if your into technical progamming / numerical stuff maybe work on the Open Source FORTRAN's as they are poor performers compared to the paid for counterparts.
If numeric computing is of interest...
Actually there are thousands of Fortran modules that scientists, engineers, and mathematicians still rely on because they are well known, organized, and trusted.
Look for local users who may have some "kludge"-works that they doing like MATLAB, an old Fortran module from NetLib, maybe a couple C or Fortran module from Numeric Recipes, all bound together with some very brittle Korn Shell scripts. That would be perfect to help refine the process into an Octave (or other Free Software alternative) script, and re-write (or quite likely simply replace) the Fortran and C modules with Octave toolboxes (or in Octave or C/C++).
Why would someone, who is supposed to be a data visualisation researcher, not have seen this celebrated work of his own field before he saw a knock-off cartoon?
You're either a) new to IT / Computer Science, or b) too young to have experienced a revolutionary new paradigm that matches either anything discovered at Xerox PARC Labs or in general 20-30 years ago by professionals who are now "grey beards," but commonly referred to as old fogies when they point our that even IT / Computing and Computer Science has a history.
Examples include Alohanet (vs. Wi-Fi / "wireless Internet"), time-sharing systems (vs. thin computing or virtualization), IM (vs talk / irc), CU-SeeMe (vs video IM, ChatRoulette), Jennifer Ringley (vs cam-girls), Xanadu (vs. iBooks, Google Books), and Nikola Tesla (vs. "wireless power" and numerous other things he invented, prototyped, or predicted).
The court dismissed that Lanham Act-based case, because Beverly Stayart had no "commercial interest" where Yahoo (and Overtune?) i.e. search engines were competitors to herself.
It did not mean that she has no commercial interest in her own name. She cannnot sue "big company X" who display unrelated (read: adult content, ED pharmaceuticals) ads paid for by third-parties.
The judge's decision was that Beverly Stayart cannot use the particular section, 43(a), of the federal Lanham Act (in regard to trademarks) to have Yahoo search engine's Safe Harbor protection drops.
Actually Maplin* carries more than 2 transistors, whereas the physical Radio Shack stores are like your odd uncle's attempt to sell consumer electronics out of a store front rather than a car boot.
* I'm basing that on my last time I was in a Maplin in Cambridge, not City of London.
If ENOUGH people start paying, who weren't then the developer has more money to improve the product, which improves the productivity of ALL the users
You comments are well thought out and valid, except this one presupposed that the developer (producer / manufacturer / IP owner) has an economic incentive to re-invest in improving the product, rather than taking the additional income as more profit. Which would make their stock valuation increase.
Since most software development is done through "sunk cost" (NRE) model of spending to pay developers (i.e. geeks) as they work prior to the sale of the software product, rather than royalty based income based on sales, developers income and budget do not typically increase due to any given product being a run-away successful product. Stock options are an incentive, not a guarantee of improved income with increased sales / success; if the CEO robs the company, the developers are screwed like any other investors.
Or are you trying to tell me that the largest contributors to the BSA, have continuously taken their record profits and re-invested the majority of that back into the company? Or is Microsoft and Apple both still sitting on a huge war chest of cash and liquid assets? I think one of their developers, William something, made out okay, but you might of heard of Mr. Allen and "the other Steve" and as as a book entitled, Microserf, a fictionalized account of the experience of a typical software developer within a Washington state based 8086 micro-computer software company.
I take it this does not include a complete set of System V (Release 4.2 or 5) source code does it?
Having never seen any AT&T Unix code newer than the reprint of Lions' A commentary on the Unix Operating System, (based on V6 - 1975) and the "ancient" Unix source from The Unix Heritage Society.
It would be purely academic and novelty, but it would be of geeky interest to have access to System V's source code.
Besides Standard Oil, General Motors, and of course IBM (too lazy to bother, see the 2001 book IBM and the Holocaust?
I don't think any US based facilities of GM, and the Seven Sisters from the Standard Oil breakup, were taken by gun point. I also don't know if any US firearm and other weapon manufacturers supplied the Nazi Germany.
I'm not trying to vilify USA during this time period, many countries and companies made some embarrassingly cruel political and economic decisions. Germany was not alone in its anti-Semitism.
Some (many?) of DoD projects are "high-risk" of failure. They are typically want to push the envelope and be early adopters of technology before their enemy does.
I don't know how they run their IS/IM side of the house (payroll, HR, administrative IT).
Plus NGC and co know DoD has very few obligations to make their budget (per project) overruns public, with the easily cited "national security" concerns.
I actually happened to read this article on IEEE Spectrum about new RAM technologies, and it covers both Phase-Change RAM (PC-RAM), which may of hit a road block in its development, and Resistance RAM (RRAM), of which memristor is a particular kind of.
None of the in production processors are 3-D layered. Of course all physical devices are three dimensional themselves, but the height is basically moot until designers can use 3-D layering and routing (of the "wires" or interconnections.
I believe research prototypes in universities and R&D labs have been created or are being worked on, so it is not science fiction.
give them the respect they deserve and trust them to make their own decisions about what games to buy and play.
Not stocking it at the BX/PX (I assume) at US military bases was a business decision, it does not mean that GameStop will refuse to sell to anyone in the US military service. They can still go to the mall, or order via the Internet or mail order.
GameStop simply won't have the game boxes on the US bases. It seems at least a honest attempt to show some respect.
Lisp systems did this 30+ years ago: reload new compiled functions, and keep going.
Just to clarify you point, as in Lisp machines, not Lisp running standard hardware. That's an impressive feat, but they were not the first or only systems to do this.
I believe Forth based systems had been doing the same thing prior to that; as well IBM's mainframes were hot swapping kernels and CPUs for over 40 years I believe.
The more common mini-computer DEC VAX "clusters" circa 1980's were capable of this as well, and included being able to hot swap the CPU modules. I use quotation marks because a VAX cluster was a tightly coupled single "system" or "machine" in my understanding, not like the current concept of loosely coupled systems today, though I never operated one myself.
I'm not currently in the US, the book isn't for sale here, nothing by him is in any library in the country (as far as I can tell from a couple searches), and Amazon wouldn't ship his book here.
Lots of Slashdot readers are non-US, myself included. Strangely I don't find that any limitation.
I am not personally familiar with regards to South America or the Middle East and Africa, but I'm guessing it's available via South Africa at least. Otherwise in 2 minutes I found new copies available from UK, Germany, and Australia. Hint, try meta-search sites for books such as http:www.bookfinder.com, AddALL, www.abebooks.com and www.Alibris.com.
Your accusations of vitriolous seem very harsh of someone, whom by Slashdot standards is being mature and respectful in his criticism. Other than in some no-fault divorce states or provinces, the law does seem to place an a priori burden on male (husband) in regards to both financial settlement and parental access/rights. I agree that divorce is something that is always emotional ugly as like most civil or family court manner, both sides view themselves as having been wronged, and too often there is little or nothing in the way of unbiased confirmation of either parties' claims.
Wow, a story about airplanes and airports from Network World, perhaps that should of been a huge clue that it wasn't really news, novel, or particularly interesting.
And the RCAF or Canadian Air Force routinely uses them as well for their airplanes as well.
If you get tired of listen for radio waves, and looking for "wild feed" TV signals, then I'd suggest you go green and use it as a (parabolic) solar oven to cook with.
There are plenty of plans and ideas online for you to try. Some easy metal work, and food cooked for free as a reward, what more can any guy ask for?
The proper solution is to make programmers aware of leap seconds.
Actually, I disagree, programmers should be well designed, documented, and tested time and date libraries included in the development environment (system libraries, language libs, VM SDK, whatever), and stop re-implementing the f-ing wheel.
For most users and programmers, until you deal with enterprise solutions or scientific applications, time is a rough and fuzzy thing. Most of the code and experience is taken to be as good as their wristwatch, close enough to within five minutes being good enough for almost all cases. Then once you hit the "big times", you discover that either a) a second is large time frame when you are counting nanoseconds, so a leap second is a huge deal, b) that enterprises are national if not global and "issues" like using time zones to differentiate local time from system time (UTC) matter, and that local time is a human viewing preference, and should not be used as an internal representation.
Basically, stop letting system analysts act like 12-year olds ("oh, shiny new methodology") of thinking they can single handedly design a rocket ship in a 2 page specification, and hold programmers to the expectation of acting like professionals, not hill-billy motorcycle mechanics, if their are demanding a white collar professional salary.
I don't mind young programmers, I dislike professional programmers acting like a bunch of Prima donnas thinking that they are all hot-shot hero programmers.
Electrical hookup vs optical hookup isn't just digital vs digital.
Correct. High speed digital signals actual have a lot of analog related physical issues. The field is generally called (digital) Signal Integrity, and one of the better known experts is Dr. Howard Johnson.
You have to consider grounding effects too
If you mean shielding and/or signal termination, then yes.
If the base signal is identical but you remove a source of mains hum by breaking a ground loop you can have a very audible improvement.
Sorry, but mains hum should be rejected by as always being below the noise threshold in a well design digital system. That's one of the most widely cited reasons for usage of digital signal processing of what are naturally continuous analog signals (e.g. audio, RF (mostly), visible and non-visible light/radiation).
In a classic digital system, the logic levels have a wide margin sepearing the two digital states. Say in a 0-5V TTL logic, common from the 1970s to 1980s. As long as the digital signal says outside the "dead band" around 2.0V (from memory), while a digital bit is either 0.0V (or very close to it) or 5.0V (or very close to it), so the noise from the AC mains hum (50-60 Hz) will not distort the signal enough to swap logic levels.
It's got absolutely nothing to do with analog computers.
Really? Because the Fine Article from the OP, says:
Internally, Lyric's probability gates are essentially analog devices typically working with analog values called pbits that have a digital resolution of approximately 8-bits although the approach is applicable for different resolutions as well.
"[A]nalog devices working with analog values" does actually imply it is an analog computer, at least in part. Still, the overall usage sounds does novel, through the usage of Bayesian statistics "operations" logic as an alternative to the better known Boolean logic operations used in binary digital computers.
While electronic analog computers are primarily considered rareartifacts these days, analog electronics still exist, and continue to be used in various applications where an embedded computer is either overkill (no need for a re-programmable computer, application is trivial in analog), or less suitable (few very simple evaluations at very high speeds).
It would seem that they have reinvented the analog computer, but this time entirely on a chip.
Actually it would be sweet to have an equivalent to a CPLD or FPGA for analog electronics, where an entire analog sub-system could be reduced to a single chip, reducing the cost and board real estate for usage in low-cost electronics, reduce noise levels. Many it's my math background, or working in scientific computing, but being able to work natively with continuous number versus discrete representation that are often only approximate (a la floating point number in a digital computer), would be nice.
If such a computing device could be scaled up in "logical unit" density and speed like we've seen with digital computers, they could prove useful in a number of applications. Depending on the quality of noise (undefined or unintentional variation in numeric values), and its management, it might prove fruitful for scientific simulation such as weather forecasting, fluid dynamics, and any other model of physical conditions which are more accurately in continuous numbers (i.e. the Real number domain).
Slashdot Mirror
if your into technical progamming / numerical stuff maybe work on the Open Source FORTRAN's as they are poor performers compared to the paid for counterparts.
If numeric computing is of interest...
Actually there are thousands of Fortran modules that scientists, engineers, and mathematicians still rely on because they are well known, organized, and trusted.
Look for local users who may have some "kludge"-works that they doing like MATLAB, an old Fortran module from NetLib, maybe a couple C or Fortran module from Numeric Recipes, all bound together with some very brittle Korn Shell scripts. That would be perfect to help refine the process into an Octave (or other Free Software alternative) script, and re-write (or quite likely simply replace) the Fortran and C modules with Octave toolboxes (or in Octave or C/C++).
And did you really read it in -62? That would make you ... pretty old by Slashdot standards.
Being old enough to have actually read a paper based book, not just seen them cited in Wikipedia, makes you old Slashdot standards.
Nowadays you are expected to have downloaded the ebook, reading it would take too long; preferably without having paid for it.
Why would someone, who is supposed to be a data visualisation researcher, not have seen this celebrated work of his own field before he saw a knock-off cartoon?
You're either a) new to IT / Computer Science, or b) too young to have experienced a revolutionary new paradigm that matches either anything discovered at Xerox PARC Labs or in general 20-30 years ago by professionals who are now "grey beards," but commonly referred to as old fogies when they point our that even IT / Computing and Computer Science has a history.
Examples include Alohanet (vs. Wi-Fi / "wireless Internet"), time-sharing systems (vs. thin computing or virtualization), IM (vs talk / irc), CU-SeeMe (vs video IM, ChatRoulette), Jennifer Ringley (vs cam-girls), Xanadu (vs. iBooks, Google Books), and Nikola Tesla (vs. "wireless power" and numerous other things he invented, prototyped, or predicted).
You missed a requirement: easy for the students to remove by hand
I took that to mean that the kids needs a steady hand and very tiny magnetic needles to physically edit the disk sectors by hand.
I just figured it was a gym teacher stuck teaching home-ec (economics, "domestic science") class that was bored with knitting stupid hats.
It's basically a telnet GUI, right?
But with the advanced security of Javascript.
A publicly funded fire brigade? What's next? Public healthcare? You dirty socialist!
Gawd, won't somebody think of the children?
Next thing you know the government will be taking care of orphans and offering free public education.
The court dismissed that Lanham Act-based case, because Beverly Stayart had no "commercial interest" where Yahoo (and Overtune?) i.e. search engines were competitors to herself.
It did not mean that she has no commercial interest in her own name. She cannnot sue "big company X" who display unrelated (read: adult content, ED pharmaceuticals) ads paid for by third-parties.
The judge's decision was that Beverly Stayart cannot use the particular section, 43(a), of the federal Lanham Act (in regard to trademarks) to have Yahoo search engine's Safe Harbor protection drops.
See TechDirt article for a better write up.
Why would you want to give a kid a ruler with inches on it in the first place?
To be serious, all decent science programmes do use SI units including the US government and UK government.
Of course, engineering, construction trades, and commerce in some countries still see common usage of non-standard units in popular (lay) life.
Could be worse.I'm stuck with Maplin.
Actually Maplin* carries more than 2 transistors, whereas the physical Radio Shack stores are like your odd uncle's attempt to sell consumer electronics out of a store front rather than a car boot.
* I'm basing that on my last time I was in a Maplin in Cambridge, not City of London.
If ENOUGH people start paying, who weren't then the developer has more money to improve the product, which improves the productivity of ALL the users
You comments are well thought out and valid, except this one presupposed that the developer (producer / manufacturer / IP owner) has an economic incentive to re-invest in improving the product, rather than taking the additional income as more profit. Which would make their stock valuation increase.
Since most software development is done through "sunk cost" (NRE) model of spending to pay developers (i.e. geeks) as they work prior to the sale of the software product, rather than royalty based income based on sales, developers income and budget do not typically increase due to any given product being a run-away successful product. Stock options are an incentive, not a guarantee of improved income with increased sales / success; if the CEO robs the company, the developers are screwed like any other investors.
Or are you trying to tell me that the largest contributors to the BSA, have continuously taken their record profits and re-invested the majority of that back into the company? Or is Microsoft and Apple both still sitting on a huge war chest of cash and liquid assets? I think one of their developers, William something, made out okay, but you might of heard of Mr. Allen and "the other Steve" and as as a book entitled, Microserf, a fictionalized account of the experience of a typical software developer within a Washington state based 8086 micro-computer software company.
I take it this does not include a complete set of System V (Release 4.2 or 5) source code does it?
Having never seen any AT&T Unix code newer than the reprint of Lions' A commentary on the Unix Operating System, (based on V6 - 1975) and the "ancient" Unix source from The Unix Heritage Society.
It would be purely academic and novelty, but it would be of geeky interest to have access to System V's source code.
Besides Standard Oil, General Motors, and of course IBM (too lazy to bother, see the 2001 book IBM and the Holocaust?
I don't think any US based facilities of GM, and the Seven Sisters from the Standard Oil breakup, were taken by gun point. I also don't know if any US firearm and other weapon manufacturers supplied the Nazi Germany.
I'm not trying to vilify USA during this time period, many countries and companies made some embarrassingly cruel political and economic decisions. Germany was not alone in its anti-Semitism.
Some (many?) of DoD projects are "high-risk" of failure. They are typically want to push the envelope and be early adopters of technology before their enemy does.
I don't know how they run their IS/IM side of the house (payroll, HR, administrative IT).
Plus NGC and co know DoD has very few obligations to make their budget (per project) overruns public, with the easily cited "national security" concerns.
I actually happened to read this article on IEEE Spectrum about new RAM technologies, and it covers both Phase-Change RAM (PC-RAM), which may of hit a road block in its development, and Resistance RAM (RRAM), of which memristor is a particular kind of.
Aren't processors already layered[?]
None of the in production processors are 3-D layered. Of course all physical devices are three dimensional themselves, but the height is basically moot until designers can use 3-D layering and routing (of the "wires" or interconnections.
I believe research prototypes in universities and R&D labs have been created or are being worked on, so it is not science fiction.
give them the respect they deserve and trust them to make their own decisions about what games to buy and play.
Not stocking it at the BX/PX (I assume) at US military bases was a business decision, it does not mean that GameStop will refuse to sell to anyone in the US military service. They can still go to the mall, or order via the Internet or mail order.
GameStop simply won't have the game boxes on the US bases. It seems at least a honest attempt to show some respect.
Lisp systems did this 30+ years ago: reload new compiled functions, and keep going.
Just to clarify you point, as in Lisp machines, not Lisp running standard hardware. That's an impressive feat, but they were not the first or only systems to do this.
I believe Forth based systems had been doing the same thing prior to that; as well IBM's mainframes were hot swapping kernels and CPUs for over 40 years I believe.
The more common mini-computer DEC VAX "clusters" circa 1980's were capable of this as well, and included being able to hot swap the CPU modules. I use quotation marks because a VAX cluster was a tightly coupled single "system" or "machine" in my understanding, not like the current concept of loosely coupled systems today, though I never operated one myself.
I'm not currently in the US, the book isn't for sale here, nothing by him is in any library in the country (as far as I can tell from a couple searches), and Amazon wouldn't ship his book here.
Lots of Slashdot readers are non-US, myself included. Strangely I don't find that any limitation.
I am not personally familiar with regards to South America or the Middle East and Africa, but I'm guessing it's available via South Africa at least. Otherwise in 2 minutes I found new copies available from UK, Germany, and Australia. Hint, try meta-search sites for books such as http:www.bookfinder.com, AddALL, www.abebooks.com and www.Alibris.com.
Your accusations of vitriolous seem very harsh of someone, whom by Slashdot standards is being mature and respectful in his criticism. Other than in some no-fault divorce states or provinces, the law does seem to place an a priori burden on male (husband) in regards to both financial settlement and parental access/rights. I agree that divorce is something that is always emotional ugly as like most civil or family court manner, both sides view themselves as having been wronged, and too often there is little or nothing in the way of unbiased confirmation of either parties' claims.
Wow, a story about airplanes and airports from Network World, perhaps that should of been a huge clue that it wasn't really news, novel, or particularly interesting.
And the RCAF or Canadian Air Force routinely uses them as well for their airplanes as well.
If you get tired of listen for radio waves, and looking for "wild feed" TV signals, then I'd suggest you go green and use it as a (parabolic) solar oven to cook with.
There are plenty of plans and ideas online for you to try. Some easy metal work, and food cooked for free as a reward, what more can any guy ask for?
The proper solution is to make programmers aware of leap seconds.
Actually, I disagree, programmers should be well designed, documented, and tested time and date libraries included in the development environment (system libraries, language libs, VM SDK, whatever), and stop re-implementing the f-ing wheel.
For most users and programmers, until you deal with enterprise solutions or scientific applications, time is a rough and fuzzy thing. Most of the code and experience is taken to be as good as their wristwatch, close enough to within five minutes being good enough for almost all cases. Then once you hit the "big times", you discover that either a) a second is large time frame when you are counting nanoseconds, so a leap second is a huge deal, b) that enterprises are national if not global and "issues" like using time zones to differentiate local time from system time (UTC) matter, and that local time is a human viewing preference, and should not be used as an internal representation.
Basically, stop letting system analysts act like 12-year olds ("oh, shiny new methodology") of thinking they can single handedly design a rocket ship in a 2 page specification, and hold programmers to the expectation of acting like professionals, not hill-billy motorcycle mechanics, if their are demanding a white collar professional salary.
I don't mind young programmers, I dislike professional programmers acting like a bunch of Prima donnas thinking that they are all hot-shot hero programmers.
Electrical hookup vs optical hookup isn't just digital vs digital.
Correct. High speed digital signals actual have a lot of analog related physical issues. The field is generally called (digital) Signal Integrity, and one of the better known experts is Dr. Howard Johnson.
You have to consider grounding effects too
If you mean shielding and/or signal termination, then yes.
If the base signal is identical but you remove a source of mains hum by breaking a ground loop you can have a very audible improvement.
Sorry, but mains hum should be rejected by as always being below the noise threshold in a well design digital system. That's one of the most widely cited reasons for usage of digital signal processing of what are naturally continuous analog signals (e.g. audio, RF (mostly), visible and non-visible light/radiation).
In a classic digital system, the logic levels have a wide margin sepearing the two digital states. Say in a 0-5V TTL logic, common from the 1970s to 1980s. As long as the digital signal says outside the "dead band" around 2.0V (from memory), while a digital bit is either 0.0V (or very close to it) or 5.0V (or very close to it), so the noise from the AC mains hum (50-60 Hz) will not distort the signal enough to swap logic levels.
It's got absolutely nothing to do with analog computers.
Really? Because the Fine Article from the OP, says:
Internally, Lyric's probability gates are essentially analog devices typically working with analog values called pbits that have a digital resolution of approximately 8-bits although the approach is applicable for different resolutions as well.
"[A]nalog devices working with analog values" does actually imply it is an analog computer, at least in part. Still, the overall usage sounds does novel, through the usage of Bayesian statistics "operations" logic as an alternative to the better known Boolean logic operations used in binary digital computers.
While electronic analog computers are primarily considered rare artifacts these days, analog electronics still exist, and continue to be used in various applications where an embedded computer is either overkill (no need for a re-programmable computer, application is trivial in analog), or less suitable (few very simple evaluations at very high speeds).
It would seem that they have reinvented the analog computer, but this time entirely on a chip.
Actually it would be sweet to have an equivalent to a CPLD or FPGA for analog electronics, where an entire analog sub-system could be reduced to a single chip, reducing the cost and board real estate for usage in low-cost electronics, reduce noise levels. Many it's my math background, or working in scientific computing, but being able to work natively with continuous number versus discrete representation that are often only approximate (a la floating point number in a digital computer), would be nice.
If such a computing device could be scaled up in "logical unit" density and speed like we've seen with digital computers, they could prove useful in a number of applications. Depending on the quality of noise (undefined or unintentional variation in numeric values), and its management, it might prove fruitful for scientific simulation such as weather forecasting, fluid dynamics, and any other model of physical conditions which are more accurately in continuous numbers (i.e. the Real number domain).
Wow, those risky contests sound like just another at work, whether for yourself, or your employer. Either one could fail, and receive nothing.
Maybe McAllister forgot about the whole "dot com" "nEW eCONOMY" (stylized for Web 2.0 chicness) market crashing.