DISCALIMER: This is a personal, nonprofessional opinion. It is not legal advice. Ask your lawyer. I am not one.
Specifically adding code to diminish capability without adding any counterbalancing benefit sounds like restraint of trade to me. In the USA, that's illegal.
I wonder if Street Bump detects pot holes equally well in the wealthiest neighborhoods. Maybe they have a higher percentage of cars with cushy soft suspensions that are less likely to cause a pothole to trigger a reportable event.
The execution environment matters if the application runs in one.
Execution size & time matter if execution will be long or done many times, or in a constrained environment.
Compile time matters if it only has to run once. That's why there was WATFIV.
If there are any, the standards of the team or organization that produce or consume the source code matter.
Readability and maintainability sometimes matter. I did a lot with APL, including enhancing a program where the flow chart was over 40 pages, but the program was so well structured, it was easy. In most personal programming cases, however, any complex function had to be written and tested in one day. After that, it was almost undecipherable, even by the author.
Verbosity matters to poor typists. It gets in the way of understanding. Did the person who came up with, "Blah blah = new Blah;" stutter? In what way is groovy inferior to java?
Domain really matters. Once I needed something to generate several drawings for a patent application. I considered generating SVG, I considered macro capabilities in a CAD package. In less than a day, I learned and made the diagrams with MSLogo. If I had to do it again, I might use python turtle graphics, but it would have been more verbose..
Was it Javascript that terminated their observably short programming lives? Was it what the experience did to them or what others did to them due to the { quality | performance | maintainability | other } of the results?
* COBOL isn't evil. It is good for its domain. It is very good for nested data structures. * An example is given that goes beyond the typical. * I claim not to be a COBOL bigot. * I explain where COBOL programmers came from originally. * There are some aspects of COBOL I like.
Don't be disrespectful of the elder languages just because their domain isn't what you work on. COBOL programs are probably handling your payroll, bank, and investment accounts.
Details:
>> For those of us who are unfamiliar, could you describe what it is that COBOL does that other languages don't cover as well? and >> Pages and pages and pages of foreplay before you get any action. Yes, there is stuff at the top that is largely documentation followed by a FILE CONTROL SECTION with information about the files to be used, and then the DATA DIVISION. In many cases, the DATA DIVISION, the part of the program that describes the variables, condition codes, and data structures is larger than the procedural logic.
Most of the discussion here has been about the procedural code in COBOL programs, not the DATA DIVISION and its structures. One can accomplish very interesting things with the hierarchic data structures of COBOL and PL/I. The following example shows how to march through a variable length record containing instances of 2 kinds of variable length segments, each of which could appear many times. It leaves out some of the boring stuff.
77 OFFSET-1 PIC S9999 USAGE COMP-3. 01 LAYOUT-1.
03 LL-1 PIC S9999 USAGE COMP-3.
03 BB-1 PIC XX USAGE DISPLAY.
03 FILLER PIC X OCCURS 0 TO 4096 TIMES DEPENDING ON OFFSET-1.
03 SEGMENT-LENGTH PIC S9999 USAGE COMP-3.
03 SEGMENT-TYPE PIC XX USAGE DISPLAY.
88 TYPEAA VALUE "AA".
88 TYPEBB VALUE "BB".
03 AASEGMENT.
05 FIRST-FIELD....
05 SECOND-FIELD....
03 BBSEGMENT REDEFINES ASEGMENT.
05 FIRST-FIELD....
05 SECOND-FIELD....
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
open the file
PERFORM UNTIL EOF-1
READ FILE-1 INTO LAYOUT-1 SUBTRACT 4 FROM LL-1 GIVING OFFSET-1
PERFORM WITH TEST BEFORE UNTIL OFFSET-1 >= LL-1
IF TYPEAA THEN
blah blah blah
END-IF
IF TYPEBB THEN
blah blah blah
END-IF * slide over to the next segment ADD LL-1A TO OFFSET-1 END-PERFORM
END-PERFORM.
Admittedly, this is not your typical COBOL program, but stuff like this can and is done with COBOL when necessary. My first real COBOL program read 7-track (6 bit characters + parity) tape where there were multiple variable length records within a block. To process the records on an IBM mainframe, I had to deal with the fact that the lengths were 12 bits that had been read into two 8 character bytes, so the length was really byte0+64*byte1. All this was doable in COBOL. Once I got the data out, I did the first level of analysis in FORTRAN and the fun stuff in APL.
I wouldn't try to create and select from the 4 dimensional outer product of 4 vectors in COBOL, and I wouldn't and didn't in FORTRAN, as long as I had access to APL.
When is COBOL a preferred choice: * When the data structure definitions are many and many are subsidiary to one another. * When it's what the example is writt
Q: What's the difference between a quantum mechanic and an auto mechanic?
A: A quantum mechanic can get his car into the garage without opening the door.
Note: When I thought that joke up over 35 years ago, there was little risk that "Auto mechanic" would be misconstrued as referring to an autonomous programmed agent, except in Science Fiction.
I consider facebook and twitter to be personal-social, not business. Linkedin is for business. It is where recruiters in many industries are looking for candidates. They troll profiles and the appropriate groups. They also post jobs in the groups. My linkedin profile is unusually thorough, with dozens of project entries, but as a result is producing very much on-target contacts from recruiters. http://www.linkedin.com/in/dakra
Somebody from Nigeria asked me to mentor him towards certification in something. I was concerned that maybe this would turn into a scam or my electronic interactions might end up with an inbound malware payload. By googling him I found his interactions and comments on other people's blogs and emedia columns going back several years. The name, id match, and content gave me the confidence that he was both bona fide and an experienced practitioner.
I am sure there are blogs, columns, help sites, and discussion groups in your field. Participate. You'll get ideas and contacts. Of course, if your industry doesn't publish because it is covert, for good or for bad, that is another story.;-)
I do system modeling, architecture and design, capacity planning, and design for high availability, high capacity, high performance, continuous operations,, and occasional programming. I am not in a research organization. I am in the world of commercial IT. Most of my career has been in technical sales.
I use simple algebra all the time. Workload growth over time implies exponentiation. In the last few years I have used logs and even quadratic equations in system analysis and modeling.
I use Boolean logic, AND, OR, NOT, XOR, IMPLIES, DeMorgan's Law etc to construct and understand & debug other's complex if statements and hierarchies of them.
I use probability to understand variations in workload coming in to servers, their business (busy-ness), and how to combine multiple workloads together. Some of Excel's probability functions have an unnecessarily limited domain. I had to substitute alternative versions in VBA that added and subtracted the logs of the components and then exponentiated to return the results.
When considering servers (machines and programs) capacity and responsiveness, I use queuing theory, and consider where things get buffered and queued along the way and at the layers between clients and servers.
I use graph theory to be able to understand network flows, linkages between relational tables, multiply linked lists, and graph databases.
When modeling communications links or systems availability, with lots of things with very low error or failure rates, I do binomial expansions and sometimes Maclaurin or Taylor Series.
I do most of all this in spreadsheets, but sometimes the provided functions are simplistically written, so they cannot handle combinations of large and small parameters. Then I had to substitute a better algorithm.
Some people are willing to zero in on an optimum of something via successive approximation, but when a function is readily differentiable and that is easy to solve for a zero, isn't it embarrassing?
I have created and navigated through a four dimensional array A[i,j,k,l] only once, to deal with the consequences of combining four independent discrete probability distributions of requirements for a type of resource.
This research was funded in part by the US Air Force. If this technology can really be tweaked to outdischarge supercapacitors at similar or better energy densities, I am surprised it wasn't declared a military secret.
On the civilian side, I am sure many hearing aid users will look forward to recharging their device, maybe by induction while wearing it, rather than consuming zinc-air batteries.
Forking Norwood and Northfield is not feasible. By car there are about 94 miles and almost 2 hours of driving between them.
Forking the adjacent municipalities of Wayland and Weston by merger or rearrangement is a possibility. The fork feasibility is improved if it happens on April 18th, is made of silver, and is done by Paul Revere.
Divine names: Two deity names are used here. God has hundreds of names, each associated with an attribute it highlights. The first name is associated with the attribute of strictness, as is appropriate when formulating the laws of physics. The second name starts to be used when man appears on the scene. It is associated with mercy. Fallible humanity could could not exist without divine mercy.
Six Days: According to Psalms, a thousand years for man are but a moment to God. Some rabbi a few hundred years ago did his arithmetic and came up with a universe age of about 1.3E10 years.
Light before the Sun and the Moon: Traditional commentary: The first light was the light of prophecy. Visible light came later.
More recent explanation: The story is told from the Earth's surface point of view. As long as the sky was obscured by cloud cover and volcanic ash, or glaciation, the Sun, moon, planets, and stars were not visible.
Big Bang Theory: Right. The Talmud states that there exists a light left over from the moment of creation that permeates the universe. That sure sounds like Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation to me. It also says it is reasonable to think about and research back to the moment of creation, but not before. Would cosmologists disagree?
Male & Female: The Hebrew text says, "Male and female He created them." There is one ancient Jewish opinion that we were hermaphrodites, and the surgery split us into separate genders.
Tuesday: This is a problem. "And the earth brought forth grass, herb yielding seed after its kind, and tree bearing fruit, wherein is the seed thereof, after its kind;" This is a neat trick since the Sun, moon and stars were created and positioned on Wednesday.
A modern rabbinic explanation: The story is told from the Earth's surface point of view. As long as the sky was obscured by cloud cover, volcanic ash, or glaciation, the Sun, moon, planets, and stars were not visible.
Dinosaurs: God produced dozens of "creations" before he came up with one he liked. How much of one he kept around or recycled into the next is unspecified.
Evolution: The tradition is that since creation the physical and biological world proceeds along its natural course. There is no traditional Jewish position that creation and evolution are mutually exclusive.
Genesis 6:2: "Sons of the Lords" and 6:4 "Nephilim" : The "Sons of the Lords" were invading humans who grabbed power and had their way as they wished with women. The word "Nephilim" means both "those who dropped down" and miscarried or aborted fetuses. A traditional view is that these lords caused their pretty wives to have abortions to keep their pretty figures, and it was this that God found despicable. [I wonder what He thinks about forced abortions in China.]
Non-Jewish possibilities: This is talking about interactions between Neanderthals and modern man. "Those who dropped down" were aliens who dropped down from the sky.
Many years ago, before there were MiB, when IBM in one document defined a MB of memory as 2**20 and of magnetic media as 10**6, I asked what happens when we copy a MB of memory to disk. Does it:
A. Truncate high order,
B. Truncate low order, or
C. Automagically compress?
Somebody flung a Dell Dimension L733r out of the second story into my backyard about 10 years ago. It still worked and still runs a telephony application when needed. The only discernible damage, other than grass stain, was that one of the plastic clips holding the motherboard in place broke. The remaining clips have been sufficient.
According to Genesis 6:15 the ark's dimensions are 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits tall.
That makes the total volume 450,000 cubic cubits.
A cubit is generally understood to be approximately the length from elbow to finger tip, about 18 inches, just under half a meter. Whose arm is that based on? I don't know. In some countries it may have been the king's and varied depending on who was on the throne.
re: But might it have the same legal difficulties flying from U.S. airports as the Concorde did?"
Yes, international laws and laws of physics. Consider, "travel into orbit from local airports (ideally, those close to the equator)..." It would violate international laws to extend the borders of the USA to the vicinity of the equator. In the absence of that, the laws of physics make it harder to launch from the USA's latitude closest to the equator, namely Hawaii for a state, maybe the US Virgin Islands for a territory.
This reminds me of the movie "Cops and Robbers" where the cops avoid being caught with the goods by shredding millions of dollars worth of bearer bonds and then throwing the shreddings out the window onto the ticker tape parade that just happens to be marching by.
For the SSD's that IBM sells, it gives them an "Endurance" rating for a certain number of "Total Bytes Written." According to http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0879.html
The implication for this discussion thread is that if you build a RAID 1, 5, 6, or 10 array with new SSD's you should expect them to all reach end of life at about the same time.
The drives described in this paper from March, 2012 are rated for Endurance: "36 TB of total bytes written (TBW) at 90% full disk based on predefined usage pattern for 64 GB SSDs and 72 TB of TBW for higher capacity drives."
"Enterprise Value SSDs and Enterprise SSDs have similar read and write IOPS performance, but the key difference between them is their endurance (or life time) (that is, how long they can perform write operations because SSDs have a finite number of program/erase (P/E) cycles). Enterprise Value SSDs have a better cost/IOPS ratio but lower endurance compared to Enterprise SSDs. SSD write endurance is typically measured by the number of program/erase (P/E) cycles, that the drive incurs over its lifetime, listed as TBW in the device specification.
"The TBW value assigned to a solid-state device is the total bytes of written data (based on the number of P/E cycles) that a drive can be guaranteed to complete (% of remaining P/E cycles = % of remaining TBW). Reaching this limit does not cause the drive to immediately fail. It simply denotes the maximum number of writes that can be guaranteed. A solid-state device will not fail upon reaching the specified TBW. At some point based on manufacturing variance margin, after surpassing the TBW value, the drive will reach the end-of-life point, at which the drive will go into a read-only mode. Because of such behavior by Enterprise Value solid-state drives, careful planning must be done to use them only in read-intensive environments to ensure that the TBW of the drive will not be exceeded prior to the required life expectancy.
"The endurance of Enterprise Value drives is specified based on the following access pattern: 50% random data and 50% sequential data with block size mixes of 5% of the data as 4 KB block size, 5% of the data as 8 KB block size, 10% of the data as 16 KB block size, 35% of the data as 64 KB block size, and 35% of the data as 128 KB block size. The Enterprise Value drives described here are capable of 36 TB (64 GB SSD) or 72 TB (128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB SSDs) of lifetime writes, with the workload stated above as the worse case. For the device to last in five years inside of the 72 TB of TBW, the drive write workload must be limited to no more than 40 GB of writes per day. For the device to last in three years, the drive write workload must be limited to no more than 65 GB of writes per day."
About 1967, T. Vincent Learson, an IBM executive and Boston Latin School Alumnus, donated (the rental of) an IBM 1130 minicomputer system to the school for academic purposes only. It may have been the first on-premises computer at a high school dedicated to student computing. All 10th graders learned FORTRAN IV using McCracken's textbook. The machine had 4k 16 byte words. We punched cards on 029 keypunches. Printouts came out on the console, based on a 12 CPS Selectric typewriter. The 1 platter 14 inch disk held about 160K, if I recall. Students were not permitted to store anything on it.
I wrote programs to do my homework for me. I hated hand drawing graphs, so I wrote a program to graph equations (rather than merely functions). I used it to graph functions (0=y-f(x)), equations, numerical differentiation and integration.
Guy Steele did some amazing things with it in Assembler, aside from what has been publicized about his implementing LISP on it. He wrote a card deck listing program that interleaved printing with reading the columns on the cards. He also wrote a one card binary program that would read the text punched on the next card and then punch that text as a dot matrix of holes on the cards that followed. It was brilliant, but the cards with too many holes near each other often broke and jammed the machine.
Many of us received free admission tickets to the Spring Joint Computer Conference in Boston in 1969.
After I graduated in 1970, the machine was upgraded to 16K words and a line printer. Steele's LISP may have been implemented on that.
I do system modeling, architecture and design, capacity planning, and design for high availability, high capacity, high performance, continuous operations,, and occasional programming. I am not in a research organization. I am in the world of commercial IT. Most of my career has been in technical sales.
I use simple algebra all the time. Workload growth over time implies exponentiation. In the last few years I have used logs and even quadratic equations in system analysis and modeling.
I use Boolean logic, AND, OR, NOT, XOR, IMPLIES, DeMorgan's Law etc to construct and understand & debug other's complex if statements and hierarchies of them.
I use probability to understand variations in workload coming in to servers, their business (busy-ness), and how to combine multiple workloads together.
When considering servers (machines and programs) capacity and responsiveness, I use queuing theory, and consider where things get buffered and queued along the way and at the layers between clients and servers.
I use graph theory to be able to understand network flows, linkages between relational tables, multiply linked lists, and graph databases.
When modeling communications links or systems availability, with lots of things with very low error or failure rates, I do binomial expansions and sometimes Maclaurin or Taylor Series.
I do most of all this in spreadsheets, but sometimes the provided functions are simplistically written, so they cannot handle combinations of large and small parameters. Then I had to substitute a better algorithm.
my observations as a college student in the 1970's.
Academic educational institutions (e.g. Yale) teach computer science, including programming. Their goal is to educate, not prepare students for the job market. They don't give for-credit courses for particular languages. Learning the language is an exercise left to the student, maybe guided by sessions with teaching assistants, in order to do the assignments.
Training institutions (e.g. NYC's Queens College) do teach and give credit for programming languages. Their goal is to prepare students for the job market.
What is the difference between education and training?
Yes, you do know the answer.
You may be happy your child gets sex education in school, but you would not be happy if the school provided training.
Training involves repeated practice to develop and hone a skill.
Three:
Two young adults who grew up in my community as classmates. The first in a bus bombing in Gaza, the second in the WTC on 9/11.
The third was a physician who treated my wife, was the medical practice partner of a very close friend, and head of the ER at a hospital that Arabs in and around Jerusalem prefer.
One challenge in all countries with significant citizens' (and in some cases non-citizens) rights, is determining how much they apply to those who deny those rights to others. Few people, for example, think that intercepted terrorist bombs should be detonated without first being separated from their bearers.
Slashdot Mirror
DISCALIMER: This is a personal, nonprofessional opinion. It is not legal advice. Ask your lawyer. I am not one.
Specifically adding code to diminish capability without adding any counterbalancing benefit sounds like restraint of trade to me. In the USA, that's illegal.
I wonder if Street Bump detects pot holes equally well in the wealthiest neighborhoods. Maybe they have a higher percentage of cars with cushy soft suspensions that are less likely to cause a pothole to trigger a reportable event.
Kudos to ninite. It makes starting to use a new OS install much quicker.
The execution environment matters if the application runs in one.
Execution size & time matter if execution will be long or done many times, or in a constrained environment.
Compile time matters if it only has to run once. That's why there was WATFIV.
If there are any, the standards of the team or organization that produce or consume the source code matter.
Readability and maintainability sometimes matter. I did a lot with APL, including enhancing a program where the flow chart was over 40 pages, but the program was so well structured, it was easy. In most personal programming cases, however, any complex function had to be written and tested in one day. After that, it was almost undecipherable, even by the author.
Verbosity matters to poor typists. It gets in the way of understanding. Did the person who came up with, "Blah blah = new Blah;" stutter? In what way is groovy inferior to java?
Domain really matters. Once I needed something to generate several drawings for a patent application. I considered generating SVG, I considered macro capabilities in a CAD package. In less than a day, I learned and made the diagrams with MSLogo. If I had to do it again, I might use python turtle graphics, but it would have been more verbose..
Was it Javascript that terminated their observably short programming lives? Was it what the experience did to them or what others did to them due to the { quality | performance | maintainability | other } of the results?
>> "any machine or device or system or network of devices" that can be used in games of chance.
Besides card tables, this also includes Candyland and other board games with spinners or dice. The entire game is a "system."
One way to get the governor voted out of office would be for the state to ban the dreidel.
This is also a way to prevent any more Wheel of Fortune roadtrips to Florida.
Are the results correct? Well I've double checked the formulae.
So what, if your computer doesn't use Error Correcting Code (ECC) Memory or at least parity memory, soft or hard errors may not be noticed.
If you must use toy class computers for important work:
Verify the data and formulae and calculate file hashes on a business class computer,
for (i=1; i < 3; i++) {transfer to toy[i]; verify the hashes; calculate;}
Gather the results; compare ;
if (same) {hurray;} else {try again;}
Summary:
* COBOL isn't evil. It is good for its domain. It is very good for nested data structures.
* An example is given that goes beyond the typical.
* I claim not to be a COBOL bigot.
* I explain where COBOL programmers came from originally.
* There are some aspects of COBOL I like.
Don't be disrespectful of the elder languages just because their domain isn't what you work on.
COBOL programs are probably handling your payroll, bank, and investment accounts.
Details:
>> For those of us who are unfamiliar, could you describe what it is that COBOL does that other languages don't cover as well?
and
>> Pages and pages and pages of foreplay before you get any action.
Yes, there is stuff at the top that is largely documentation followed by a FILE CONTROL SECTION with information about the files to be used, and then the DATA DIVISION. In many cases, the DATA DIVISION, the part of the program that describes the variables, condition codes, and data structures is larger than the procedural logic.
Most of the discussion here has been about the procedural code in COBOL programs, not the DATA DIVISION and its structures. One can accomplish very interesting things with the hierarchic data structures of COBOL and PL/I. The following example shows how to march through a variable length record containing instances of 2 kinds of variable length segments, each of which could appear many times. It leaves out some of the boring stuff.
77 OFFSET-1 PIC S9999 USAGE COMP-3. .... .... .... ....
01 LAYOUT-1.
03 LL-1 PIC S9999 USAGE COMP-3.
03 BB-1 PIC XX USAGE DISPLAY.
03 FILLER PIC X OCCURS 0 TO 4096 TIMES DEPENDING ON OFFSET-1.
03 SEGMENT-LENGTH PIC S9999 USAGE COMP-3.
03 SEGMENT-TYPE PIC XX USAGE DISPLAY.
88 TYPEAA VALUE "AA".
88 TYPEBB VALUE "BB".
03 AASEGMENT.
05 FIRST-FIELD
05 SECOND-FIELD
03 BBSEGMENT REDEFINES ASEGMENT.
05 FIRST-FIELD
05 SECOND-FIELD
PROCEDURE DIVISION.
open the file
PERFORM UNTIL EOF-1
READ FILE-1 INTO LAYOUT-1
SUBTRACT 4 FROM LL-1 GIVING OFFSET-1
PERFORM WITH TEST BEFORE UNTIL OFFSET-1 >= LL-1
IF TYPEAA THEN
blah blah blah
END-IF
IF TYPEBB THEN
blah blah blah
END-IF
* slide over to the next segment
ADD LL-1A TO OFFSET-1
END-PERFORM
END-PERFORM.
Admittedly, this is not your typical COBOL program, but stuff like this can and is done with COBOL when necessary. My first real COBOL program read 7-track (6 bit characters + parity) tape where there were multiple variable length records within a block. To process the records on an IBM mainframe, I had to deal with the fact that the lengths were 12 bits that had been read into two 8 character bytes, so the length was really byte0+64*byte1. All this was doable in COBOL. Once I got the data out, I did the first level of analysis in FORTRAN and the fun stuff in APL.
I wouldn't try to create and select from the 4 dimensional outer product of 4 vectors in COBOL, and I wouldn't and didn't in FORTRAN, as long as I had access to APL.
When is COBOL a preferred choice:
* When the data structure definitions are many and many are subsidiary to one another.
* When it's what the example is writt
Q: What's the difference between a quantum mechanic and an auto mechanic?
A: A quantum mechanic can get his car into the garage without opening the door.
Note: When I thought that joke up over 35 years ago, there was little risk that "Auto mechanic" would be misconstrued as referring to an autonomous programmed agent, except in Science Fiction.
I consider facebook and twitter to be personal-social, not business. Linkedin is for business. It is where recruiters in many industries are looking for candidates. They troll profiles and the appropriate groups. They also post jobs in the groups. My linkedin profile is unusually thorough, with dozens of project entries, but as a result is producing very much on-target contacts from recruiters. http://www.linkedin.com/in/dakra
Somebody from Nigeria asked me to mentor him towards certification in something. I was concerned that maybe this would turn into a scam or my electronic interactions might end up with an inbound malware payload. By googling him I found his interactions and comments on other people's blogs and emedia columns going back several years. The name, id match, and content gave me the confidence that he was both bona fide and an experienced practitioner.
I am sure there are blogs, columns, help sites, and discussion groups in your field. Participate. You'll get ideas and contacts. Of course, if your industry doesn't publish because it is covert, for good or for bad, that is another story. ;-)
I do system modeling, architecture and design, capacity planning, and design for high availability, high capacity, high performance, continuous operations,, and occasional programming. I am not in a research organization. I am in the world of commercial IT. Most of my career has been in technical sales.
I use simple algebra all the time. Workload growth over time implies exponentiation. In the last few years I have used logs and even quadratic equations in system analysis and modeling.
I use Boolean logic, AND, OR, NOT, XOR, IMPLIES, DeMorgan's Law etc to construct and understand & debug other's complex if statements and hierarchies of them.
I use probability to understand variations in workload coming in to servers, their business (busy-ness), and how to combine multiple workloads together. Some of Excel's probability functions have an unnecessarily limited domain. I had to substitute alternative versions in VBA that added and subtracted the logs of the components and then exponentiated to return the results.
When considering servers (machines and programs) capacity and responsiveness, I use queuing theory, and consider where things get buffered and queued along the way and at the layers between clients and servers.
I use graph theory to be able to understand network flows, linkages between relational tables, multiply linked lists, and graph databases.
When modeling communications links or systems availability, with lots of things with very low error or failure rates, I do binomial expansions and sometimes Maclaurin or Taylor Series.
I do most of all this in spreadsheets, but sometimes the provided functions are simplistically written, so they cannot handle combinations of large and small parameters. Then I had to substitute a better algorithm.
Some people are willing to zero in on an optimum of something via successive approximation, but when a function is readily differentiable and that is easy to solve for a zero, isn't it embarrassing?
I have created and navigated through a four dimensional array A[i,j,k,l] only once, to deal with the consequences of combining four independent discrete probability distributions of requirements for a type of resource.
On the civilian side, I am sure many hearing aid users will look forward to recharging their device, maybe by induction while wearing it, rather than consuming zinc-air batteries.
Forking the adjacent municipalities of Wayland and Weston by merger or rearrangement is a possibility. The fork feasibility is improved if it happens on April 18th, is made of silver, and is done by Paul Revere.
Divine names: Two deity names are used here. God has hundreds of names, each associated with an attribute it highlights. The first name is associated with the attribute of strictness, as is appropriate when formulating the laws of physics. The second name starts to be used when man appears on the scene. It is associated with mercy. Fallible humanity could could not exist without divine mercy.
Six Days: According to Psalms, a thousand years for man are but a moment to God. Some rabbi a few hundred years ago did his arithmetic and came up with a universe age of about 1.3E10 years.
Light before the Sun and the Moon: Traditional commentary: The first light was the light of prophecy. Visible light came later. More recent explanation: The story is told from the Earth's surface point of view. As long as the sky was obscured by cloud cover and volcanic ash, or glaciation, the Sun, moon, planets, and stars were not visible.
Big Bang Theory: Right. The Talmud states that there exists a light left over from the moment of creation that permeates the universe. That sure sounds like Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation to me. It also says it is reasonable to think about and research back to the moment of creation, but not before. Would cosmologists disagree?
Male & Female: The Hebrew text says, "Male and female He created them." There is one ancient Jewish opinion that we were hermaphrodites, and the surgery split us into separate genders.
Tuesday: This is a problem. "And the earth brought forth grass, herb yielding seed after its kind, and tree bearing fruit, wherein is the seed thereof, after its kind;" This is a neat trick since the Sun, moon and stars were created and positioned on Wednesday. A modern rabbinic explanation: The story is told from the Earth's surface point of view. As long as the sky was obscured by cloud cover, volcanic ash, or glaciation, the Sun, moon, planets, and stars were not visible.
Dinosaurs: God produced dozens of "creations" before he came up with one he liked. How much of one he kept around or recycled into the next is unspecified.
Evolution: The tradition is that since creation the physical and biological world proceeds along its natural course. There is no traditional Jewish position that creation and evolution are mutually exclusive.
Genesis 6:2: "Sons of the Lords" and 6:4 "Nephilim" : The "Sons of the Lords" were invading humans who grabbed power and had their way as they wished with women. The word "Nephilim" means both "those who dropped down" and miscarried or aborted fetuses. A traditional view is that these lords caused their pretty wives to have abortions to keep their pretty figures, and it was this that God found despicable. [I wonder what He thinks about forced abortions in China.]
Non-Jewish possibilities: This is talking about interactions between Neanderthals and modern man. "Those who dropped down" were aliens who dropped down from the sky.
Many years ago, before there were MiB, when IBM in one document defined a MB of memory as 2**20 and of magnetic media as 10**6, I asked what happens when we copy a MB of memory to disk. Does it:
A. Truncate high order,
B. Truncate low order, or
C. Automagically compress?
Of course the answer was:
D. None of the above.
Somebody flung a Dell Dimension L733r out of the second story into my backyard about 10 years ago. It still worked and still runs a telephony application when needed. The only discernible damage, other than grass stain, was that one of the plastic clips holding the motherboard in place broke. The remaining clips have been sufficient.
According to Genesis 6:15 the ark's dimensions are 300 cubits long, 50 cubits wide, and 30 cubits tall. That makes the total volume 450,000 cubic cubits. A cubit is generally understood to be approximately the length from elbow to finger tip, about 18 inches, just under half a meter. Whose arm is that based on? I don't know. In some countries it may have been the king's and varied depending on who was on the throne.
re: But might it have the same legal difficulties flying from U.S. airports as the Concorde did?"
Yes, international laws and laws of physics. Consider, "travel into orbit from local airports (ideally, those close to the equator)..." It would violate international laws to extend the borders of the USA to the vicinity of the equator. In the absence of that, the laws of physics make it harder to launch from the USA's latitude closest to the equator, namely Hawaii for a state, maybe the US Virgin Islands for a territory.
I think the definitive response is at http://www.motifake.com/the-beard-fear-the-beard-giants-demotivational-posters-139695.html
This reminds me of the movie "Cops and Robbers" where the cops avoid being caught with the goods by shredding millions of dollars worth of bearer bonds and then throwing the shreddings out the window onto the ticker tape parade that just happens to be marching by.
For the SSD's that IBM sells, it gives them an "Endurance" rating for a certain number of "Total Bytes Written." According to http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/tips0879.html The implication for this discussion thread is that if you build a RAID 1, 5, 6, or 10 array with new SSD's you should expect them to all reach end of life at about the same time.
The drives described in this paper from March, 2012 are rated for Endurance: "36 TB of total bytes written (TBW) at 90% full disk based on predefined usage pattern for 64 GB SSDs and 72 TB of TBW for higher capacity drives."
"Enterprise Value SSDs and Enterprise SSDs have similar read and write IOPS performance, but the key difference between them is their endurance (or life time) (that is, how long they can perform write operations because SSDs have a finite number of program/erase (P/E) cycles). Enterprise Value SSDs have a better cost/IOPS ratio but lower endurance compared to Enterprise SSDs. SSD write endurance is typically measured by the number of program/erase (P/E) cycles, that the drive incurs over its lifetime, listed as TBW in the device specification.
"The TBW value assigned to a solid-state device is the total bytes of written data (based on the number of P/E cycles) that a drive can be guaranteed to complete (% of remaining P/E cycles = % of remaining TBW). Reaching this limit does not cause the drive to immediately fail. It simply denotes the maximum number of writes that can be guaranteed. A solid-state device will not fail upon reaching the specified TBW. At some point based on manufacturing variance margin, after surpassing the TBW value, the drive will reach the end-of-life point, at which the drive will go into a read-only mode. Because of such behavior by Enterprise Value solid-state drives, careful planning must be done to use them only in read-intensive environments to ensure that the TBW of the drive will not be exceeded prior to the required life expectancy.
"The endurance of Enterprise Value drives is specified based on the following access pattern: 50% random data and 50% sequential data with block size mixes of 5% of the data as 4 KB block size, 5% of the data as 8 KB block size, 10% of the data as 16 KB block size, 35% of the data as 64 KB block size, and 35% of the data as 128 KB block size. The Enterprise Value drives described here are capable of 36 TB (64 GB SSD) or 72 TB (128 GB, 256 GB and 512 GB SSDs) of lifetime writes, with the workload stated above as the worse case. For the device to last in five years inside of the 72 TB of TBW, the drive write workload must be limited to no more than 40 GB of writes per day. For the device to last in three years, the drive write workload must be limited to no more than 65 GB of writes per day."
About 1967, T. Vincent Learson, an IBM executive and Boston Latin School Alumnus, donated (the rental of) an IBM 1130 minicomputer system to the school for academic purposes only. It may have been the first on-premises computer at a high school dedicated to student computing. All 10th graders learned FORTRAN IV using McCracken's textbook. The machine had 4k 16 byte words. We punched cards on 029 keypunches. Printouts came out on the console, based on a 12 CPS Selectric typewriter. The 1 platter 14 inch disk held about 160K, if I recall. Students were not permitted to store anything on it.
I wrote programs to do my homework for me. I hated hand drawing graphs, so I wrote a program to graph equations (rather than merely functions). I used it to graph functions (0=y-f(x)), equations, numerical differentiation and integration.
Guy Steele did some amazing things with it in Assembler, aside from what has been publicized about his implementing LISP on it. He wrote a card deck listing program that interleaved printing with reading the columns on the cards. He also wrote a one card binary program that would read the text punched on the next card and then punch that text as a dot matrix of holes on the cards that followed. It was brilliant, but the cards with too many holes near each other often broke and jammed the machine.
Many of us received free admission tickets to the Spring Joint Computer Conference in Boston in 1969.
After I graduated in 1970, the machine was upgraded to 16K words and a line printer. Steele's LISP may have been implemented on that.
I do system modeling, architecture and design, capacity planning, and design for high availability, high capacity, high performance, continuous operations,, and occasional programming. I am not in a research organization. I am in the world of commercial IT. Most of my career has been in technical sales.
I use simple algebra all the time. Workload growth over time implies exponentiation. In the last few years I have used logs and even quadratic equations in system analysis and modeling.
I use Boolean logic, AND, OR, NOT, XOR, IMPLIES, DeMorgan's Law etc to construct and understand & debug other's complex if statements and hierarchies of them.
I use probability to understand variations in workload coming in to servers, their business (busy-ness), and how to combine multiple workloads together.
When considering servers (machines and programs) capacity and responsiveness, I use queuing theory, and consider where things get buffered and queued along the way and at the layers between clients and servers.
I use graph theory to be able to understand network flows, linkages between relational tables, multiply linked lists, and graph databases.
When modeling communications links or systems availability, with lots of things with very low error or failure rates, I do binomial expansions and sometimes Maclaurin or Taylor Series.
I do most of all this in spreadsheets, but sometimes the provided functions are simplistically written, so they cannot handle combinations of large and small parameters. Then I had to substitute a better algorithm.
my observations as a college student in the 1970's.
Academic educational institutions (e.g. Yale) teach computer science, including programming. Their goal is to educate, not prepare students for the job market. They don't give for-credit courses for particular languages. Learning the language is an exercise left to the student, maybe guided by sessions with teaching assistants, in order to do the assignments.
Training institutions (e.g. NYC's Queens College) do teach and give credit for programming languages. Their goal is to prepare students for the job market.
What is the difference between education and training?
Yes, you do know the answer.
You may be happy your child gets sex education in school, but you would not be happy if the school provided training.
Training involves repeated practice to develop and hone a skill.
Three: Two young adults who grew up in my community as classmates. The first in a bus bombing in Gaza, the second in the WTC on 9/11. The third was a physician who treated my wife, was the medical practice partner of a very close friend, and head of the ER at a hospital that Arabs in and around Jerusalem prefer. One challenge in all countries with significant citizens' (and in some cases non-citizens) rights, is determining how much they apply to those who deny those rights to others. Few people, for example, think that intercepted terrorist bombs should be detonated without first being separated from their bearers.