... I'm willing to admit that some christians have done some good over the course of history (Mother Teresa, for instance).
You will have to refresh my memory on this one. As far as I can recall, her biggest accomplishment was to deny condoms to the locals, thereby ensuring that she had a continuous supply of AIDS orphans to array around herself for photo ops. Perhaps you had something else in mind that I've missed?
I was using the term yuppie flu based on the symptoms: "Non-specific symptoms of fatigue, tiredness, exhaustion, and aches..." In my case, blood tests also showed that I had a viral infection, although it would have taken them months to find out what virus it was.
Saying "Acyclovir is used to treat herpes infections" is akin to saying "Asprin is used to thin the blood". Once a drug hits the market, it is open game for any use by a doctor that is allowed to write a prescription. Acyclovir has been clinically tested for use with herpes, hence that description for typical use. However it is a broad spectrum anti-viral that can be used against many others.
Most people aren't prescribed anti-virals because humans normally get over virus infections (such as a cold or flu) fairly quickly without any help. In my case I kept getting recurring infections that would leave me exhausted almost to the point of being unable to stand up. The exhaustion was accompanied by a very mild sore throat, no fever, and I had the results of the blood test. I took the $180 worth of 12 capsules (it was a very new drug at the time, ~17 years ago) when I had another infection running, and it seemed to fix the problem. As always, there is no way to prove that the drug had any effect because my immune system may have coincidentally figured out how to crack the virus.
Noted. I was just objecting to the original poster's implication that only the immune system can deal with viruses. Antibiotic is a fairly generic term in common speech.
... but I know in general terms the difference between a virus and bacteria.
And if more doctors had known the difference over the years, we wouldn't be rapidly approaching this crisis with more and more antibiotic resistant bacteria. If that many doctors have gotten it so wrong, I wouldn't expect the general/. population to know much about it either.
There isn't a single antibiotic that can disable a virus...
This will come as a great surprise to the many people who have taken antiviral drugs and been cured of various viral diseases. I was cured of some strange recurrant yuppie flu using Acyclovir. Thank $DEITY that I had a GP who had trained as a pharmacist.
I guess we can be pedantic and say that antibiotics and antivirals are not similar things, but as far as the patient is concerned they are.
I would have to say that the implementation of the language rather than the language itself is the only thing unprovable in most cases. An optimizer may change just about anything for the worse. The only true provable language would be assembler, but only as long as the physical processor itself wasn't encumbered with pipelines, caches, co-processors, external logic, etc.
From what I remember of real life and classes, real life and classes rarely approach each other. They aren't even on speaking terms. As soon as you take pointers out of C, you have also removed arrays, since C treats them as identical paradigms. For many embedded systems, removing pointers also removes I/O since many embedded programmers (in my experience) don't know that you can define the I/O map in assembler. Without data, the algorithms do... what?
You might have missed the section in the middle of my post describing a recent job offering for medical systems using C++ and C#. I have written a good whack of C code that was safety critical, but even I hesitate when faced with those C derivatives. I don't know much about C#, but I have learned the subset of C++ that can be considered not incredibly dangerous to use.:-)
The main point, that I apparently did not articulate well enough, is that you need a competant person engineering the code and in fact, the whole system, not just a "progammer". Someone who understands what the term "fail safe" means at a minimum.
As a P.Eng. with more than 20 years experience in the embedded and safety critical space (I've worked on systems that could injure individuals and other systems which could blow up entire buildings), what I should state is that given the meagre information we have on this roller coaster, I could not suggest a best language to use. I can see scenarios where the launch mechanism could be as easily driven by a batch system using almost any language (including Postscript) as well as multiple distributed processors each running assembler (or C) code. The original poster was way off base (and professional experience) stating that C could not possibly be used.
Just out of curiosity, what makes you think you "know" anything about embedded software engineering? Judging from your statements you clearly have no experience with the matter, and you have never spoken with anybody with any experience in the matter.
Most embedded systems are written in either C or assembler and they do just fine. Most real-time OSs are written in either C or assembler and they do just fine. For both of these statements I am including everything from the systems that run on space and planetary probes down to the processor running in the keyboard you were just typing on. I just saw a job posting today for a medical device software engineer requiring experience with WinCE, C++, and C#. Guess what language(s) WinCE was written in. It sure wasn't Pascal, PerfectScript, Perl, PHP, Pict, Pike, Pilot, PL/C, PL/I, Postscript, Prolog, or Python.
Embedded systems don't normally need the absurd amounts of error checking that user level programs do. Thermocouples aren't normally in the habit of randomly generating buffer overflows. Physics is sufficient to deal with most situations, and I'm not just talking about the physics of the real, such as the expected temperature variation over time that said thermocouple would be experiencing. The physics involved in a thermocouple wire breaking will also not overwrite the stack into the code space. I have never heard of a network buffer overflow problem in VxWorks, and that was written in C.
What language would you suggest for embedded systems? Something that will randomly shut down randomly for milliseconds at a time to do garbage collection? Something where the first pass through a section of code takes a radically different different amount of time than the second pass, or the third? Even ladder logic is unsuited to many tasks because the PLCs that are normally used to run it often have loop times dependent on the input states.
C was designed for system level work. It is predictable, which is the single greatest criterion for embedded and real-time systems. It is really quite adequate for the task as long as the people working with it are used to designing embedded systems. Or else they have their work reviewed by those who do have the experience. Any real engineering office would be run this way.
Israel and Switzerland have both come close (in their own respective and different ways), but I don't think I would like to live in either place (and for different reasons in each case).
I have up to 12 months worth of backups, including hourly snapshots of the previous 24 hours, always available to all the users online. Tapes do not have to be hunted down and mounted. The users can easily go browse their own snapshots and get the files they need when they have an oops. The snapshots are maintained on a different machine than the source data, so an individual machine can melt into a lump of slag with the loss of no more than one hour of data.
Since it uses rsync and hard links, only the changed files get added to the backup, so you can size your backup hard drive at roughly 50% larger than the source drive and never have to worry about running out of backup space.
If you have a reasonably fast network connection, you could even have the backups located off site with no extra effort beyond the initial setup.
How about the link: 02 d. >> CSS/HTML-Specifications, or were you thinking of some other standards not already covered there? If so, then it looks like you can Submit a link to help him correct the deficiency.
The only problem with this thesis is that they have 4-10 times more "spikes in the graph" than they have "world events". If I got to pick and choose the correlation between spikes and events the way they do, my next trip to Vegas would make me a billionare.
I'm not the sort of person to just dismiss things out of hand. I've seen things happen that I could not explain with my knowledge of physics and mathematics even 30 years later. The original article sounds pretty good and I would like to believe in it. It sounds pretty cool and reminds me of some of the stuff I read when I was a kid.
Unfortunately, they are suppressing their own evidence on a massive scale by ignoring all the other "spikes" they have seen. If you get a spike on average every few hours (they had several similar spikes on the days before 9/11), any moron can correlate it to any real world activity they feel like. Especially when they feel free to let it skew by +/- several hours due to prescience as they have already demonstrated.
Get back to me when they only get one spike per event, and it always has the same lead or lag time as all the other spikes. Otherwise, get in line with all the other charlatans who think they can fool Randi and collect $1M.
I think enough scientists have already seen those apples falling. Unfortunately for the people at Princeton, when the real scientists saw falling apples they also saw the rising and floating apples being ignored by the Princetonians. A real scientist spends a considerable amount of time trying to invalidate their own theory. This is hard to do when you ignore 90% of your own data set.
They've seen it deviate only in controlled experiments (repeatedly), and before major world events (again repeatedly).
You seem to have an odd definition of the word "only" that I am not familiar with. From just one of the many articles that debunks this:
Another serious problem with the September 11 result was that during the days before the attacks, there were several instances of the eggs picking up data that showed the same fluctuation as on September 11th. When I asked Radin what had happened on those days, the answer was:
It is very important to remember that what has happened in the past should have some weight in predicting what will happen in the future.
If you are talking about real world events, I agree with you. If you are talking about true random events, then you couldn't be more wrong.
What if all scientists took your approach to science?
"Oh look, the apple fell from the tree, and I think it fell at the same accelaration as the last object I saw fall. I wonder if all objects fall with the same acceleration? Too bad I can't learn anything from that, since what happens in the past has no bearing at all on the future. I'm gonna go get some pie."
Except in the case of the "experiment" in the article, they are ignoring the fact that most of the apples are flying upwards and that a significant number of the apples which are detaching themselves from the branches are floating there unnoticed, neither going up or down.
No. The updates are fetched based on what is installed...it won't go hit some random (malware) site looking for an update.
I install Firefox and Thunderbird on other people's computers via CD. I install a collection of extensions from the same CD. Not all of them are from updates.mozilla.org. The update process seems to quite happily go to these other sites.
Or are you saying the author of the extension will deliberately trojan it down the road?
That was exactly what I was thinking. What happens if the author of some popular extension, say Adblock, gets an offer he can't refuse from the "Russian spam mob"? I know what I would do if I was offered the choice of losing my knees or gaining a wad of cash.
Well, there is nothing you can do about that with any software. If Intuit wanted to bundle spyware into Quicken, you would get that with your Quicken updates too.
Doesn't that happen with Quicken already?:-)
Seriously though, coupling this loophole with some level of social engineering could be a problem. I kind of like the idea of the update process opening up the authoritative extension source (preferably some semi-trusted third party like updates.mozilla.org) in a tab, and adding a button to the bottom of the page that you have to click to accept the update. Of course this still wouldn't help the clicky-clicky types.
The loophole here is that people will only see those reviews once, just before they install the extension. A year goes by and everybody hits the software update button which just goes ahead and installs the new stuff. Instant malware.
I'm not saying this will happen, but it could. Hopefully the developers figure out a defence for this before it does, such as popping up tabs with the lastest reviews of the extensions Firefox wants to upgrade.
Why would anybody want to refer to science fiction as "skiffy" except to denigrate the genre? Give me SF or science fiction. I don't want to hear about Buffy's dog.
It may have seemed plausible, but man was it ever fucking boring. I'm glad I didn't pay to read any of them. I only read the third one because of inertia, something that will never be repeated for the third Dune prequel.
Slashdot Mirror
You will have to refresh my memory on this one. As far as I can recall, her biggest accomplishment was to deny condoms to the locals, thereby ensuring that she had a continuous supply of AIDS orphans to array around herself for photo ops. Perhaps you had something else in mind that I've missed?
I was using the term yuppie flu based on the symptoms: "Non-specific symptoms of fatigue, tiredness, exhaustion, and aches..." In my case, blood tests also showed that I had a viral infection, although it would have taken them months to find out what virus it was.
Saying "Acyclovir is used to treat herpes infections" is akin to saying "Asprin is used to thin the blood". Once a drug hits the market, it is open game for any use by a doctor that is allowed to write a prescription. Acyclovir has been clinically tested for use with herpes, hence that description for typical use. However it is a broad spectrum anti-viral that can be used against many others.
Most people aren't prescribed anti-virals because humans normally get over virus infections (such as a cold or flu) fairly quickly without any help. In my case I kept getting recurring infections that would leave me exhausted almost to the point of being unable to stand up. The exhaustion was accompanied by a very mild sore throat, no fever, and I had the results of the blood test. I took the $180 worth of 12 capsules (it was a very new drug at the time, ~17 years ago) when I had another infection running, and it seemed to fix the problem. As always, there is no way to prove that the drug had any effect because my immune system may have coincidentally figured out how to crack the virus.
Noted. I was just objecting to the original poster's implication that only the immune system can deal with viruses. Antibiotic is a fairly generic term in common speech.
And if more doctors had known the difference over the years, we wouldn't be rapidly approaching this crisis with more and more antibiotic resistant bacteria. If that many doctors have gotten it so wrong, I wouldn't expect the general /. population to know much about it either.
This will come as a great surprise to the many people who have taken antiviral drugs and been cured of various viral diseases. I was cured of some strange recurrant yuppie flu using Acyclovir. Thank $DEITY that I had a GP who had trained as a pharmacist.
I guess we can be pedantic and say that antibiotics and antivirals are not similar things, but as far as the patient is concerned they are.
I would have to say that the implementation of the language rather than the language itself is the only thing unprovable in most cases. An optimizer may change just about anything for the worse. The only true provable language would be assembler, but only as long as the physical processor itself wasn't encumbered with pipelines, caches, co-processors, external logic, etc.
From what I remember of real life and classes, real life and classes rarely approach each other. They aren't even on speaking terms. As soon as you take pointers out of C, you have also removed arrays, since C treats them as identical paradigms. For many embedded systems, removing pointers also removes I/O since many embedded programmers (in my experience) don't know that you can define the I/O map in assembler. Without data, the algorithms do... what?
You might have missed the section in the middle of my post describing a recent job offering for medical systems using C++ and C#. I have written a good whack of C code that was safety critical, but even I hesitate when faced with those C derivatives. I don't know much about C#, but I have learned the subset of C++ that can be considered not incredibly dangerous to use. :-)
The main point, that I apparently did not articulate well enough, is that you need a competant person engineering the code and in fact, the whole system, not just a "progammer". Someone who understands what the term "fail safe" means at a minimum.
As a P.Eng. with more than 20 years experience in the embedded and safety critical space (I've worked on systems that could injure individuals and other systems which could blow up entire buildings), what I should state is that given the meagre information we have on this roller coaster, I could not suggest a best language to use. I can see scenarios where the launch mechanism could be as easily driven by a batch system using almost any language (including Postscript) as well as multiple distributed processors each running assembler (or C) code. The original poster was way off base (and professional experience) stating that C could not possibly be used.
Just out of curiosity, what makes you think you "know" anything about embedded software engineering? Judging from your statements you clearly have no experience with the matter, and you have never spoken with anybody with any experience in the matter.
Most embedded systems are written in either C or assembler and they do just fine. Most real-time OSs are written in either C or assembler and they do just fine. For both of these statements I am including everything from the systems that run on space and planetary probes down to the processor running in the keyboard you were just typing on. I just saw a job posting today for a medical device software engineer requiring experience with WinCE, C++, and C#. Guess what language(s) WinCE was written in. It sure wasn't Pascal, PerfectScript, Perl, PHP, Pict, Pike, Pilot, PL/C, PL/I, Postscript, Prolog, or Python.
Embedded systems don't normally need the absurd amounts of error checking that user level programs do. Thermocouples aren't normally in the habit of randomly generating buffer overflows. Physics is sufficient to deal with most situations, and I'm not just talking about the physics of the real, such as the expected temperature variation over time that said thermocouple would be experiencing. The physics involved in a thermocouple wire breaking will also not overwrite the stack into the code space. I have never heard of a network buffer overflow problem in VxWorks, and that was written in C.
What language would you suggest for embedded systems? Something that will randomly shut down randomly for milliseconds at a time to do garbage collection? Something where the first pass through a section of code takes a radically different different amount of time than the second pass, or the third? Even ladder logic is unsuited to many tasks because the PLCs that are normally used to run it often have loop times dependent on the input states.
C was designed for system level work. It is predictable, which is the single greatest criterion for embedded and real-time systems. It is really quite adequate for the task as long as the people working with it are used to designing embedded systems. Or else they have their work reviewed by those who do have the experience. Any real engineering office would be run this way.
Israel and Switzerland have both come close (in their own respective and different ways), but I don't think I would like to live in either place (and for different reasons in each case).
What do you call something with 58 legs and 27 teeth?
The front row at a Willie Nelson concert.
You need rsnapshot and a *nix box.
I have up to 12 months worth of backups, including hourly snapshots of the previous 24 hours, always available to all the users online. Tapes do not have to be hunted down and mounted. The users can easily go browse their own snapshots and get the files they need when they have an oops. The snapshots are maintained on a different machine than the source data, so an individual machine can melt into a lump of slag with the loss of no more than one hour of data.
Since it uses rsync and hard links, only the changed files get added to the backup, so you can size your backup hard drive at roughly 50% larger than the source drive and never have to worry about running out of backup space.
If you have a reasonably fast network connection, you could even have the backups located off site with no extra effort beyond the initial setup.
How about the link: 02 d. >> CSS/HTML-Specifications, or were you thinking of some other standards not already covered there? If so, then it looks like you can Submit a link to help him correct the deficiency.
Three minutes after the article hit the front page of /., neither was true.
What about "The Donald"? Or is "The" his first name?
Take a look at bbclone.
The only problem with this thesis is that they have 4-10 times more "spikes in the graph" than they have "world events". If I got to pick and choose the correlation between spikes and events the way they do, my next trip to Vegas would make me a billionare.
I'm not the sort of person to just dismiss things out of hand. I've seen things happen that I could not explain with my knowledge of physics and mathematics even 30 years later. The original article sounds pretty good and I would like to believe in it. It sounds pretty cool and reminds me of some of the stuff I read when I was a kid.
Unfortunately, they are suppressing their own evidence on a massive scale by ignoring all the other "spikes" they have seen. If you get a spike on average every few hours (they had several similar spikes on the days before 9/11), any moron can correlate it to any real world activity they feel like. Especially when they feel free to let it skew by +/- several hours due to prescience as they have already demonstrated.
Get back to me when they only get one spike per event, and it always has the same lead or lag time as all the other spikes. Otherwise, get in line with all the other charlatans who think they can fool Randi and collect $1M.
I think enough scientists have already seen those apples falling. Unfortunately for the people at Princeton, when the real scientists saw falling apples they also saw the rising and floating apples being ignored by the Princetonians. A real scientist spends a considerable amount of time trying to invalidate their own theory. This is hard to do when you ignore 90% of your own data set.
There's no trend in that there metaphor.
You seem to have an odd definition of the word "only" that I am not familiar with. From just one of the many articles that debunks this:
If you are talking about real world events, I agree with you. If you are talking about true random events, then you couldn't be more wrong.
Except in the case of the "experiment" in the article, they are ignoring the fact that most of the apples are flying upwards and that a significant number of the apples which are detaching themselves from the branches are floating there unnoticed, neither going up or down.
Spock: He is intelligent, but not experienced. His pattern indicates 2 dimensional thinking.
Not intended as a dis.
Yadda yadda Apache ISS yadda yadda.
You trolls just can't let go of this meme, can you?
I install Firefox and Thunderbird on other people's computers via CD. I install a collection of extensions from the same CD. Not all of them are from updates.mozilla.org. The update process seems to quite happily go to these other sites.
That was exactly what I was thinking. What happens if the author of some popular extension, say Adblock, gets an offer he can't refuse from the "Russian spam mob"? I know what I would do if I was offered the choice of losing my knees or gaining a wad of cash.
Doesn't that happen with Quicken already? :-)
Seriously though, coupling this loophole with some level of social engineering could be a problem. I kind of like the idea of the update process opening up the authoritative extension source (preferably some semi-trusted third party like updates.mozilla.org) in a tab, and adding a button to the bottom of the page that you have to click to accept the update. Of course this still wouldn't help the clicky-clicky types.
The loophole here is that people will only see those reviews once, just before they install the extension. A year goes by and everybody hits the software update button which just goes ahead and installs the new stuff. Instant malware.
I'm not saying this will happen, but it could. Hopefully the developers figure out a defence for this before it does, such as popping up tabs with the lastest reviews of the extensions Firefox wants to upgrade.
Why would anybody want to refer to science fiction as "skiffy" except to denigrate the genre? Give me SF or science fiction. I don't want to hear about Buffy's dog.
It may have seemed plausible, but man was it ever fucking boring. I'm glad I didn't pay to read any of them. I only read the third one because of inertia, something that will never be repeated for the third Dune prequel.
You could also try the Palm emulator, POSE, to get a feel for the available software before you decide to lay out any cash.
Does PlanMyDay sound like it will do the job for you?
It's Cal Worthington and his dog Spot!
If you wanna good car, go see Cal
If you wanna good car, go see Cal...