ENIAC was the first Turing-complete, general-purpose electronic computer, completed in 1946
The ENIAC was not a stored-program computer, however. ENIAC was programmed by connecting its computing units together with patch cables, just like its predecessor, Colossus.
Its predecessors were either not Turing-complete, not programmable, or not fully electronic (i.e., electro-mechanical).
I'm not sure of the relevance of this, as this article is about a successor, not a predecessor.
The judge in the 1973 patent decision was misinformed.
The judge in the 1973 case was very well informed, the lawyers on each side of the case would hardly leave him lacking any information they felt he might need. They were being paid by the hour, naturally. He decided (quite correctly, IMO) that reorganizing the structure of a computer to be general-purpose rather than fixed-purpose by allowing the computing units to be connected together in different arrangements (which was the ENIAC's only real innovation) was insufficiently innovative to justify the granting of a patent on all forms of computing equipment even when the method of programming of those computers was completely different.
According to this it was Konrad Zuse and the Z3, in 1941
The Z3 wasn't stored-program in the modern sense, as it responded to instructions as they were read at input via a punched tape. Looping was obtained by gluing the two ends of a tape together. The Manchester machines stored their programs in random access memory, thus could have jump and branch instructions, which the Z3 lacked.
EPA's methylmercury reference dose is.1 micrograms/kg body weight per day. Where is your 1.0 milligrams from?
I've lost the link now, but it was a study of the amounts of mercury found in various fish. The tuna came out way higher than most others, IIRC it was about 0.3mg per 100g of fish. I don't think all of that was methyl mercury though, so it isn't as dangerous as it sounds (as methyl mercury is a lot more dangerous than most other forms of mercury).
And when a user drops a CFL, the problem is right there in their house, not miles away.
A CFL typically contains 3mg of mercury. A tuna steak is likely to contain as much as 1mg. If you eat fish three times and break a CFL once (and snort the mercury rather than disposing of it safely), you'll take in as much mercury from the fish as the broken lamp.
Since I have switched to CFL... none of my light bulbs has ever burned out yet for 9+ months. With incandescents, I was changing 5-6 light-bulbs a month (I live in an older house, the electric grid and the wiring in the place I live is not always ideal for traditional light bulbs)
Similar experience here. I moved into a house in 2000, and installed all CFLs at the time. Some of those lights, particularly the external one I had on a timer to come on 8 hours a day, I have only changed once since then. A few months ago I was planning on moving out, so when I had a bulb fail I switched it to incandescent: no point spending the money on a CFL for so little time. But the incadescent blew after only 3 weeks. A replacement lasted even less time.
But the real power is never greater than the apparent power, so there is something very screwy in the summary. Probably the summary meant the "apparent" load was twice that implied by their wattage. That is, if you actually measured the volts time current flowing, you'd find it to be 28 VA, but for whatever reason, it only "uses" 13 "real watts."
Yep. 13W, 28VA. Which isn't even approximately similar to using 28W as the summary seems to be implying.
I think have a great idea as to how to solve this.
But unfortunately I'm still waiting for the CFL bulb above my head to light up.
I have to ask: who exactly is it that the summary claims is complaining about the heat-up delay on CFLs? My experience is that modern CFLs take no noticeable time to reach a brightness level that is completely acceptable. Did the poster only ask people who haven't tried a new lamp in the last 5 years?
So because a 13W light really uses 28W you are going to stick with a lights that uses even more?
It doesn't use 28W. It uses 28VA, which is totally different. It's still only using 13W, but you need to preload some charge into a capacitor before you use it to cope with the variations in voltage and current draw it'll cause.
Interesting - this is a pretty serious blow to the CFL concept, and if they're really that bad, I'm surprised why it's taken this long for it to come up. Maybe it's fixable but I doubt it could be done without adding significant cost to the bulbs.
They aren't really that bad, which is why it's taken this long. Do you really think utility companies would be pushing the technology (as they are here in the UK at least) if they were? Read the comments on the article. First off, it's only some designs that have an issue. Second, the issue can be corrected for with very little cost by the power companies adding capacitance to the distribution network to even the load. It's virtually a non-issue.
Why do these arrogant companies think they can take back what they've sold without compensation? This is ripe for a lawsuit.
They don't. WotC didn't sell them to the consumers; they sold a licence to RPGNow that let RPGNow sell them. This license had a termination clause (presumably) but RPGNow assumed it would not be terminated so sold subscriptions to consumers that would allow them to download later.
WotC hasn't taken anything back. It's just stopped selling. RPGNow has no choice. They can't continue to supply, because that would be illegal. They almost certainly can't refund all of their subscribers without going bust.
Offering the service without a contract with WotC that required them to continue supplying to the customers they had already sold copies to was stupid, but I don't think there's any arrogance on display here.
Of course it would have been exceptionally stupid for RPGNow to sell these continued-download subscriptions without some kind of contract from WotC to ensure they'd be able to fulfill them. If they don't have such a contract, either they ignored their lawyer's advice, or didn't consult one, either of which is particularly dull.
What a load of bullcr*p. What are the arguments that RoR is a fad? The fact that people build great businesses on it? The fact that what seems like every other language now has a least one RoR clone - including Microsofts.Net?
Here's the thing: just because something is a fad doesn't mean it isn't good. There are plenty of fads that, once the smoke has cleared, it turns out the object of that attention was something really special. The Beatles, for a pop culture example. But what being a fad does mean is that it has gained attention from a lot of people for the wrong reasons. In Ruby-on-Rails' case, those reasons are usually "it was used on this site that was a really cool site, so it must be good". That, I think, is the reason 90% of developers who have started Rails projects in the last couple of years chose the platform. They didn't look at and think about how useful the ORM is, examine the MVC framework and decide that it was a better fit to their application than, say, Struts, and nor did they choose Ruby because they feel that the psuedo-functional style enabled by Ruby's neat closure syntax was the obvious natural way to write programs. They picked Ruby because that's what Rails uses and they picked Rails because that's what Twitter uses.
Just because something is a fad doesn't mean that people can't use it and get good results. But it does mean that some people using it may get better results if they look elsewhere.
I wonder if you've ever even tried implementing anything with RoR. If you had I would expect you to have found plenty of reasons to use RoR over PHP, not because it's different, but because it provides you with a lot of great tools not present in PHP.
Yes, I have tried it, and I agree it's a better platform than PHP. And I say this as a professional PHP developer who has been maintaining a 150kloc code base in PHP for the last 10 years. But what it isn't is so great that _every project_ should be using it. It's a good fit to a certain type of project, which I would say is general CRUD-type applications with a relatively simple domain model and limited reporting complexity. Beyond a certain complexity point of the domain model the lazy fetching will start to become a performance issue, and beyond a certain level of complexity in terms of reports you'll want to be using SQL directly, which I understand can be quite tricky.
Finally I would love to hear what you mean by serious applications. Obviously you don't consider Ruby stable enough for Twitter, Basecamp, Yellow Pages or LinkedIn. Or maybe you just don't consider those serious applications?
Basecamp looks interesting, and I'll admit I hadn't come across it before, so I don't really know enough about it to comment. The others are all very simple applications, fitting well within the scope of the restricted application domain I described above.
I like the bit at the bottom that says "Japanese use only". Classy. Register a.uk domain, and then ask that only Japanese people use it.
Re:Should have used PHP.
on
Twitter On Scala
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
Difference is, Facebook is still using php, Twitter is going toScala.
PHP was a mature environment when facebook was launched. RoR was (and still is to a certain extent) a fad environment, popular primarily because of its differentness. People who build sites on a platform because it's the latest thing are less likely to stick with that platform than people who choose a platform that has a solid reputation but is boring. Scala, at a guess, is going to be the next fad platform. Like Ruby, it has some interesting ideas behind it, but it needs a lot of development before we can consider a stable platform for serious applications, I think.
So what you are saying is it is yet another way for the government to hide public debt, probablly at considerably cost (see: pfi)
More like, it's a plan to take working capital away from banks, who clearly don't need it, especially not -- you know -- right now, and put it in the hands of the government.
Star Wars (and Star Trek) are what we call 'Space Opera,' which is a romanticized outer space story, not necessarily science fiction.
Space opera is usually considered a subgenre of science fiction. I've met and talked to a _lot_ of science fiction fans, but never one who doesn't consider space opera part of the genre.
That's not quite accurate. If you read true *science* fiction (as opposed to future fantasy), most of the things described CAN be built.
Most people accept stuff in the science fiction genre that cannot be built with any currently known or anticipated science. Faster than light travel is the cannonical example, but there's plenty of other stuff that's just implausible given our current understanding of science. "Grey goo", for example, has been widely featured in SF lately, but is scientifically implausible due to there being no adequate source of energy to drive such machinery.
There's a huge difference. Harry Potter (and other wizards) do magic without using any technology.
Well, yes, but there's a range of stuff that's accepted within the fantasy genre. Consider, for example, Wen Spencer's "Tinker" series, where magic is performed by drawing out circuits that capture and convert latent magical energy from the environment. That sounds very much like technology, but it's still fantasy.
Science Fantasy said the sky was purple. Science Fiction said the sky was purple, but gave a scientifically plausible reason as to why.
Actually, science fantasy says the sky is purple, leaving the readers to think that it's just purple for no reason, but then takes its characters on a long, dangerous journey on the course of which they discover a plausible reason why it's so that most people have forgotten because their colony world degenerated into iron-age style technology.
Actually, I think we're going to struggle to come up with with the lengthy list we that might imagine here. Most "Sci Fi" terms actually come from blue sky mathematics and science texts
I think we should give SF credit when the term is significantly changed in meaning. The list in the article gives a few good examples; "robot" (although not "robotics" which is the term they actually mention), "worm", and "virus" were all in use to mean something different beforehand. Hence, grey goo and (I guess) space elevator are out, the rest are used by SF to mean something different to the original meaning, so if they became real concepts would qualify.
Slashdot Mirror
AFAIK the first ones were the Z1 -> Z3 a couple of years earlier than the Mark I
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z1_(computer)
These computers weren't stored-program computers; they read instructions from punched tape and executed them immediately.
ENIAC was the first Turing-complete, general-purpose electronic computer, completed in 1946
The ENIAC was not a stored-program computer, however. ENIAC was programmed by connecting its computing units together with patch cables, just like its predecessor, Colossus.
Its predecessors were either not Turing-complete, not programmable, or not fully electronic (i.e., electro-mechanical).
I'm not sure of the relevance of this, as this article is about a successor, not a predecessor.
The judge in the 1973 patent decision was misinformed.
The judge in the 1973 case was very well informed, the lawyers on each side of the case would hardly leave him lacking any information they felt he might need. They were being paid by the hour, naturally. He decided (quite correctly, IMO) that reorganizing the structure of a computer to be general-purpose rather than fixed-purpose by allowing the computing units to be connected together in different arrangements (which was the ENIAC's only real innovation) was insufficiently innovative to justify the granting of a patent on all forms of computing equipment even when the method of programming of those computers was completely different.
According to this it was Konrad Zuse and the Z3, in 1941
The Z3 wasn't stored-program in the modern sense, as it responded to instructions as they were read at input via a punched tape. Looping was obtained by gluing the two ends of a tape together. The Manchester machines stored their programs in random access memory, thus could have jump and branch instructions, which the Z3 lacked.
Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look like in the year 2004.
You are aware that this is a hoax, right? I understand it originated on 4chan.
A tuna steak is likely to contain as much as 1mg
EPA's methylmercury reference dose is .1 micrograms/kg body weight per day. Where is your 1.0 milligrams from?
I've lost the link now, but it was a study of the amounts of mercury found in various fish. The tuna came out way higher than most others, IIRC it was about 0.3mg per 100g of fish. I don't think all of that was methyl mercury though, so it isn't as dangerous as it sounds (as methyl mercury is a lot more dangerous than most other forms of mercury).
... I never did the club hunting thing ...
You mean like this, right?
And when a user drops a CFL, the problem is right there in their house, not miles away.
A CFL typically contains 3mg of mercury. A tuna steak is likely to contain as much as 1mg. If you eat fish three times and break a CFL once (and snort the mercury rather than disposing of it safely), you'll take in as much mercury from the fish as the broken lamp.
Since I have switched to CFL... none of my light bulbs has ever burned out yet for 9+ months. With incandescents, I was changing 5-6 light-bulbs a month (I live in an older house, the electric grid and the wiring in the place I live is not always ideal for traditional light bulbs)
Similar experience here. I moved into a house in 2000, and installed all CFLs at the time. Some of those lights, particularly the external one I had on a timer to come on 8 hours a day, I have only changed once since then. A few months ago I was planning on moving out, so when I had a bulb fail I switched it to incandescent: no point spending the money on a CFL for so little time. But the incadescent blew after only 3 weeks. A replacement lasted even less time.
But the real power is never greater than the apparent power, so there is something very screwy in the summary. Probably the summary meant the "apparent" load was twice that implied by their wattage. That is, if you actually measured the volts time current flowing, you'd find it to be 28 VA, but for whatever reason, it only "uses" 13 "real watts."
Yep. 13W, 28VA. Which isn't even approximately similar to using 28W as the summary seems to be implying.
I think have a great idea as to how to solve this.
But unfortunately I'm still waiting for the CFL bulb above my head to light up.
I have to ask: who exactly is it that the summary claims is complaining about the heat-up delay on CFLs? My experience is that modern CFLs take no noticeable time to reach a brightness level that is completely acceptable. Did the poster only ask people who haven't tried a new lamp in the last 5 years?
So because a 13W light really uses 28W you are going to stick with a lights that uses even more?
It doesn't use 28W. It uses 28VA, which is totally different. It's still only using 13W, but you need to preload some charge into a capacitor before you use it to cope with the variations in voltage and current draw it'll cause.
Interesting - this is a pretty serious blow to the CFL concept, and if they're really that bad, I'm surprised why it's taken this long for it to come up. Maybe it's fixable but I doubt it could be done without adding significant cost to the bulbs.
They aren't really that bad, which is why it's taken this long. Do you really think utility companies would be pushing the technology (as they are here in the UK at least) if they were? Read the comments on the article. First off, it's only some designs that have an issue. Second, the issue can be corrected for with very little cost by the power companies adding capacitance to the distribution network to even the load. It's virtually a non-issue.
I haven't played ADnD (book and pen) for almost 10 years
And it shows. We don't call it AD&D any more. Back to just plain old D&D.
That's it! I quit! I will never play D & D again! Oh wait, I haven't played since I was 1986. yawns and moves on
Back to sleep for another 300 years? Or are you going to set the alarm for 2100 and see if anything interesting's going on?
Why do these arrogant companies think they can take back what they've sold without compensation? This is ripe for a lawsuit.
They don't. WotC didn't sell them to the consumers; they sold a licence to RPGNow that let RPGNow sell them. This license had a termination clause (presumably) but RPGNow assumed it would not be terminated so sold subscriptions to consumers that would allow them to download later.
WotC hasn't taken anything back. It's just stopped selling.
RPGNow has no choice. They can't continue to supply, because that would be illegal. They almost certainly can't refund all of their subscribers without going bust.
Offering the service without a contract with WotC that required them to continue supplying to the customers they had already sold copies to was stupid, but I don't think there's any arrogance on display here.
Of course it would have been exceptionally stupid for RPGNow to sell these continued-download subscriptions without some kind of contract from WotC to ensure they'd be able to fulfill them. If they don't have such a contract, either they ignored their lawyer's advice, or didn't consult one, either of which is particularly dull.
What a load of bullcr*p. What are the arguments that RoR is a fad? The fact that people build great businesses on it? The fact that what seems like every other language now has a least one RoR clone - including Microsofts .Net?
Here's the thing: just because something is a fad doesn't mean it isn't good. There are plenty of fads that, once the smoke has cleared, it turns out the object of that attention was something really special. The Beatles, for a pop culture example. But what being a fad does mean is that it has gained attention from a lot of people for the wrong reasons. In Ruby-on-Rails' case, those reasons are usually "it was used on this site that was a really cool site, so it must be good". That, I think, is the reason 90% of developers who have started Rails projects in the last couple of years chose the platform. They didn't look at and think about how useful the ORM is, examine the MVC framework and decide that it was a better fit to their application than, say, Struts, and nor did they choose Ruby because they feel that the psuedo-functional style enabled by Ruby's neat closure syntax was the obvious natural way to write programs. They picked Ruby because that's what Rails uses and they picked Rails because that's what Twitter uses.
Just because something is a fad doesn't mean that people can't use it and get good results. But it does mean that some people using it may get better results if they look elsewhere.
I wonder if you've ever even tried implementing anything with RoR. If you had I would expect you to have found plenty of reasons to use RoR over PHP, not because it's different, but because it provides you with a lot of great tools not present in PHP.
Yes, I have tried it, and I agree it's a better platform than PHP. And I say this as a professional PHP developer who has been maintaining a 150kloc code base in PHP for the last 10 years. But what it isn't is so great that _every project_ should be using it. It's a good fit to a certain type of project, which I would say is general CRUD-type applications with a relatively simple domain model and limited reporting complexity. Beyond a certain complexity point of the domain model the lazy fetching will start to become a performance issue, and beyond a certain level of complexity in terms of reports you'll want to be using SQL directly, which I understand can be quite tricky.
Finally I would love to hear what you mean by serious applications. Obviously you don't consider Ruby stable enough for Twitter, Basecamp, Yellow Pages or LinkedIn. Or maybe you just don't consider those serious applications?
Basecamp looks interesting, and I'll admit I hadn't come across it before, so I don't really know enough about it to comment. The others are all very simple applications, fitting well within the scope of the restricted application domain I described above.
(NSFW) http://technicaladvisoryboard.org.uk/
I like the bit at the bottom that says "Japanese use only". Classy. Register a .uk domain, and then ask that only Japanese people use it.
Difference is, Facebook is still using php, Twitter is going toScala.
PHP was a mature environment when facebook was launched. RoR was (and still is to a certain extent) a fad environment, popular primarily because of its differentness. People who build sites on a platform because it's the latest thing are less likely to stick with that platform than people who choose a platform that has a solid reputation but is boring. Scala, at a guess, is going to be the next fad platform. Like Ruby, it has some interesting ideas behind it, but it needs a lot of development before we can consider a stable platform for serious applications, I think.
So what you are saying is it is yet another way for the government to hide public debt, probablly at considerably cost (see: pfi)
More like, it's a plan to take working capital away from banks, who clearly don't need it, especially not -- you know -- right now, and put it in the hands of the government.
QX
Star Wars (and Star Trek) are what we call 'Space Opera,' which is a romanticized outer space story, not necessarily science fiction.
Space opera is usually considered a subgenre of science fiction. I've met and talked to a _lot_ of science fiction fans, but never one who doesn't consider space opera part of the genre.
That's not quite accurate. If you read true *science* fiction (as opposed to future fantasy), most of the things described CAN be built.
Most people accept stuff in the science fiction genre that cannot be built with any currently known or anticipated science. Faster than light travel is the cannonical example, but there's plenty of other stuff that's just implausible given our current understanding of science. "Grey goo", for example, has been widely featured in SF lately, but is scientifically implausible due to there being no adequate source of energy to drive such machinery.
There's a huge difference. Harry Potter (and other wizards) do magic without using any technology.
Well, yes, but there's a range of stuff that's accepted within the fantasy genre. Consider, for example, Wen Spencer's "Tinker" series, where magic is performed by drawing out circuits that capture and convert latent magical energy from the environment. That sounds very much like technology, but it's still fantasy.
Science Fantasy said the sky was purple.
Science Fiction said the sky was purple, but gave a scientifically plausible reason as to why.
Actually, science fantasy says the sky is purple, leaving the readers to think that it's just purple for no reason, but then takes its characters on a long, dangerous journey on the course of which they discover a plausible reason why it's so that most people have forgotten because their colony world degenerated into iron-age style technology.
Actually, I think we're going to struggle to come up with with the lengthy list we that might imagine here. Most "Sci Fi" terms actually come from blue sky mathematics and science texts
I think we should give SF credit when the term is significantly changed in meaning. The list in the article gives a few good examples; "robot" (although not "robotics" which is the term they actually mention), "worm", and "virus" were all in use to mean something different beforehand. Hence, grey goo and (I guess) space elevator are out, the rest are used by SF to mean something different to the original meaning, so if they became real concepts would qualify.