My only problem with this is chromosome counts. Humans have 23 pairs (assuming a healthy individual). Most of the great apes have 24 pairs. Some monkeys hare more, but others have less. I don't know about Neanderthal and other Homo species, but I assume they also have 23 pairs. This means that some species jumps are discrete and not gradual. This means that there can be a single date where a new species appeared.
And I've never heard a satisfactory explanation for how this discrete jump happens. Most changes to chromosome count result in sterile offspring. The explanations that I've heard either didn't make sense, or they were so filled with jargon that I couldn't understand them.
The Milky Way is estimated to have 200 to 400 billion stars. However, just counting stars doesn't tell the whole story. The total mass of Andromeda is estimated at 1.5 x 10^12 solar masses, which is roughly double the 8.5 x 10^11 solar masses estimated for the Milky Way. Still pretty big, but not the 10x you are suggesting.
Of course, that is our best information at present. Historically, estimates have varied quite a bit. Back in 2006 there were a bunch of news articles stating that the Milky Way had fewer stars but more mass from dark matter. And then Andromeda was determined to be four times more massive. And now it's only twice as massive. I expect this to be significantly revised as we learn more about both galaxies (especially our own: it's harder to learn size, shape, and mass from inside than it is from outside) and as we learn more about dark matter.
.NET doesn't handle leap seconds because Windows doesn't. Its NTP client will ignore seconds values greater than 59, and then fix the time during the next update. This means that Windows can knowingly be up to a second off from UTC time between the introduction of a leap second and its next NTP update. This is important to know if you attempt a fully synchronous distributed system that relies on NTP for synchronization.
I believe that some of the details in jni.h changed from 1.3 to 1.4. Perhaps a change to how JNIEnv was defined? A quick Google shows that the JNI version did in fact change then, but every page describes launching a JVM from within C/C++ code (which does use the JNI version information).
It is possible that my memory could be faulty (it was a long time ago after all) and that the problem was with launching a JVM from native code. Either way, my point stands. It is possible (however unlikely) to upgrade the JVM and have running JNI code break.
You can get the version of the compiler used to compile a class file (which contains the bytecode) using "javap -verbose MyClass.class". A major and minor version will be at the top. For what it is worth, Java 7 uses major version 51.
This is mostly true, but it is worth expanding as there are a lot of misconceptions about this. Java bytecode contains the JVM version it was compiled against, and later JVMs will run it just fine, even if it will no longer compile. I remember when Java added the enum keyword, and all our applications ran fine on the new JVM, even though it wouldn't compile without changes (one of our programmers used enum as the standard variable name for Enumerators). Overall, I've been very impressed with Java's cross platform and version compatibility, but I have found three causes of compatibility problems that are worth knowing about.
First, you cannot rely on non-standard libraries such as the com.sun packages. These aren't guaranteed to exist from one version of Java to the next. They aren't even guaranteed to work the same between minor Java versions. If you limit yourself to the standard libraries, you are safe. Be advised that deprecated methods may be removed in the future, though none have been removed so far.
Second, some programmers explicitly version check the JVM. This is usually for compliance issues, as some organizations feel that code should never run against a JVM that it hasn't been formally verified against. I have also seen this done because code was written to a known bug and some idiot thought it would be better to ensure that the underlying JVM always had the bug rather than work with both bugged and unbugged JVMs. Whatever your reasons, I consider this to be a bad practice, as you won't get security fixes from updated JVMs.
Third, while bytecode should always be forward compatible (barring bugs in the Java library), if you use native code you should be aware that JNI libraries are not guaranteed to work across major JVM versions. JNI libraries must be recompiled to work on newer JVMs.
There may be other sources of compatibility problems, but these are the only that I've run across them in my 15 years maintaining several million lines of Java code.
Only if you are considering desktop PC's. If you consider all computing devices, Linux wins easily. It is run on the largest of supercomputers and the smallest of embedded systems. All Android devices run Linux. Many (most?) home routers run Linux. Even my LG Blu-ray player has some sort of Linux somewhere inside it. Linux is literally everywhere.
Why stop there? The days of the week are named after the gods associated with the seven celestial bodies (only Saturday wasn't converted from a Roman deity to a German one, as there was no equivalent of Saturn in the Norse pantheon). And the first 6 months of the calendar are all named after Roman gods or religious festivals, so we should rename those as well. Even how we divide time into hours, minutes, and seconds is associated with Babylonian numerology and astrology, which has deep religious significance.
If we are going to start changing names to remove religious connotations, we have a lot of work to do. Or is it just the Christian origin of the name you object to, and not religion in general?
It's been doing okay. NVIDIA is making money, but it is only up 4.5% over the last year. Compare this to 6.6% for Intel, 13% for the Dow Jones, and 16% for the S&P 500. It's only doing well when compared with smaller chipmakers like ARM (up only 4.2% in the last year), Qualcomm (down over 12% in the last year), and AMD (which has lost over 26% in the last year).
I haven't read Linux's rant against C++ for a while, but he is correct that C++ isn't a good choice for an OS kernel. The only major kernel written in C++ that I know of is Windows NT, and it uses only a subset of C++ language features. In particular, it disables exceptions, disables RTTI, removes new/delete, and it doesn't have the standard library. Microsoft wrote their C++ compiler with this in mind, and there is a compiler flag to disable kernel unfriendly features (documented here). For everyone else, it's easier to just say that the C++ subset for kernel development is C (minus the standard library).
For non kernel use, C++ is superior to C in the hands of an expert programmer, but mediocre programmers who don't understand the language tend to write absolutely horrible code. And you can't take an expert C or Java programmer and expect them to write expert C++ code with just a few weeks practice. C++ is one of those languages that you have to dedicate a lot of time to, but it can be worth it if you require highly optimized code, have low latency requirements, or have low space requirements (areas where higher level languages like Java don't do well).
The Soviet Union adopted with the AK-74 in 1974, and most Eastern European and former Soviet Republics use it today. It has many advantages over the old AK-47, including accuracy, penetration, and muzzle velocity. With proper maintenance it is as reliable as the AK-47, and it costs less than other modern assault rifles.
The only nation states I know of that still use the old AK-47 are in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia (including, I think, India). The big advantage of the AK-47 is that it is cheap enough to hand out like candy to guerrilla fighters, and it's reliable enough to still work after years of little to no maintenance (though it's effectiveness drops quite a lot when doing so).
The Pennsylvania bill did not become law, but the UK and Vermont ones did (according to the article, which is flagged as needing more than three references).
I had never heard of the Red Flag traffic laws before. You learn something new every day. I can see why they would be enacted, and why they were thought to be practical (early self-propelled vehicles weren't much faster than a pedestrian, they were only practical for bulk transport). I suspect that many disruptive technologies have crazy laws and regulations before they become mainstream.
The problem with D isn't the language, which is excellent. Unfortunately, superior languages loose out to inferior ones all the time. (Yes, I'm aware that superior and inferior are subjective terms.)
Language quality is nice, but there are several factors that are more important when it comes to market success. These factors include: third party tools (compilers, debuggers, IDEs, profilers, etc.), third party libraries (both quantity and quality are important here), momentum (C++ and Java are pretty well entrenched, and it will take a lot more than being a better language to significantly displace them), and finally there is the coolness factor. Coolness relies on many things, but the one that I think is most important is having a charismatic creator or evangelist.
Now D is making significant improvements in each of these areas, so I expect it to continue to grow in market share. In particular, LLVM support and having Andrei Alexandrescu as an evangelist are pretty huge. It still has a ways to go before it can catch up to C++, however.
Many definitions of Object Orientation describe methods as functions associated with data (or with an objects state) and define them formally in terms of message passing. In fact, Alan Kay (creator of Smalltalk and I believe the originator of the term Object Oriented) includes objects sending and receiving messages as part of his definition of Object Oriented. Of course, Alan Kay also stated that every object is an instance of a class, so perhaps his definition isn't quite correct today.
Multiple dispatch often relies on inheritance, which is necessary but insufficient for Object Orientation. However, it isn't clear how to map a function call into a message for an object. Message passing is too useful of a model of computation to throw away. Perhaps you can create a definition of Object Oriented that doesn't use it, but I haven't seen one.
This isn't 100% true. I recently flew on a United flight from Atlanta to Dubai, and the nifty map showing the flight path displayed us flying right through the middle of Iraq. Perhaps it used to be true that we wouldn't fly over Iraq, but we do now. I'm sure that there are still altitude restrictions, but I'm just guessing.
Computer Science is a pretty broad area of study, but I consider these three problems to be the most fundamental.
Computability: What can a computer do and what can it not do? There are an uncountably infinite number of problems that a computer cannot solve (undecidable), and only a countably infinite number of problems that a computer can solve (decidable). Fortunately, most of the interesting problems are decidable.
Complexity: If a computer can do something, how efficiently can it be done? This goes beyond the Big O you are taught as an undergraduate, and considered language spaces such as P, NP, PSPACE, EXPTIME, and so on. It also considered not only computation time but space (unfortunately, few undergraduates are introduced to space constraints of algorithms, a great interview question is to list an example of a sorting algorithm that takes constant space).
Equivalence: Given two algorithms, do they perform the same computation? Meaning that given the same inputs they will always produce the same outputs (and yes, side effects are also outputs)? A less strict (but of more practical importance) is whether or not a program meets a specification.
Computability and complexity are both important parts of the theory of computation, which is usually built on top of Language Theory, which is itself built on top of Set Theory. The hardest problem is modern mathematics may be P = NP, which is also a Computer Science problem. The third problem requires creating mathematical proofs using Formal Logic. It is also an excellent example of an undecidable problem, meaning that there is no general algorithm that can perform it for every program (in other words, it's something that a computer cannot do).
In addition to Set Theory and Formal Logic, Computer Science relies heavily on Boolean Algebra, Graph Theory, and other areas of Discrete Mathematics. Computer Science is inherently cross-disciplinary, but at its core it is closer to Mathematics than it is to Engineering or Science.
80 years ago the Lingua Franca for diplomacy was French. In fact, French dominated diplomacy from the 17th century until WW2. English didn't start getting used in non-English diplomatic circles until after WW1 (it was quite significant when the Treaty of Versailles was written in both English and French). French has been eclipsed by English, but it is still popular (it is the second most used language in the UN and the EU).
For science and technology, Latin used to dominate. Once people stopped publishing in Latin, three dominant languages appeared: English, French, and German. Which was dominant depended on the field being discussed. Before WW1, German may have been the largest of the three, but after WW1, English was noticeably more dominant (and has only continued to grow).
For business, the general rule is that whenever possible the seller speaks the buyers language. 80 years ago, there were several useful intermediate languages that could be used to facilitate business. The most common would be English, French, and Arabic. I don't know that German was used much outside of Europe and the few German colonies. French was probably the smallest here, since outside of Europe it was most spoken in Africa, where it had to compete with Arabic as a language of trade. There are plenty of other languages which are influential at a regional level, such as Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili, but these haven't had much of an impact globally. Due to its size and economic might, I expect that Chinese will become more influential in the future, and it will slowly become more significant outside of Asia. I don't see Spanish moving outside of Europe and the Americas, at least not in the short term.
You fail at reading comprehension. There is nothing in the summary that says those drives aren't possible, just that they have increased heat and (therefore) an increased rate of failure. This is one reason why average hard drive speeds haven't improved much in the last 15 years.
I once bought six Western Digital 10000 RPM drives for a RAID setup. Three of them failed within the first year. Two failed the next year (including one of the warranty replacements). I replaced them all with six of their 7200 RPM Red drives and other than one DOA that needed to be replaced, I haven't had a failure in almost two years. Sure, anecdotal evidence is purely anecdotal, but it backs up the summary. (Still pissed off about the DOA though.)
In the same time frame I have owned five SSDs, including an Intel SLC that is almost six years old (works great as a small root partition on my Linux box) and I have had only one failure (a 250GB OCZ Vertex Pro). And unlike the hard drives, the data was recoverable from the dead SSD (I could mount it read only, but it wouldn't mount writable). Other than the failed SSD and my laptop drive (no idea who made it), all of my SSDs have been Samsung or Intel drives, and I highly recommend both manufacturers.
Slashdot Mirror
My only problem with this is chromosome counts. Humans have 23 pairs (assuming a healthy individual). Most of the great apes have 24 pairs. Some monkeys hare more, but others have less. I don't know about Neanderthal and other Homo species, but I assume they also have 23 pairs. This means that some species jumps are discrete and not gradual. This means that there can be a single date where a new species appeared.
And I've never heard a satisfactory explanation for how this discrete jump happens. Most changes to chromosome count result in sterile offspring. The explanations that I've heard either didn't make sense, or they were so filled with jargon that I couldn't understand them.
The Milky Way is estimated to have 200 to 400 billion stars. However, just counting stars doesn't tell the whole story. The total mass of Andromeda is estimated at 1.5 x 10^12 solar masses, which is roughly double the 8.5 x 10^11 solar masses estimated for the Milky Way. Still pretty big, but not the 10x you are suggesting.
Of course, that is our best information at present. Historically, estimates have varied quite a bit. Back in 2006 there were a bunch of news articles stating that the Milky Way had fewer stars but more mass from dark matter. And then Andromeda was determined to be four times more massive. And now it's only twice as massive. I expect this to be significantly revised as we learn more about both galaxies (especially our own: it's harder to learn size, shape, and mass from inside than it is from outside) and as we learn more about dark matter.
And he would be right. By historical standards, everyone in America is obscenely wealthy.
.NET doesn't handle leap seconds because Windows doesn't. Its NTP client will ignore seconds values greater than 59, and then fix the time during the next update. This means that Windows can knowingly be up to a second off from UTC time between the introduction of a leap second and its next NTP update. This is important to know if you attempt a fully synchronous distributed system that relies on NTP for synchronization.
I believe that some of the details in jni.h changed from 1.3 to 1.4. Perhaps a change to how JNIEnv was defined? A quick Google shows that the JNI version did in fact change then, but every page describes launching a JVM from within C/C++ code (which does use the JNI version information).
It is possible that my memory could be faulty (it was a long time ago after all) and that the problem was with launching a JVM from native code. Either way, my point stands. It is possible (however unlikely) to upgrade the JVM and have running JNI code break.
You can get the version of the compiler used to compile a class file (which contains the bytecode) using "javap -verbose MyClass.class". A major and minor version will be at the top. For what it is worth, Java 7 uses major version 51.
This is mostly true, but it is worth expanding as there are a lot of misconceptions about this. Java bytecode contains the JVM version it was compiled against, and later JVMs will run it just fine, even if it will no longer compile. I remember when Java added the enum keyword, and all our applications ran fine on the new JVM, even though it wouldn't compile without changes (one of our programmers used enum as the standard variable name for Enumerators). Overall, I've been very impressed with Java's cross platform and version compatibility, but I have found three causes of compatibility problems that are worth knowing about.
First, you cannot rely on non-standard libraries such as the com.sun packages. These aren't guaranteed to exist from one version of Java to the next. They aren't even guaranteed to work the same between minor Java versions. If you limit yourself to the standard libraries, you are safe. Be advised that deprecated methods may be removed in the future, though none have been removed so far.
Second, some programmers explicitly version check the JVM. This is usually for compliance issues, as some organizations feel that code should never run against a JVM that it hasn't been formally verified against. I have also seen this done because code was written to a known bug and some idiot thought it would be better to ensure that the underlying JVM always had the bug rather than work with both bugged and unbugged JVMs. Whatever your reasons, I consider this to be a bad practice, as you won't get security fixes from updated JVMs.
Third, while bytecode should always be forward compatible (barring bugs in the Java library), if you use native code you should be aware that JNI libraries are not guaranteed to work across major JVM versions. JNI libraries must be recompiled to work on newer JVMs.
There may be other sources of compatibility problems, but these are the only that I've run across them in my 15 years maintaining several million lines of Java code.
Stupid Slashdot doesn't have a way to undo a moderation other than posting. I meant to select Funny, and hit Overrated instead.
Your theory would work if the agents that were pulled out were American, but British agents are unlikely to have an SF-86.
I get the same page both with and without AdBlock for Chrome. And I agree, this site isn't a good example of tricky download links.
Robot Santa lives on Neptune.
Maxim 43: If it's stupid and it works, it's still stupid and you're lucky.
Credit goes to Schlock Mercenary.
Only if you are considering desktop PC's. If you consider all computing devices, Linux wins easily. It is run on the largest of supercomputers and the smallest of embedded systems. All Android devices run Linux. Many (most?) home routers run Linux. Even my LG Blu-ray player has some sort of Linux somewhere inside it. Linux is literally everywhere.
This demonstrates the importance of not being seen.
Why stop there? The days of the week are named after the gods associated with the seven celestial bodies (only Saturday wasn't converted from a Roman deity to a German one, as there was no equivalent of Saturn in the Norse pantheon). And the first 6 months of the calendar are all named after Roman gods or religious festivals, so we should rename those as well. Even how we divide time into hours, minutes, and seconds is associated with Babylonian numerology and astrology, which has deep religious significance.
If we are going to start changing names to remove religious connotations, we have a lot of work to do. Or is it just the Christian origin of the name you object to, and not religion in general?
It's been doing okay. NVIDIA is making money, but it is only up 4.5% over the last year. Compare this to 6.6% for Intel, 13% for the Dow Jones, and 16% for the S&P 500. It's only doing well when compared with smaller chipmakers like ARM (up only 4.2% in the last year), Qualcomm (down over 12% in the last year), and AMD (which has lost over 26% in the last year).
I haven't read Linux's rant against C++ for a while, but he is correct that C++ isn't a good choice for an OS kernel. The only major kernel written in C++ that I know of is Windows NT, and it uses only a subset of C++ language features. In particular, it disables exceptions, disables RTTI, removes new/delete, and it doesn't have the standard library. Microsoft wrote their C++ compiler with this in mind, and there is a compiler flag to disable kernel unfriendly features (documented here). For everyone else, it's easier to just say that the C++ subset for kernel development is C (minus the standard library).
For non kernel use, C++ is superior to C in the hands of an expert programmer, but mediocre programmers who don't understand the language tend to write absolutely horrible code. And you can't take an expert C or Java programmer and expect them to write expert C++ code with just a few weeks practice. C++ is one of those languages that you have to dedicate a lot of time to, but it can be worth it if you require highly optimized code, have low latency requirements, or have low space requirements (areas where higher level languages like Java don't do well).
The Soviet Union adopted with the AK-74 in 1974, and most Eastern European and former Soviet Republics use it today. It has many advantages over the old AK-47, including accuracy, penetration, and muzzle velocity. With proper maintenance it is as reliable as the AK-47, and it costs less than other modern assault rifles.
The only nation states I know of that still use the old AK-47 are in the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia (including, I think, India). The big advantage of the AK-47 is that it is cheap enough to hand out like candy to guerrilla fighters, and it's reliable enough to still work after years of little to no maintenance (though it's effectiveness drops quite a lot when doing so).
The Pennsylvania bill did not become law, but the UK and Vermont ones did (according to the article, which is flagged as needing more than three references).
I had never heard of the Red Flag traffic laws before. You learn something new every day. I can see why they would be enacted, and why they were thought to be practical (early self-propelled vehicles weren't much faster than a pedestrian, they were only practical for bulk transport). I suspect that many disruptive technologies have crazy laws and regulations before they become mainstream.
The problem with D isn't the language, which is excellent. Unfortunately, superior languages loose out to inferior ones all the time. (Yes, I'm aware that superior and inferior are subjective terms.)
Language quality is nice, but there are several factors that are more important when it comes to market success. These factors include: third party tools (compilers, debuggers, IDEs, profilers, etc.), third party libraries (both quantity and quality are important here), momentum (C++ and Java are pretty well entrenched, and it will take a lot more than being a better language to significantly displace them), and finally there is the coolness factor. Coolness relies on many things, but the one that I think is most important is having a charismatic creator or evangelist.
Now D is making significant improvements in each of these areas, so I expect it to continue to grow in market share. In particular, LLVM support and having Andrei Alexandrescu as an evangelist are pretty huge. It still has a ways to go before it can catch up to C++, however.
Many definitions of Object Orientation describe methods as functions associated with data (or with an objects state) and define them formally in terms of message passing. In fact, Alan Kay (creator of Smalltalk and I believe the originator of the term Object Oriented) includes objects sending and receiving messages as part of his definition of Object Oriented. Of course, Alan Kay also stated that every object is an instance of a class, so perhaps his definition isn't quite correct today.
Multiple dispatch often relies on inheritance, which is necessary but insufficient for Object Orientation. However, it isn't clear how to map a function call into a message for an object. Message passing is too useful of a model of computation to throw away. Perhaps you can create a definition of Object Oriented that doesn't use it, but I haven't seen one.
This isn't 100% true. I recently flew on a United flight from Atlanta to Dubai, and the nifty map showing the flight path displayed us flying right through the middle of Iraq. Perhaps it used to be true that we wouldn't fly over Iraq, but we do now. I'm sure that there are still altitude restrictions, but I'm just guessing.
Computer Science is a pretty broad area of study, but I consider these three problems to be the most fundamental.
Computability: What can a computer do and what can it not do? There are an uncountably infinite number of problems that a computer cannot solve (undecidable), and only a countably infinite number of problems that a computer can solve (decidable). Fortunately, most of the interesting problems are decidable.
Complexity: If a computer can do something, how efficiently can it be done? This goes beyond the Big O you are taught as an undergraduate, and considered language spaces such as P, NP, PSPACE, EXPTIME, and so on. It also considered not only computation time but space (unfortunately, few undergraduates are introduced to space constraints of algorithms, a great interview question is to list an example of a sorting algorithm that takes constant space).
Equivalence: Given two algorithms, do they perform the same computation? Meaning that given the same inputs they will always produce the same outputs (and yes, side effects are also outputs)? A less strict (but of more practical importance) is whether or not a program meets a specification.
Computability and complexity are both important parts of the theory of computation, which is usually built on top of Language Theory, which is itself built on top of Set Theory. The hardest problem is modern mathematics may be P = NP, which is also a Computer Science problem. The third problem requires creating mathematical proofs using Formal Logic. It is also an excellent example of an undecidable problem, meaning that there is no general algorithm that can perform it for every program (in other words, it's something that a computer cannot do).
In addition to Set Theory and Formal Logic, Computer Science relies heavily on Boolean Algebra, Graph Theory, and other areas of Discrete Mathematics. Computer Science is inherently cross-disciplinary, but at its core it is closer to Mathematics than it is to Engineering or Science.
80 years ago the Lingua Franca for diplomacy was French. In fact, French dominated diplomacy from the 17th century until WW2. English didn't start getting used in non-English diplomatic circles until after WW1 (it was quite significant when the Treaty of Versailles was written in both English and French). French has been eclipsed by English, but it is still popular (it is the second most used language in the UN and the EU).
For science and technology, Latin used to dominate. Once people stopped publishing in Latin, three dominant languages appeared: English, French, and German. Which was dominant depended on the field being discussed. Before WW1, German may have been the largest of the three, but after WW1, English was noticeably more dominant (and has only continued to grow).
For business, the general rule is that whenever possible the seller speaks the buyers language. 80 years ago, there were several useful intermediate languages that could be used to facilitate business. The most common would be English, French, and Arabic. I don't know that German was used much outside of Europe and the few German colonies. French was probably the smallest here, since outside of Europe it was most spoken in Africa, where it had to compete with Arabic as a language of trade. There are plenty of other languages which are influential at a regional level, such as Chinese, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili, but these haven't had much of an impact globally. Due to its size and economic might, I expect that Chinese will become more influential in the future, and it will slowly become more significant outside of Asia. I don't see Spanish moving outside of Europe and the Americas, at least not in the short term.
You fail at reading comprehension. There is nothing in the summary that says those drives aren't possible, just that they have increased heat and (therefore) an increased rate of failure. This is one reason why average hard drive speeds haven't improved much in the last 15 years.
I once bought six Western Digital 10000 RPM drives for a RAID setup. Three of them failed within the first year. Two failed the next year (including one of the warranty replacements). I replaced them all with six of their 7200 RPM Red drives and other than one DOA that needed to be replaced, I haven't had a failure in almost two years. Sure, anecdotal evidence is purely anecdotal, but it backs up the summary. (Still pissed off about the DOA though.)
In the same time frame I have owned five SSDs, including an Intel SLC that is almost six years old (works great as a small root partition on my Linux box) and I have had only one failure (a 250GB OCZ Vertex Pro). And unlike the hard drives, the data was recoverable from the dead SSD (I could mount it read only, but it wouldn't mount writable). Other than the failed SSD and my laptop drive (no idea who made it), all of my SSDs have been Samsung or Intel drives, and I highly recommend both manufacturers.