The government announced that CSIRO's funding allocation for next year will be reduced by a one-off amount of $200 million.
The savings will be used to fund a series of very large plaques in school gyms where, by pure coincidence, most polling booths are set up during federal elections.
Look, I gave up a law degree to do computer science. But the fact is that if aliens abducted lawyers and programmers, the lawyers would be jauntily farewelled and the programmers forgotten.
But once the bank equipment stops being upgraded, people won't be saying "I wish we still had programmers". They'd be wishing they still had lawyers so they could work out how to get their money back without having to shoot people.
1. There's an enormous amount of existing code. Look at how much Slashdot talks about COBOL, which is around 50 years old. In common law countries (eg Britain, the USA and Australia), the law has code nearly a millennium old, written in a variety of languages.
2. Corner cases. There are lots of these. Much like software, they are usually discovered in "maintenance mode"; ie after the law is passed. As time goes on, legal draftsmen begin to include lots of standard boilerplate, which will only rarely actually be applied.
3. Legal draftsmen. Never heard of these? Who do you think actually sits down and writes the law? It's not the politicians. They give drafting instructions, which are translated into legalese.
Expecting politicians to read and comprehend legalese is a bit like expecting businessmen to read and comprehend assembler. It will never, ever happen. The idea of "plain english" law is a lot like "automatic programming". A total pipedream that will never happen.
The law is a semi-structured language. You can think of it as a distributed rule system created by a mix of engineered modules (Acts of Congress / Parliament) and reverse engineering.
The reverse engineered parts are case law. Lawyers feed in black-box test cases, then carefully record what the CPU (the judges) output. Over time they map out what the law "is". The reason legalese repeats the same phrases over and over again is because they have been proved, in court, to have specific and reliable semantics. "It ain't broke", so to speak.
Laws are flawed and problematic because they deal with humans. Humans who are complex and motivated and intelligent. No purely rule-based system will ever completely tame human ingenuity, just as no code will ever fully describe all subject domains.
Disclaimer: I used to be a law student, until I came to my senses.
Talk to IBM about renting time and space on one of their mainframes. Timesharing was for mainframes to solve your exact problem. Eventually you can upgrade to your own.
At least according to some rough microbenchmarking I've done myself. My workload is to write raw CSV to disk as fast as possible. In testing, NILFS2 was nearly 20% faster than ext3 on a spinning disk.
It was also smoother. Under very heavy load ext3 seemingly batched up writes then flushed them all at once, causing my server process to drop from 99% to 70% utilisation. NILFS seemed to consume a roughly constant percentage of CPU the whole time, which is much more in line with what I want.
NILFS2 is not for everyone or for every purpose. But it suits my purpose. As usual, you should do the engineering thing: consider your needs, test the alternatives.
A firm called SiCortex was selling just this sort of compact, energy-efficient supercomputer. They shut down a few weeks ago because an investor pulled out.
It's a damn shame, they had really cool stuff. If I was Johnathon Schwartz I wouldn't have pissed away $1 billion on MySQL (it was worth maybe $10 and a stick of gum), I would have been out the front of SiCortex banging on the door with a chequebook.
Circulations are still healthy for most newspapers. Many small newspapers publish content only of interest to locals and they get those eyeballs because of it.
But eyeballs do you no good if a) Craigslist sucks the money out of classifieds and b) online advertising rates continue to plunge like a chunk of lead, making a shift to online news worthless.
There's more to it than that, but as I said: it's about money.
The biggest earner is classifieds, followed by advertising. And yes, local content is king for newspapers: Google News is not going to carry the local gossip.
It's very simple: what will sell the most copies? Boosting circulation means being able to charge a higher rate for classifieds and advertising.
For tabloid papers, maximising circulation is explicitly considered by the editorial staff. They keep an eye on what subjects sell papers and promote similar stories to the front page.
Disclaimer: I worked for a small Newscorp paper in the classifieds department.
I believe it's meant to be a pun on "cloud computing". So it'll seem especially stupid in 12 months from now when "dust storm 3.0" is the Next Big Thing.
As much as I like and admire SQLite, I'm not sure if it's the right tool for the job. Something like PostgreSQL, with proper MVCC and nice multicore scaling, would probably have worked a lot better in the first place.
My understanding is that this is part of the Defence Whitepaper's plan for Australia to develop orbital remote sensing that doesn't rely on asking the USA very nicely if we could please have some photos.
That much is pretty much safe from budget cuts in future. But everything else except pensions is now up for grabs. I know it's a recession blah blah blah but they just put in a $58 billion dollar deficit for this year alone, plus more to come. But it's OK, because Treasury predictions (which have NEVER been accurate) say that all the debt will all be paid off by unicorns and pixie dollars when GDP growth snaps up to 4.5% in a few years time.
When, inevitably, that does not happen, everything that's not discussable on talkback radio (like space science) will get fucked. The CSIRO will scraping along on patent money in just a few years from now, you watch.
The sad thing about Windows NT is that the design was pretty good, the implementation was OK, but the default security policy is totally useless. Hooray for backwards compatibility.
No, but dividing things into smaller pieces makes it easier to fix those pieces in isolation. It's easier for a microkernel system to be self-healing because of that isolation.
This is not an amazing revelation. We've known about the idea of isolating changes since the invention of the sub-routine. The reason microkernels have always been relegated to second-best is that they require more context switching than a regular monolithic kernel. The tradeoff between "fast enough" and "reliable enough" has for some time now favoured "fast enough".
But that's changing -- people's computers are getting plenty fast. The 10-15% slowdown Tanenbaum claims for Minix3 is less of a drag than, say, an anti-virus program and could serve to more effectively prevent viruses into the bargain.
People who say microkernels are passe forget our industry is not set in stone. Priorities change and technologies change with them. In the last 10 years performance has become progressively less important than reducing bugs or speed of development. Microkernels have lots to offer in such a world.
Slashdot Mirror
The government announced that CSIRO's funding allocation for next year will be reduced by a one-off amount of $200 million.
The savings will be used to fund a series of very large plaques in school gyms where, by pure coincidence, most polling booths are set up during federal elections.
Look, I gave up a law degree to do computer science. But the fact is that if aliens abducted lawyers and programmers, the lawyers would be jauntily farewelled and the programmers forgotten.
But once the bank equipment stops being upgraded, people won't be saying "I wish we still had programmers". They'd be wishing they still had lawyers so they could work out how to get their money back without having to shoot people.
I realise you're making a joke, but a few years back I proposed something like that.
Of course, in my experience, if I have a flash of brilliant insight, somebody else had it years ago. So YMMV.
Your analogy is flawed. Asking lawyers to drop legalese is like asking programmers to drop programming languages.
1. There's an enormous amount of existing code. Look at how much Slashdot talks about COBOL, which is around 50 years old. In common law countries (eg Britain, the USA and Australia), the law has code nearly a millennium old, written in a variety of languages.
2. Corner cases. There are lots of these. Much like software, they are usually discovered in "maintenance mode"; ie after the law is passed. As time goes on, legal draftsmen begin to include lots of standard boilerplate, which will only rarely actually be applied.
3. Legal draftsmen. Never heard of these? Who do you think actually sits down and writes the law? It's not the politicians. They give drafting instructions, which are translated into legalese.
Expecting politicians to read and comprehend legalese is a bit like expecting businessmen to read and comprehend assembler. It will never, ever happen. The idea of "plain english" law is a lot like "automatic programming". A total pipedream that will never happen.
The law is a semi-structured language. You can think of it as a distributed rule system created by a mix of engineered modules (Acts of Congress / Parliament) and reverse engineering.
The reverse engineered parts are case law. Lawyers feed in black-box test cases, then carefully record what the CPU (the judges) output. Over time they map out what the law "is". The reason legalese repeats the same phrases over and over again is because they have been proved, in court, to have specific and reliable semantics. "It ain't broke", so to speak.
I personally think there's enormous scope for borrowing software engineering practice and tools for legal drafting, but it's no panacea. I even used to think that we could treat legalese as a kind of assembler and develop a higher level language that "compiles down" to it. But it doesn't solve the problem, just moves it around.
Laws are flawed and problematic because they deal with humans. Humans who are complex and motivated and intelligent. No purely rule-based system will ever completely tame human ingenuity, just as no code will ever fully describe all subject domains.
Disclaimer: I used to be a law student, until I came to my senses.
If they publish papers about it, then it can't be patented. That's the first thing a patent lawyer asks: "Who have you told?".
Followed by: "How much money do you have? Gimme!"
First off, as an Australian and a nerd, I am very proud.
Now.
Good news: there is now a formally verified microkernel. 8,700 lines of C and 600 odd lines of ARM assembly. Awesome.
Bad news: it took 200,000 lines of manually-generated proof and approximately 25 person-years by PhDs to verify the aforementioned microkernel.
Conclusion: formal verification of software is not going to take off any time soon.
Talk to IBM about renting time and space on one of their mainframes. Timesharing was for mainframes to solve your exact problem. Eventually you can upgrade to your own.
What's the antidote for acronym poisoning?
You know what I remember about that scene? Wondering why the future had reverted to Sneakernet.
At least according to some rough microbenchmarking I've done myself. My workload is to write raw CSV to disk as fast as possible. In testing, NILFS2 was nearly 20% faster than ext3 on a spinning disk.
It was also smoother. Under very heavy load ext3 seemingly batched up writes then flushed them all at once, causing my server process to drop from 99% to 70% utilisation. NILFS seemed to consume a roughly constant percentage of CPU the whole time, which is much more in line with what I want.
NILFS2 is not for everyone or for every purpose. But it suits my purpose. As usual, you should do the engineering thing: consider your needs, test the alternatives.
A firm called SiCortex was selling just this sort of compact, energy-efficient supercomputer. They shut down a few weeks ago because an investor pulled out.
It's a damn shame, they had really cool stuff. If I was Johnathon Schwartz I wouldn't have pissed away $1 billion on MySQL (it was worth maybe $10 and a stick of gum), I would have been out the front of SiCortex banging on the door with a chequebook.
Oh well.
Circulations are still healthy for most newspapers. Many small newspapers publish content only of interest to locals and they get those eyeballs because of it.
But eyeballs do you no good if a) Craigslist sucks the money out of classifieds and b) online advertising rates continue to plunge like a chunk of lead, making a shift to online news worthless.
There's more to it than that, but as I said: it's about money.
Addendum: I hate to seem like I'm spamming that link, but it pretty much covers all I have to say on this subject.
As it happens, I agreed with you before we met.
The biggest earner is classifieds, followed by advertising. And yes, local content is king for newspapers: Google News is not going to carry the local gossip.
Most newspapers lose money on the cover price. The real money is in classifieds and advertising.
What is killing newspapers is not competitive sources of content, it is competitive ways to place classifieds and display advertising.
Disclaimer: I used to work for a small Newscorp newspaper in the classifieds department.
It's very simple: what will sell the most copies? Boosting circulation means being able to charge a higher rate for classifieds and advertising.
For tabloid papers, maximising circulation is explicitly considered by the editorial staff. They keep an eye on what subjects sell papers and promote similar stories to the front page.
Disclaimer: I worked for a small Newscorp paper in the classifieds department.
As I have pointed out here and elsewhere, newspapers do not make their money from selling copies; they make it on classifieds and advertising.
All the stuff about bloggers being better than journalists, or journalists being better than bloggers, is a total sideshow. It's about money.
I believe it's meant to be a pun on "cloud computing". So it'll seem especially stupid in 12 months from now when "dust storm 3.0" is the Next Big Thing.
As much as I like and admire SQLite, I'm not sure if it's the right tool for the job. Something like PostgreSQL, with proper MVCC and nice multicore scaling, would probably have worked a lot better in the first place.
I'm guessing "no".
My understanding is that this is part of the Defence Whitepaper's plan for Australia to develop orbital remote sensing that doesn't rely on asking the USA very nicely if we could please have some photos.
That much is pretty much safe from budget cuts in future. But everything else except pensions is now up for grabs. I know it's a recession blah blah blah but they just put in a $58 billion dollar deficit for this year alone, plus more to come. But it's OK, because Treasury predictions (which have NEVER been accurate) say that all the debt will all be paid off by unicorns and pixie dollars when GDP growth snaps up to 4.5% in a few years time.
When, inevitably, that does not happen, everything that's not discussable on talkback radio (like space science) will get fucked. The CSIRO will scraping along on patent money in just a few years from now, you watch.
"And then, take a page out of Knuth's book -- throw the code away, and write it again."
I was pretty sure Fred Brooks is responsible for that idea, not Knuth.
The sad thing about Windows NT is that the design was pretty good, the implementation was OK, but the default security policy is totally useless. Hooray for backwards compatibility.
No, but dividing things into smaller pieces makes it easier to fix those pieces in isolation. It's easier for a microkernel system to be self-healing because of that isolation.
This is not an amazing revelation. We've known about the idea of isolating changes since the invention of the sub-routine. The reason microkernels have always been relegated to second-best is that they require more context switching than a regular monolithic kernel. The tradeoff between "fast enough" and "reliable enough" has for some time now favoured "fast enough".
But that's changing -- people's computers are getting plenty fast. The 10-15% slowdown Tanenbaum claims for Minix3 is less of a drag than, say, an anti-virus program and could serve to more effectively prevent viruses into the bargain.
People who say microkernels are passe forget our industry is not set in stone. Priorities change and technologies change with them. In the last 10 years performance has become progressively less important than reducing bugs or speed of development. Microkernels have lots to offer in such a world.