The article seems to be inaccurate in at least one respect, and one comment calls the author on it: It's not a 5-foot diameter pipe. Various sources say it's either 12-inch or 21-inch, but not five feet. One source says the largest riser pipe made is 21-inches in diameter.
I am the chairman of the Board of Trustees for my church. This kind of collaborative web page is a reasonable substitute for what would be a real database and web pages if we had the money and time.
One way we'd use it is to track building maintenance tasks. Any trustee might enter items as they notice them. Someone else would do the job and mark it done. Bugzilla would be ok for this and I'm sure there's other software, too, but all require a real web site.
Local governments would be providing taxpayer-supported WiFi because its a Public Good. There are many aspects of "free" WiFi that make it fit this role:
Service is available to everyone, rich or poor, profitable area or not.
Seamless. The same service is everywhere in the region, not a patchwork quilt of services like we see offered by private enterprise today.
Everyone benefits. Even non-users benefit from the increased access, communication, and education that others derive. I don't have to drive on a road myself to benefit from it: perhaps my mail, food, and books are delivered by trucks that use it.
I'm sure there are others.
If a city isn't allowed to provide the service itself, it needs to be able to regulate whatever service is provided in a manner similar to what's done with CATV: e.g. require that the service is available to everyone, not just the wealthy side of town.
One concern I've had with all the discussions of privatizing SS is this:
An influx of cash now will drive the prices up, making stock brokers and the already rich (i.e. current stock owners) wealthier; then, when all us boomers cash out as we retire, the stock market will drop.
The cash-out problem happens whether SS is privatized or not, but privatization makes it that much worse. Same with real estate: visualize all the estate sales ~82 years after 1957.
Yes, it happens over time and not all on one day, and you can hedge (i.e. short) against it, but it's still a real problem.
Woe to Gen-X'ers who are "in" either market.
In the US (and other places, too!) there's this thing called a "secret ballot". A paper receipt that can be used to verify the actual votes once you've left the polling place can also be used by thugs to make sure you voted the way they wanted you to.
Any verification scheme has to be contained within the polling place to avoid this (very real) problem. We depend on having two election officials present, typically from different parties, to prevent systematic voter fraud.
Perhaps you are thinking of the Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) from Network Appliance. The situation is different for a network storage box because of large write-through caches on all the clients: most of the traffic the box sees are writes. This situation combined with a stripped level 5 RAID array where small writes are really expensive leads you to the battery-backed RAM and WAFL file system described in a paper by Hitz, et al: http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/3002.html
I learned a good rule from my manager at HP many years ago: First, do what you know you have to do.
Let me explain: When a new project starts, those involved will come up with all kinds of technical problems to be addressed. Some of these may even seem like show-stoppers. Upper management will want these problems to be solved before allowing the project to move forward.
Project managers and engineers have 2 choices: put the project on hold and work on solutions to the problems, or put the problems on hold and get a prototype of the project working. We all know what happens when you put the project on hold: nothing.
If you go ahead and do what you know you have to do to get the prototype working, miracles occur! Many of the so-called problems turn out not to be problems at all. Or some clever engineer just solves the problem while working on the prototype. Or new problems, much worse than the original ones, are found and can be addressed now that they're known.
Which kind of project do you want to be working on?
During a news conference from Dallas this morning, the AA spokesman said that the most recent "A" maintainance of this plane was 11/11/01, yesterday . This seems to support the "failure of preventive maintainance" possibility.
Very soon it will become too much work to scan each paper against every paper
ever submitted, and that's what the task will devolve to. Pretty soon it will become an intractable problem to search
through N*(N-m) combinations, where N is the total number of papers ever submitted, and (N-m) are the papers
submitted before this quarter/semester. To do any less thorough of a search is to defeat the purpose of the search.
You don't have to do NxM at all.
Does the "similar pages" button on Google try to directly match the page with every other page on the web? I don't think so... Hash tables make this kind of task easy and fast. A table indexed by all the 6 word phrases seen so far can be checked faster than the disk can read the papers.
Count hits, sort, threshold, and print out candidates for hand comparing.
The integer multiplier in the Mips R2000 (1986) was self-timed.
The original Jim Clark Geometry Engine (c. 1981) was a self-timed floating point pipeline.
Mead and Conway talk about self-timed ICs in their book (1980)
There are connections between all of these folks
and Sutherland.
But
what about the farmer who has land and equipment worth a million bucks? His kids would be hit
with a $600,000 penalty, leaving them no choice but to sell the family business...
This is incorrect. Under today's laws, a $1M estate is exempt from estate taxes and the cost basis is reset to the value at the date of death, which means if the decendants do sell the farm soon after the death, they will owe no capital gains taxes. The Democrat's plan would move the exemption amount up to a few $M over the next few years. The Republican plan would have $0 estate taxes, but no reset basis, either, so the decendants of the $1M farmer could have to pay ~ $300,000 in taxes when they sold the farm (assuming that it was originally purchased at a low value).
from their web page: http://www.patents.ibm.com/tdb
The IBM Technical Disclosure Bulletin (TDB) was
published by the IBM Corporation from 1958 until January 1998 as a forum for IBM employees to publish defensive disclosures of inventions that did not actually become patents.
Any prior publication of an idea (invention?) can be used to invalidate a patent. A well-organized searchable database for ideas would be great for collecting such ideas to prevent the rampant patenting of the obvious that's been going on.
And therein lies the problem. Management need to be made forcefully aware that the agency is not a
Windows only shop, and that proposing Windows only solutions like this is a road to ruin.
Management understands two things: schedule and budget. (But, since time is money, management only really understands one thing.)
A more positive approach often works better:
For these purposes, put yourself in a frame of mind that is supportive of the change. Now make a plan that includes everything that has to be done to make the change. Include time and money for research of the technical issues that others have raised. Include time and materials to build up a working prototype. Since the cutover to the new system probably need to be done over a weekend, include time and material to make it so the cutover can be nearly instantaneous. Include time for training of all employees on the new system, and money to cover temporary employees to cover for those being trained. Don't put anything in the plan, schedule, or budget that isn't justified. Management and others will be looking carefully for any padding.
Make sure your plan makes it clear that only YOUR people can do the work, so your group gets the budget dollars (some IT managers love opportunities to get a bigger budget). Make it clear that the cutover can't happen until the new system is shown to be working in an operational environment.
You can take this even further: propose the research to be followed by a real plan. Or propose two plans: one that involves making the existing Unix systems work with the change; another that involves a complete changeover to W2K for your department.
Does anyone remember MIPS Unix? I'm not sure of it's origins, but I think MIPS made it before SGI bought them outright
(although I think it was still maintained despite the fact SGI had their own version of Unix, IRIX).
The first MIPS Unix was BSD4.2, then BSD4.3.
Around the same time as the 4.3 port was just working,
we did a System V R2 port followed quickly by a
System V R3 port that was developed jointly with SGI. This System V R3 port plus a lot of 4.3 features and NFS became IRIX. SGI didn't buy Mips
until a few years later.
Slashdot Mirror
The pipe is a 21-inch pipe according to this UKPress article. 53 centimeters is about 21 inches.
The article seems to be inaccurate in at least one respect, and one comment calls the author on it: It's not a 5-foot diameter pipe. Various sources say it's either 12-inch or 21-inch, but not five feet. One source says the largest riser pipe made is 21-inches in diameter.
I am the chairman of the Board of Trustees for my church. This kind of collaborative web page is a reasonable substitute for what would be a real database and web pages if we had the money and time. One way we'd use it is to track building maintenance tasks. Any trustee might enter items as they notice them. Someone else would do the job and mark it done. Bugzilla would be ok for this and I'm sure there's other software, too, but all require a real web site.
- Service is available to everyone, rich or poor, profitable area or not.
- Seamless. The same service is everywhere in the region, not a patchwork quilt of services like we see offered by private enterprise today.
- Everyone benefits. Even non-users benefit from the increased access, communication, and education that others derive. I don't have to drive on a road myself to benefit from it: perhaps my mail, food, and books are delivered by trucks that use it.
I'm sure there are others.If a city isn't allowed to provide the service itself, it needs to be able to regulate whatever service is provided in a manner similar to what's done with CATV: e.g. require that the service is available to everyone, not just the wealthy side of town.
One concern I've had with all the discussions of privatizing SS is this: An influx of cash now will drive the prices up, making stock brokers and the already rich (i.e. current stock owners) wealthier; then, when all us boomers cash out as we retire, the stock market will drop. The cash-out problem happens whether SS is privatized or not, but privatization makes it that much worse. Same with real estate: visualize all the estate sales ~82 years after 1957. Yes, it happens over time and not all on one day, and you can hedge (i.e. short) against it, but it's still a real problem. Woe to Gen-X'ers who are "in" either market.
In the US (and other places, too!) there's this thing called a "secret ballot". A paper receipt that can be used to verify the actual votes once you've left the polling place can also be used by thugs to make sure you voted the way they wanted you to.
Any verification scheme has to be contained within the polling place to avoid this (very real) problem. We depend on having two election officials present, typically from different parties, to prevent systematic voter fraud.
Perhaps you are thinking of the Write Anywhere File Layout (WAFL) from Network Appliance. The situation is different for a network storage box because of large write-through caches on all the clients: most of the traffic the box sees are writes. This situation combined with a stripped level 5 RAID array where small writes are really expensive leads you to the battery-backed RAM and WAFL file system described in a paper by Hitz, et al: http://www.netapp.com/tech_library/3002.html
Let me explain: When a new project starts, those involved will come up with all kinds of technical problems to be addressed. Some of these may even seem like show-stoppers. Upper management will want these problems to be solved before allowing the project to move forward.
Project managers and engineers have 2 choices: put the project on hold and work on solutions to the problems, or put the problems on hold and get a prototype of the project working. We all know what happens when you put the project on hold: nothing. If you go ahead and do what you know you have to do to get the prototype working, miracles occur! Many of the so-called problems turn out not to be problems at all. Or some clever engineer just solves the problem while working on the prototype. Or new problems, much worse than the original ones, are found and can be addressed now that they're known.
Which kind of project do you want to be working on?
(with the same link as this article)
You've just hit on the idea for a dupe-detector: comparing links from previous stories would probably weed out several dupes per week.
During a news conference from Dallas this morning, the AA spokesman said that the most recent "A" maintainance of this plane was 11/11/01, yesterday . This seems to support the "failure of preventive maintainance" possibility.
The San Jose Mercury reported this morning that California has indicated that it would reject the proposed settlement as well.
MATTRACKS is the result of the imagination of our founder's 11 year old son.
That's cool.
You don't have to do NxM at all. Does the "similar pages" button on Google try to directly match the page with every other page on the web? I don't think so... Hash tables make this kind of task easy and fast. A table indexed by all the 6 word phrases seen so far can be checked faster than the disk can read the papers. Count hits, sort, threshold, and print out candidates for hand comparing.
The original Jim Clark Geometry Engine (c. 1981) was a self-timed floating point pipeline.
Mead and Conway talk about self-timed ICs in their book (1980)
There are connections between all of these folks and Sutherland.
Management understands two things: schedule and budget. (But, since time is money, management only really understands one thing.)
A more positive approach often works better: For these purposes, put yourself in a frame of mind that is supportive of the change. Now make a plan that includes everything that has to be done to make the change. Include time and money for research of the technical issues that others have raised. Include time and materials to build up a working prototype. Since the cutover to the new system probably need to be done over a weekend, include time and material to make it so the cutover can be nearly instantaneous. Include time for training of all employees on the new system, and money to cover temporary employees to cover for those being trained. Don't put anything in the plan, schedule, or budget that isn't justified. Management and others will be looking carefully for any padding. Make sure your plan makes it clear that only YOUR people can do the work, so your group gets the budget dollars (some IT managers love opportunities to get a bigger budget). Make it clear that the cutover can't happen until the new system is shown to be working in an operational environment.
You can take this even further: propose the research to be followed by a real plan. Or propose two plans: one that involves making the existing Unix systems work with the change; another that involves a complete changeover to W2K for your department.
Good luck!
The first MIPS Unix was BSD4.2, then BSD4.3. Around the same time as the 4.3 port was just working, we did a System V R2 port followed quickly by a System V R3 port that was developed jointly with SGI. This System V R3 port plus a lot of 4.3 features and NFS became IRIX. SGI didn't buy Mips until a few years later.