C is close to machine language because every basic operation except a function call results in simple, brief, and concise machine language code. "c=a+b;" results in only a few instructions. And except when you're calling functions whose internals you haven't investigated, everything else is like that.
C is a high level language in that it masks the repetitive assembly language constructs to do those basic functions, but it still only provides basic constructs which are directly tied to what the hardware itself does.
By comparison, perl has a basic construct: "$myhash{"stuff"}=5;" This complex operation under the hood is masked by the simple language construct. It is far away from assembly language.
By comparison, C++ has a basic construct: "cout << "stuff";" While not as egregious as perl, this simple language construct masks function calls and loops under the hood.
In C, simple constructs in the language always result in comparably simple machine level code with comparably short running times. That's what is meant when folks say that C is close to machine language.
CCIE is worth it if you have a passion for routers and networking. The rest (including the other Cisco certs) are trash.
Your career is stalled because you're not interested in programming and don't have an easy knack for management. You've reached the pinnacle of general systems administration and no certifications will change that. There will be more raises as you refine your expertise but you're no longer on a fast growth curve.
If I'm wrong, go get your MBA or MSCS and your career will un-stall.
"student in his twenties" is by far the most common time for schizophrenia and a number of other mental illnesses to first manifest. If you notice a rapid and unexpected change in your cognitive abilities in that time frame, visiting with a doctor is just good sense.
And by the way, you seem a little paranoid about doctors.;)
Why can't a 4 year old, girl or boy, play with a fantasy?
Here you go, this is the ticket. At 4 it's all about the fantasy play. Buy her some computer games that indulge the fantasy -- dress the character, animate the character, etc. Things that match the fantasy but also conceptually prepare the player for more technical endeavors.
She'll either be interested or she won't. If she's not interested, you can't force it. If she is, maybe the play segues into something more technical and maybe it doesn't.
You can set the stage but get used to the idea that your child will write her own script. You did when you were the child.
There's no reason to fear a smart machine. What you should fear is an autonomous but stupid machine. Something with the power to do harm but without the free will to choose not to follow its instructions.
Besides, humans are the great adapters. AI won't replace us; we'll become it.
Wear leveling is only part of the picture. Whenever the SSD erases a block (for wear leveling OR because one sector in the block has been rewritten) it empties any sectors in that block which have been trimmed. The next write to an empty sector requires no erase and copy, thus it's far faster.
Without trim, a visible sector, once used, is never again empty. This means that every write requires a block copy and erase.
I haven't heard of any SSD remapping sectors as opposed to remapping full blocks. Not saying it's impossible, just that I don't think it's generally done. In principle you could journal sectors to a non-user visible area and then do your copy/erase activity when the drive is reasonably idle. But the description of the Sandforce controllers I read suggests it doesn't have the necessary hardware for that.
Sandforce controllers... that don't need trim in the first place due to their intelligent way of doing garbage collection and keeping a portion of the drive reserved for this purpose.
Seriously? I'd love to hear how you imagine that works.
Without TRIM, the SSD eventually considers all user-visible sectors to be in use. As a result, a sector is never just empty ready to be written. Even with reserved space, it still has to copy the entire much larger erase block in order to insert one sector.
Seems to me he considered the "tradition" option and labeled it "option 1: grow crappy crops that don't work out." Your disagreement is noted but you shouldn't accuse him of failing to consider your point of view.
So instead of 3,950,000 slaves gradually reducing to 0 over the course of 60ish years, actual history saw 620,000 dead, entire cities in ruins, and a century of violent hatred that has left most slaves' great great grandchildren still living in poverty as a semi-permanent underclass. All of it overseen by an out of control federal government bloated and twisted beyond recognition.
That was SO much better because, you know, freedom.
The lost opportunities were staggering. We were planning to buy Cuba from Spain for $130m around the time the war broke out. Couldn't afford it after. They eventually had an independence war instead. How different might the 20th century have been were Cuba the 51st state.
Actually, "acquiring more" slaves from Africa became illegal in the U.S. in 1808 via the "Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves." That act was passed by both northern and southern congressman, not even two full decades after ratifcation of the Constitution. We started on the gentle path to the end of slavery more than three decades before the civil war.
Suppose, just for a moment, that the abolitionist movement of the 1850's had been led by pragmatists instead of idealists. Imagine an alternate history where they demanded, not the immediate abolishment of slavery but a "born free" act where any child born in the U.S. was a free citizen regardless of parentage.
Gradual change. No immediate threat to the southern economy. No pressing need for secession. Yes, the last vestiges of slavery would have lasted into the first two decades of the 20th century but there might have been no destructive war. And no vicious hatred in the south persisting across generations and taken out on the only victims available.
Without the racism born of southern civil war hatred for the north, black participation in the world wars might have been seen as a good thing rather than a bad one, leaving large numbers of blacks college educated under the G.I. Bill afterward. Which could well have led to civil rights a decade early and both more gently and more completely.
And Abe Lincoln wouldn't have needed to reinterpret the Constitution to permit the vastly increased federal and executive power we so often decry in this very forum.
The idealists of the 1850s took a trend that was growing inevitable and instead of letting it play out backed their opponents into a corner, yielding an immediate, grisly, and needless war.
And yes, I despise H1B. As you say, it's an indentured labor program. There should be no work in the U.S. without the opportunity for citizenship and never, never a case where an employer holds the key to an individual's ability to remain in the country. I'm in favor of permitting talented technicians to immigrate. Even those with Indian degrees.;-) But the H1B program does it in a way that's unethical.
For a few U.S. southern slave owners, the solution was to earn enough off the slaves that they could afford to free them in their wills. Were they wrong? Would the slaves have been better off owned by someone with no intention of freeing them as the otherwise owner held up his nose and refused to participate? Would the slaves have been better off in Africa, dead of one savagery or another?
Idealism leads to conflict and eventually war and death. Productive change happens when moral pragmatists get to work.
what passes for college education in India is nothing more than rote-memorization and regurgitation
That's about the same as a high school diploma in the U.S. K through 12 I really only encountered two teachers who both inspired me to think and rewarded me for it when I did. And I came up through school systems widely regarded as among the best in the country.
At two score and one, I look back at the kids I knew when I was a kid and realize that many of them were (and probably still are) idiots.
Today my only contact with kids is via the news. The news rarely reported on the smart kids back then too. It reported on the sycophants (spelling bee!) and the phenomenal idiots. As it still does.
So yeah, kids today are idiots. But when was that not the case? Your childhood?
I keep hoping my Verizon stock will crater. They lead the oligarchy that controls the Internet. But until it does collapse, I'll continue to cash my dividends.
There's another tautology out there:
"God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; courage to change the things I can; and wisdom to know the difference."
You misunderstand the difference between a digital computer and an analog computer. Both are based on 1's and 0's, on and off.
The digital computer is driven by a clock strobe. When the clock strobes, the whole set of circuits accepts and processes the next inputs. As a result, the circuit is stable at the end of each clock cycle.
An analog computer has no clock. Inputs are processed as soon as they arrive. As a result, the circuit is never known to be in a stable state. It's continually in flux based on its inputs.
"Parallel processing" describes a digital computer in which multiple programs advance with each cycle of the clock. There is no clock in an analog computer. Every single circuit acts independently as soon as its inputs change. Groups of circuits can be heavily interconnected or lightly interconnected but that interconnectedness is very poorly described by digital computer concepts like "parallel processing."
If we ever build a true AI on a digital computer, it won't work anything like the human brain. The underlying hardware is just too different.
The brain is an analog computer. The notion of parallelism is fundamentally different for an analog computer... In a sense, every single neuron is operating independently and in parallel with the rest. Describing it in terms of parallel processing with digital CPUs makes no sense.
You got it exactly right. Different backgrounds yield different perspectives on any challenge that faces the team. This leads to more broadly considered solutions that have a better chance of working well.
From reading her essay, I gather that Erica's problem is that she doesn't seek diversity. Earlier in her career she sought to homogenize herself with her co-workers. Now she seeks homogeneity with "her type." Both approaches are ultimately unsuccessful.
You have to take an interest in the lives of the folks you work with. Why? Because people take an interest in the people who take an interest in them. It's human nature. But you don't do that by becoming the the other person, you do that by sitting with them and listening. Then you share your own very different adventures while they listen. Shakespeare offered it as a platitude but it's basically right: to thine own self be true.
the preference of certain personality types for functional, static and strongly typed languages.
Translation: because only very high-skill programmers attempt to use the very unpopular functional languages (like lisp and erlang) the resulting code is, on average, of better quality.
Sent the guy home with antibiotics when he presented with a fever after travel to Ebola infected area.
THAT mistake I can understand. They've seen SO many cases of Ebola after all. But permitting scores of people to be in the room with the guy *after* they decided to test for Ebola was a preventable error. And failing to tell the folks involved in his treatment to stay away from public transportation for a safety period following their contact with a confirmed Ebola patient was total amateur hour. Seriously, WTF do we have a no-fly list for anyway?
I don't know about Libre Office, but Firebox would behefit from a few more people telling certain devs how truly awful they've done this past year. It's bad. So bad.
Slashdot Mirror
What part of "every basic operation EXCEPT a function call" did you fail to understand?
C is close to machine language because every basic operation except a function call results in simple, brief, and concise machine language code. "c=a+b;" results in only a few instructions. And except when you're calling functions whose internals you haven't investigated, everything else is like that.
C is a high level language in that it masks the repetitive assembly language constructs to do those basic functions, but it still only provides basic constructs which are directly tied to what the hardware itself does.
By comparison, perl has a basic construct: "$myhash{"stuff"}=5;" This complex operation under the hood is masked by the simple language construct. It is far away from assembly language.
By comparison, C++ has a basic construct: "cout << "stuff";" While not as egregious as perl, this simple language construct masks function calls and loops under the hood.
In C, simple constructs in the language always result in comparably simple machine level code with comparably short running times. That's what is meant when folks say that C is close to machine language.
CCIE is worth it if you have a passion for routers and networking. The rest (including the other Cisco certs) are trash.
Your career is stalled because you're not interested in programming and don't have an easy knack for management. You've reached the pinnacle of general systems administration and no certifications will change that. There will be more raises as you refine your expertise but you're no longer on a fast growth curve.
If I'm wrong, go get your MBA or MSCS and your career will un-stall.
"student in his twenties" is by far the most common time for schizophrenia and a number of other mental illnesses to first manifest. If you notice a rapid and unexpected change in your cognitive abilities in that time frame, visiting with a doctor is just good sense.
And by the way, you seem a little paranoid about doctors. ;)
If your attention span is suffering that dramatically, there might be something medical going on.
Why can't a 4 year old, girl or boy, play with a fantasy?
Here you go, this is the ticket. At 4 it's all about the fantasy play. Buy her some computer games that indulge the fantasy -- dress the character, animate the character, etc. Things that match the fantasy but also conceptually prepare the player for more technical endeavors.
She'll either be interested or she won't. If she's not interested, you can't force it. If she is, maybe the play segues into something more technical and maybe it doesn't.
You can set the stage but get used to the idea that your child will write her own script. You did when you were the child.
Hawking should stick to what he actually knows.
There's no reason to fear a smart machine. What you should fear is an autonomous but stupid machine. Something with the power to do harm but without the free will to choose not to follow its instructions.
Besides, humans are the great adapters. AI won't replace us; we'll become it.
Wear leveling is only part of the picture. Whenever the SSD erases a block (for wear leveling OR because one sector in the block has been rewritten) it empties any sectors in that block which have been trimmed. The next write to an empty sector requires no erase and copy, thus it's far faster.
Without trim, a visible sector, once used, is never again empty. This means that every write requires a block copy and erase.
I haven't heard of any SSD remapping sectors as opposed to remapping full blocks. Not saying it's impossible, just that I don't think it's generally done. In principle you could journal sectors to a non-user visible area and then do your copy/erase activity when the drive is reasonably idle. But the description of the Sandforce controllers I read suggests it doesn't have the necessary hardware for that.
Sandforce controllers ... that don't need trim in the first place due to their intelligent way of doing garbage collection and keeping a portion of the drive reserved for this purpose.
Seriously? I'd love to hear how you imagine that works.
Without TRIM, the SSD eventually considers all user-visible sectors to be in use. As a result, a sector is never just empty ready to be written. Even with reserved space, it still has to copy the entire much larger erase block in order to insert one sector.
Now I understand why Sony is on the verge of bankruptcy. Late to the party with underwhelming products.
Seems to me he considered the "tradition" option and labeled it "option 1: grow crappy crops that don't work out." Your disagreement is noted but you shouldn't accuse him of failing to consider your point of view.
Puerto Rico will become a state any time a majority of its citizens want to. Just like Hawaii and Alaska did.
So instead of 3,950,000 slaves gradually reducing to 0 over the course of 60ish years, actual history saw 620,000 dead, entire cities in ruins, and a century of violent hatred that has left most slaves' great great grandchildren still living in poverty as a semi-permanent underclass. All of it overseen by an out of control federal government bloated and twisted beyond recognition.
That was SO much better because, you know, freedom.
The lost opportunities were staggering. We were planning to buy Cuba from Spain for $130m around the time the war broke out. Couldn't afford it after. They eventually had an independence war instead. How different might the 20th century have been were Cuba the 51st state.
Actually, "acquiring more" slaves from Africa became illegal in the U.S. in 1808 via the "Act Prohibiting Importation of Slaves." That act was passed by both northern and southern congressman, not even two full decades after ratifcation of the Constitution. We started on the gentle path to the end of slavery more than three decades before the civil war.
Suppose, just for a moment, that the abolitionist movement of the 1850's had been led by pragmatists instead of idealists. Imagine an alternate history where they demanded, not the immediate abolishment of slavery but a "born free" act where any child born in the U.S. was a free citizen regardless of parentage.
Gradual change. No immediate threat to the southern economy. No pressing need for secession. Yes, the last vestiges of slavery would have lasted into the first two decades of the 20th century but there might have been no destructive war. And no vicious hatred in the south persisting across generations and taken out on the only victims available.
Without the racism born of southern civil war hatred for the north, black participation in the world wars might have been seen as a good thing rather than a bad one, leaving large numbers of blacks college educated under the G.I. Bill afterward. Which could well have led to civil rights a decade early and both more gently and more completely.
And Abe Lincoln wouldn't have needed to reinterpret the Constitution to permit the vastly increased federal and executive power we so often decry in this very forum.
The idealists of the 1850s took a trend that was growing inevitable and instead of letting it play out backed their opponents into a corner, yielding an immediate, grisly, and needless war.
And yes, I despise H1B. As you say, it's an indentured labor program. There should be no work in the U.S. without the opportunity for citizenship and never, never a case where an employer holds the key to an individual's ability to remain in the country. I'm in favor of permitting talented technicians to immigrate. Even those with Indian degrees. ;-) But the H1B program does it in a way that's unethical.
For a few U.S. southern slave owners, the solution was to earn enough off the slaves that they could afford to free them in their wills. Were they wrong? Would the slaves have been better off owned by someone with no intention of freeing them as the otherwise owner held up his nose and refused to participate? Would the slaves have been better off in Africa, dead of one savagery or another?
Idealism leads to conflict and eventually war and death. Productive change happens when moral pragmatists get to work.
what passes for college education in India is nothing more than rote-memorization and regurgitation
That's about the same as a high school diploma in the U.S. K through 12 I really only encountered two teachers who both inspired me to think and rewarded me for it when I did. And I came up through school systems widely regarded as among the best in the country.
At two score and one, I look back at the kids I knew when I was a kid and realize that many of them were (and probably still are) idiots.
Today my only contact with kids is via the news. The news rarely reported on the smart kids back then too. It reported on the sycophants (spelling bee!) and the phenomenal idiots. As it still does.
So yeah, kids today are idiots. But when was that not the case? Your childhood?
I keep hoping my Verizon stock will crater. They lead the oligarchy that controls the Internet. But until it does collapse, I'll continue to cash my dividends.
There's another tautology out there:
"God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference."
This is why university degrees from India are about as valuable as a high school diploma in the U.S.
You misunderstand the difference between a digital computer and an analog computer. Both are based on 1's and 0's, on and off.
The digital computer is driven by a clock strobe. When the clock strobes, the whole set of circuits accepts and processes the next inputs. As a result, the circuit is stable at the end of each clock cycle.
An analog computer has no clock. Inputs are processed as soon as they arrive. As a result, the circuit is never known to be in a stable state. It's continually in flux based on its inputs.
"Parallel processing" describes a digital computer in which multiple programs advance with each cycle of the clock. There is no clock in an analog computer. Every single circuit acts independently as soon as its inputs change. Groups of circuits can be heavily interconnected or lightly interconnected but that interconnectedness is very poorly described by digital computer concepts like "parallel processing."
If we ever build a true AI on a digital computer, it won't work anything like the human brain. The underlying hardware is just too different.
The brain is an analog computer. The notion of parallelism is fundamentally different for an analog computer... In a sense, every single neuron is operating independently and in parallel with the rest. Describing it in terms of parallel processing with digital CPUs makes no sense.
You got it exactly right. Different backgrounds yield different perspectives on any challenge that faces the team. This leads to more broadly considered solutions that have a better chance of working well.
From reading her essay, I gather that Erica's problem is that she doesn't seek diversity. Earlier in her career she sought to homogenize herself with her co-workers. Now she seeks homogeneity with "her type." Both approaches are ultimately unsuccessful.
You have to take an interest in the lives of the folks you work with. Why? Because people take an interest in the people who take an interest in them. It's human nature. But you don't do that by becoming the the other person, you do that by sitting with them and listening. Then you share your own very different adventures while they listen. Shakespeare offered it as a platitude but it's basically right: to thine own self be true.
the preference of certain personality types for functional, static and strongly typed languages.
Translation: because only very high-skill programmers attempt to use the very unpopular functional languages (like lisp and erlang) the resulting code is, on average, of better quality.
Sent the guy home with antibiotics when he presented with a fever after travel to Ebola infected area.
THAT mistake I can understand. They've seen SO many cases of Ebola after all. But permitting scores of people to be in the room with the guy *after* they decided to test for Ebola was a preventable error. And failing to tell the folks involved in his treatment to stay away from public transportation for a safety period following their contact with a confirmed Ebola patient was total amateur hour. Seriously, WTF do we have a no-fly list for anyway?
I don't know about Libre Office, but Firebox would behefit from a few more people telling certain devs how truly awful they've done this past year. It's bad. So bad.