first species capable of colonizing the galaxy, WILL colonize the galaxy before any other life can get a chance to evolve" - again untrue unless seen from hindsight. The capability to expand beyond your own planet is useless if the nearest planets do not have the resources to permit further expansion. If you don't understand that, learn some military history and you will start to understand the problems of supply logistics. As Winston Churchill once remarked in WW2, when someone criticised the Egyptian government "It takes 20 Egyptians to keep one British soldier in the front line." For space colonisation, I suspect the numbers are more like millions to one.
Now a couple of reasons why Hawking may be totally wrong.
- 1. We have no evidence that we as a species will ever be able to deploy enough energy or resources to move beyond this solar system. We can already foresee the end of cheap energy, and it is all we can do to lift a few tonnes to low earth orbit. It is quite possible that the Universe is so arranged that almost every possible life form is trapped in its own solar system.
- 2. The period in which we have emitted significant radio waves into space is barely 100 years, and more and more we are moving to very short range low power transmitters. It's quite possible that every civilisation does that and so, except for a narrow window of a hundred years or so, is effectively radio silent. You might pick up a primitive 50s and 60s AM transmitter (think Voice of America and megawatts on a narrow frequency band) but not all those Bluetooth devices.
If both of these are correct, the chance that we will detect another civilisation is extraordinarily small even if they are extremely common. In fact, the growing knowledge of carbon chemistry - graphenes and so on - and clays suggest that there are many opportunities for substrates to arise that might hold together primitive organics long enough for life to get a start. It's a subject which is getting increasingly interesting; if you take enough surface area and spread enough small molecules over it for long enough under enough variations of conditions, something is more or less bound to happen. Recent research also seems to suggest that there could be planets around smaller and so longer-lived stars which might have conditions suitable for the formation of life for much longer than the Earth will. Our own planet may be a lot less than optimal. In which case life is likely to be very common indeed, but the low energy environments in which it evolves may make it quite unsuitable for expanding from one star to another.And why should it? The belief that there is something special about the human race which justifies its long term existence is as "religious" as any theistic religion, and no more defensible.
The firewall. It's made of burning iron, and completely blocks TCP/IP traffic. The only packages allowed through have to be carried by "Messengers", it is a kind of advanced pigeon post. No information about bandwdidth.
Many parts of Hell are at room temperature. There is a region which is almost ideal for hosting servers (continuous air currents) but it is unfortunately in the DMZ. Your best bet is to place your server in the region of the Giants, which is at a convenient temperature and is largely unpopulated. Alternatively you might want to consider extreme cooling, in which case Antenora is your best site.
You could probably power it by getting a few damned souls to operate a treadmill. I expect that Satan could easily come up with a few candidates.
You won't get data over the Styx, the outbound bandwidth is terrible. You might just possibly be able to run a fibre cable down the centre of the Earth (where there is a backdoor), but making the connection at the other end could be sheer Purgatory.
Finally, don't trust the on site IT staff. Make sure all critical work is done by external contractors. Above all, do not sign any contracts in blood or you may find yourself on the permanent staff.
The following information is not in the manual:
There is plenty of crypto in Hell but it is completely unbreakable. It is the punishment of former KGB agents and CIA analysts that they have to work on cracking it forever.
You will not need to worry about Republicans, Evangelical Christians, Islamic extremists etc. They all have their own section of Hell, and it is part of their punishment to believe that they are the only people there.
I guess the makers of this board are more with technical trends than Slashdot users.
The fact is that the quality of modern 12" widescreens is so good - high contrast and sharp pixels - that I find it comfortable to work with smaller font sizes than on the older 15 inch screens.
I noticed last week that my standard development box - Win 64 with several VMs on it - is getting less and less use.
So, to my surprise, I find that widescreen does it for me.
The Mitsubishi electric vehicle, on the other hand, is being to look like not being vaporware and I already want one.
It is also not that efficient for locomotives, it is just better than the slushbox alternative. Diesel electric drive was tried for ships because it seemed to offer many technical advantages, but in terms of efficiency nothing beats a low speed direct drive engine.
Second, modern cars have bigger engines. Even a tiny town car in Europe often now has a 100BHP engine when 20 years ago it would have been 60. More acceleration, more wasted power, plus the bigger engine just takes more power to turn over. Third, modern fuel has a lower octane rating than older fuel, and so must use a lower compression ratio - which means lower efficiency, as you find out in basic thermodynamics. Finally, air con,power steering, all need power to operate. Even the most basic model of possibly the most basic car in Europe - the Hyundia i10- has air con, power steering, and a 60HP plus engine.
Despite this, the best modern engines are remarkably good because of advances in fuel injection (both Diesel and gas), and because the timing cycles and better valve gear result in less port wastage. The real fuel consumption of that 2007 Diesel is about 80% of my 1990 non-turbo mechanically injected model of the same weight and size, which is pretty good.
You could probably disable it very effectively with a puddle in the road made from dilute PVA glue mixed with sand. Get that in the tracks and it will shortly be a stationary vehicle.
Anyway, I read the article to our beagle and asked her opinion. She points out that beagles do not run away, they are called away on urgent tracking business. She feels that any human that hangs out with beagles and wants to attach tracking boxes to them is a distrustful person who possibly lacks the right spiritual qualities. She also reminds me that she can detect a beagle treat coming out of the bag across three fields, and that in any case anyone who has trouble with beagles taking off is simply not taking them for sufficiently long walks. She thinks I should notify the ASPCA before relations completely break down between this unfortunate beagle and its lazy, distrustful owner.
I refuse to use Paypal because I am not convinced it is covered by banking regulations. These may not be perfect (understatement of year to date) but are surely better than nothing. Can anybody explain to me in what way entrusting funds to Paypal offers any real and accessible legal protection against fraud?
Briefly, so long as data is personally identifiable you must show that you are not retaining it longer than necessary. If I summarise or analyse data and remove information which makes it personally identifiable - names, addresses, telephone numbers, email accounts - then it is not covered.
IMHO the US stands in need of a Data Protection Act, as an amendment to the Constitution. The present Adnmninistration seems to be looking for ways of keeping track of its citizens which avoid the Constitution. Technically in Europe it is probably illegal to send personal data via GMail - because it is exporting it to a country that does not meet European standards for personal data protection.
BTW can anybody tell me the actual engine (and gearbox) used on the Kettering version?
However, "where did the first organic matter come from" is a no brainer. There are what, 6 * 10^23 carbon atoms in a mole (roughly 16g) of methane, the simplest organic, so imagine the number in the atmosphere of the early Earth because I can't be bothered to extrapolate to billions of tonnes. We already know that graphite spontaneously occurs in nanotubes, buckyballs and now graphene, so suitable structures for collecting random small molecules by hydrogen bonding already exist. (Add many similar structures that occur in clays.) So we have an enormous number of potential small molecules getting together on substrates that will tend to align them under the wide variety of conditions of the early earth and, initially, no predators to eat them up as soon as they appear. Given this almost infinite improbability drive, the appearance of more complex organics is hardly surprising.