After the multi-billion dollar (err... Yen) shellacking that Toshiba just took over HD-DVD, I cannot imagine in their wildest dreams that they would try again. The article notes that this is an unconfirmed rumor, and I fully expect that it is just that, a rumor, and one with absolutely no basis in fact.
Excel is indeed slow, and indeed will not teach you algorithms. However, if all you have time for is a few lectures as part of Lab class, or just crammed into some other intro class, Excel is about all you are going to be able to have time for.
As a bad analogy: A single-speed bike with recently removed training wheels isn't used in the Tour de France, but it is what many of us learned to ride on. Yeah, it doesn't teach you how to change gears and is slow, but it is still riding a bike.
Certainly Excel can be a powerful, and useful, tool in data analysis. But I agree, I would never call it programming.
For simulation, however, I would expect you need something a bit more powerful. Perhaps you can teach all the students how to use Excel to analyze experimental data, and design a separate course for simulation design, which would, in turn, use a far more featured language/toolset.
The big danger with trying to teach a "real" language is that you spend the whole semester teaching students with no aptitude for the work the basics of structured programming and they still won't have time for the numerical analysis that is important to them as scientists. Structured programming is as natural as breathing to a geek, but it would be a bit more of a struggle to somebody without the right mindset. I don't see any way of forcing two required semesters of programming on every student. Just not room in the schedule for it.
However, keep in mind that the purpose of college is not to get those students employed, it is to teach them to think. Your brighter students are going to figure out that as a practical skill, most of them will need to know how to program, and would possibly sign up for "Programming for Theoretical Science Majors" as an elective The not-so-bright students... well... they will struggle in the real world, just as they always have.
If so we can definitely add Fortran to that list. We can also add Basic and maybe even for a time, Pascal. Certainly all are wtf languages that I am glad are out of favor.
All those languages were successful, but not because of their popularity. Although I would certainly say that I know of no popular language that you could consider unsuccessful. I'm not sure you could refer to any of those languages as "WTF" languages... they each served the purpose for which they were designed, and did so well. While most of them are no longer suited for those original tasks, that does nothing to diminish their earlier accomplishments.
FORTRAN was, and remains (unlike the other languages you mentioned), a successful, useful, langage. For scientific computing, it remains a commonly-used language, even for new projects. (FORTRAN was designed for numerical analysis, after all.) It produces very efficient binaries for complex numerical computations. This is important if you are running complicated simulations. The language has changed over the years, but it is still in wide use. (I, for one, will certainly not miss the syntactic quirks of Fortran-77, which I had to program in for my frosh Intro to Engineering... in 1995.)
Pascal was designed to be a teaching language, and for that use, it worked quite well. I cut my teeth on Pascal, and it does a much better job of being an introduction to procedural programming than a more powerful language such as C or Java. (The syntax is far easier.) Is Pascal now obsolete as a teaching language? Yes, as it has no hooks for proper OOP.
You could consider BASIC too, to be a smashing success. It certainly was not a powerful or especially advanced language, even at the peak of its popularity. However, if your design goal is an easy-to-learn interpreted language that will run on the most puny of CPU's, it worked quite well.
COBOL is a successful language because it unlocked the power of computers for the businesses of the world. Certainly it was far more suited to the task than any other language available at the time. Certainly if COBOL was invented today, it would be a joke. A bad one, at that. It would be rightly viewed as a sad attempt to make computer programming "friendly". However, at the time, it was nothing less than a masterstroke. It looks silly now because of the lessons we have learned over the last half-century, not because the language was defective by design.
Before you mock the accomplishments of our predecessors, it is valuable to study their history first.
I am completely confused as to how the author can even ask the question "Is COBOL a success?"
Is COBOL old? Certainly. Is COBOL outdated? Yes. Has COBOL since been replaced by better languages? Yep. Would you be insane to start a new, large, application from scratch using COBOL? Of course.
But "Is COBOL a success?" Without doubt, yes. Countless millions (perhaps) billions of lines of production COBOL code are still in use. It is still the core behind many of the applications that run our day-to-day lives. These applications have been running for decades with downtime records that would put an average "Web 2.0" app to shame.
Certainly, IBM deserves a lot of credit for this, maintaining pure 100% backward compatibility for those apps for the last forty years or so, but some credit is due to the language itself.
I personally didn't mind Arwen inserted into the movie that much. Did she have much of a role in the original book? No, of course not. But adding her into the movie added some additional depth to Elrond's charachter, and added some complications to the relationship between Eowyn and Aragorn. (I'm glad however, that P.J. scrapped the original idea to have her show up and kick ass at Helm's Deep.)
While Tolkien may have stated Frodo was a middle-aged, upper-class guy, they did not read that way (at least when I read the books). I pictured Frodo (well before the movies came out) much as how they appeared in the movie. The "fish out of water" aspect was not really stressed in the books.
I NEVER said that the wiretap requests were NOT illegal. Nor did I say that all subpeonas, etc. were legal and not overly broad. I am saying that it is simply not the telco's job to evaluate the legality of the requests. Would it be nice if they had? Sure. But should they be liable for complying with a request (later turning out to be illegal) coming from an authority that is supposed to know what they are doing and not issue the illegal requests? No.
The real folks that should be sued here are the feds that made the illegal requests, but a bizarre chain of legal rulings has put them out of reach.
I do have quite a bit of sympathy for the telcos here. Yes, they were in many cases paid to do the wiretapping, but I do not blame them in the least for assuming that the requests from the govt. agency were legal. It is not the telco's job to evaluate the constitutionality of requests from a government agency.
OTOH, NOT granting them immunity is the only way we are ever going to get to the bottom of the wiretapping scandal, since suits against the govt. have been dismissed for lack of standing. (Lack of standing has been ruled, because the plaintiff's have not been allowed to collect or present evidence that the wiretapping took place at all. A stupid Catch-22.)
Yes, any time you want to access the data is random access... But, is a 30-60 second delay that it takes to spool a tape vs. however long it takes to align and spool this beast worth the disadvantages?
"Long-term archival" is a time measured in years. For most users, a few extra seconds to access data they haven't had to look at in a year or two is not a big deal.
This has got to be about the sixth time this company has gotten astroturfed onto Slashdot, always with a product "just around the corner." I'll believe it when I see one on a data floor.
In any case, it is a whole big pile of useless. Let's go over the flaws, keeping in mind the alleged target market for long-term archive storage. (As opposed to their last "target market" of near-line storage. Since it's only WORM, that kind of shot that down. Whoops!) In this market, the competition is tape, NOT hard drives. (Hard drives suck for long-term archival, for reasons mostly having to do with fragility and stuck bearings.)
1) The only product even promised for sale in the near future has a puny 20MB/sec data rate. We are talking five years or so behind tape in this regard. Given their schedule track record, don't hold your breath waiting for the later generations. 2) This is a compnay with a ZERO track record of shipping product. Why on earth should we believe their longevity claims? 3) How does this compete at all with old-fashioned analog storage? If I really want to archive visual media until the end of time, nothing beats old fashioned film. It degrades gracefully and has a century-long track record. (Not that that track record is universally good, but it has much improved over the years, and is well-understood.) Long-term storage of audio is trivial, as pressed CD's don't have the long-term issues that CD-R's do. 4) The capacity is a joke. 300GB? Is that the best they can do? How long have they been promising this? Current LTO is 800GB, and it actully is shipping, from companies that have a long history of generally knowing what they are doing.
Whoops! Looking at their "Markets" page, looks like they haven't given up the long-term data storage market! Yeah, they are not going to sell a single one to that market. Why?
1) They mistakenly assume that companies actually WANT to read data a decade down the road for regulatory compliance purposes... They don't! They just want the regulator to be satisfied they made a good-faith effort to do so. 2) Not doing compression on the drive makes it a non-starter here. Business records are VERY compressible. Enterprise tape drives have always compressed data. Not doing so either kills CPU or sucks media. 3) Check out that chart showing the "advantages" of this crap. Let's pick out the lies: A) "Capacity Roadmap" - The LTO roadmap goes considerably beyond the next capacity bump to 1.6TB, and it is at 800GB NOW. The InPhase roadmap stops at 1.6TB, and they are only at a puny 300GB right now. B) "Transfer Rate Roadmap" - Pretty much the same problem. They are comparing their theoretical roadmap with what tape is shipping today. C) "Media Archive Life" - 50 yrs? Based on what? LTO's spec is 30 years (not a measly 10), which isn't bad, and I am more likely to believe LTO's promises than these guys. D) "Media Price" - Tape is $.25 - $1.00 a Gig? Um no. Not even close. A Gen 4 cartridge can be bought for about $.10 - $.12 a Gig. Their prices, on the other hand, are at the max end of their range. (How can a company with only one product have a range of media prices? The mind boggles.) E) "Media Handling Issues" - While I suppose this could be a theoretical advantage for offices, it's not for studios. They already have oodles of low temp and humidity storage for their film. F) "Physical WORM" - Businesses don't care. They are just trying to satisfy regulators, for which WORM on the drive is good enough. This is just a nice way for InPhase to say that their media is not reusable. G) "Random Access" - What a joke. If your target market is long-term archival, why on earth would you need that? H) "HW Security Features" - Err... LTO tape encryption? Did they not get that memo? What on earth is "Optical Encryption" anyway? Unless there is some kind of key exchange with the host, that is not encryption at all. 4) They talk about using it for near-line storage, but it is a WORM technology rig
Yes, we have laws that require businesses to make "reasonable accommodations" to the disabled. Reserved parking places and entry ramps are but a few. (Are lever doorknobs that big of a deal? I prefer them myself...) Now, the ADA is not perfect, and "reasonable" is certainly open to interpretation, which is why we have courts.
Why do we have such a law at all?
Because, as a country, have decided that people that are disabled, (usually through no fault of their own) deserve an opportunity to meaningfully participate in society, even if that participation exacts nominal costs from those that provide public accommodations that make up society.
Yep, ADA compliance costs money, in some cases quite a bit of money. Without the ADA, those that chose to accommodate the disabled would be at a competitive disadvantage, due to increased costs not borne by those that did not choose to accommodate. That leads to either no accommodations, or higher-priced stores being the only ones accessible to the disabled. The ADA spreads those costs out so that they do not have to be absorbed only by the disabled.
All the increased costs aren't good for business. Without the ADA, those required curb cut-outs or reserved parking places likely would not exist. Why would any business choose to voluntarily put those in?
If you were blind, would you be perfectly content to simply have huge swaths of the internet closed off to you, despite the fact that opening them up requires nothing more than nominal expense and some thought put into the web design? If you were in a wheelchair, would you be content to be essentially forced to never leave the house, due to a lack of curb cut-outs, ramps, or doors a chair could fit through?
There is no law that that says that the Rx companies can't pay somebody to blog on their behalf. Would it be kind of scummy? Sure. Would it be something you could sue somebody else over? No. Not inherently. Now, it would certainly be possible for her blog to contain legally actionable material, but that is a separate matter.
There are indeed many algorithms that run well in a parallelized environment. IBM even makes the world's fastest supercomputers that take advantage of this fact.
However, there are many other tasks fit for computers that do not parallelize well. In addition, writing massively parallelized software is often quite HARD. It is far easier to design software for a single CPU running very quickly, than a whole boatload of CPU's running slower. There have in fact been quite a few articles in CS journals lately wondering how on earth software is going to be written for all these new bunch-o-cores CPUs. While it can be done, it is tedious, expensive, and error-prone for all but the most trivial tasks.
Has anybody ever noticed that the bulk of the FTC settlements pretty much state: "so-and-so is prohibited from doing things in the future that they never should have done anyway. They must pay $xM dollars, which they don't have, so they are really going to pay $5."
No criminal charges for fraud referred to DOJ, etc.
Is the lesson here: "You can scam folks as much as you want, and only have to stop once the FTC catches you and all of your profits are secreted away in offshore accounts?"
When you delete e-mails (even if you hit "Delete Forever"), GMail does not actually delete your e-mails right away. All that happens is you can't see them any more. Google has been rather forthright about this from day 1 of the Beta; it raised a big furor when GMail was first released.
From the GMail Privacy Policy: (which is blessedly short, and in English) "You may organize or delete your messages through your Gmail account or terminate your account through the Google Account section of Gmail settings. Such deletions or terminations will take immediate effect in your account view. Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems."
Another element of a contract it the "meeting of the minds". Where one party clearly makes an unreasonable pricing mistake, contract law allows the contract to be repudiated. For this same reason, if you bid 10x too much on eBay for a easily priced item, eBay will allow you to withdraw your bid with no repercussions.
In this case, the advertised price was far lower than the item sold for elsewhere... so much so, that it was clearly not just some kind of special promotion.
Amazon clearly did not mean to charge so little, so they quite properly have cancelled the orders. Certainly charging the correct amount without authorization would be improper, but in this case, no harm, no foul.
It isn't the smaller process that increases yields, it is the fact that the ensuing smaller die takes up less space on the wafer. Less wafer real-estate == less chance that a defect in the wafer will occupy the space of a particular chip.
For instance, say one 300mm wafer has 50 defects evenly distributed over it's surface, and one wafer can hold 100 chips with the old process, 200 with the new. The 10 defects result in a 50% yield with the old process, a 75% yield with the new process.
That said, yes, almost all new processes take a little while to work out the bugs. But after the bugs are worked out, you can achieve much higher yields...
The wiimote has factory set calibrations, it doesn't recalibrate itself on-the-fly. The only thing IR is used for is limited yaw calculations, depth (distance from the sensor bar) estimation, and calculating the X,Y position you are pointing at on the screen. For these the sensor bar is used as a primary sensor because that's the only point of reference that can be used to get that information
What do you mean the "only thing IR is used for is yaw, depth... X, Y position?" What else is there besides X, Y, and Z acceleration, which of course is done by the accelerometers? When I said that the IR bar was used for "calibration" I meant re-setting the reference point and correcting for drift in the accelerometers. I did not mean "re-calibrating" as in the sort of thing like setting the accelerometer sensitivity that would be done with factory test equipment. I would think it could guess delta in yaw by putting an accelerometer at each end, but I admit I haven't taken one apart to check it out.
What the IR cam does is give the software a "starting point" to figure out what the data from the accelerometers means for actual remote position. As in, the camera sees the IR bar, and notes that the Remote is currently pointed 20-degrees "up" from horizontal. Somebody then walks in front of the remote... while the signal is blocked, the user points it a further 10 degrees up, according to the accelerometers; the software then knows to send a 30-degree Y signal to the console. The interloper then stops blocking the camera, and it the remote discovers that it was really 31-degrees, it uses this new information to correct the signal and compensate for the drift.
I remember reading articles about the Wii Remote, and the engineers stating that the remote drifted far too much relying on accelerometers alone, and that the IR cam was the best solution they could come up with; adding parts to the remote was certainly not their first choice. Combining the two senor systems in my mind was a stroke of genius. They avoid the gameplay issues that come with relying on line-of-sight, but prevent the inevitable drift that would come with only using accelerometers.
The Wii Remote tracks its position via an infrared sensor that users must attach to their televisions.
Firstly, while it is called the "sensor bar", it isn't a sensor at all, it is just a row of IR emitters. There is no receiver on the bar. Instead, there is an infrared camera in the Wii Remote that takes a "picture" of the bar to figure out which way the remote is pointed.
Also, the IR system is only used as as calibration for the accelerometers. The accelerometers in the Wii Remote still do the bulk of the work. If the Wii Remote relied on the IR camera as the primary sensor, it would be useless every time line of sight to the sensor bar was lost. What the Wii Remote does is keep rough track of remote position using the accelerometers, and then when the camera is pointed at the sensor bar, it re-calculates the starting point for the motion tracking to start from.
As far as this outfit using the fact that golf on the Wii leads to bad golf habits in real life: Duh! The Wii is a toy; it is not meant to be an accurate golfing simulator.
I can fully understand Nintendo not putting gyro's in the Wii Remote. It would have driven up the cost, reduced battery life, and introduced a moving part just begging to break.
Except for the building itself, which just doesn't cost that particularly much (not that much more than any other industrial building) pretty much none of the money ends up in the local economy. If you build a data center in BFE, none of the infrastructure bits of the data center, such as the cooling, power, cabling, etc., can be locally sourced, as Random Rural County simply does not have vendors to do the work. Local firms can lay the pad, put up the walls, build the floor, provide the mains power, and build the small parking lot. After that, it is all specialty work that will have to be brought in from somewhere else.
Here in NC, the western part of the state (where the data center is being built) is currently undergoing a massive drought. The water required for large-scale chiller systems would be a fairly decent drain on the supply, if it were in place now. Even though they pay for it, that does not mean that there is no impact to them using it.
Local governments are stupid. They see "Google", and visions of their own little budding Silicon Valley dance through their heads. They just completely ignore the fact that there are pretty much no local benefits to such a facility. All they get is one more industrial building, a tiny handful of high-paying jobs (none of which will come from the local labor pool) and a slightly larger handful of decent jobs (also many of which will not come from local labor). Most communities would be better served by a corporate branch office of even a moderate size, or a smallish factory.
A $600M dollar facility WOULD trigger a decent tax infusion, if Google actually ever paid taxes on these facilities. They don't, as taxes are usually the first thing the governments waive to try and lure it there.
I live in North Carolina and all this has come up recently with one they are building here. Basically, these are very poor tools for job creation. Only a very few employees of the data centers are highly paid engineers; most of the employees do relatively low-paying (for the IT industry, anyway) jobs of HW maintenance and site maintenance. Even if the jobs were halfway decent, even those huge data centers just don't need very many people to run them. In a shop like Google's, where the servers consist of rack after rack of the exact same thing, there just isn't much of the high change-ticket volume that drives the work at most corporate data centers.
Personally, I disagree very strongly with the sweetheart deal that they were handed here in NC. They are getting more-or-less complete freedom from taxes for a great many years on the facility, while sucking fairly large amounts of power out of the local grid, using not-plentiful water for cooling, and creating very few jobs. Little to none of the high-paying jobs will come out of the local labor pool.
If someone breaks into my house, steals my stuff, and puts it in their house, I am not allowed to just go into the thief's house and steal it back. I am required to give them the due process of law, file criminal charges, provide evidence to the prosecution, and let the jury decide.
Ah, but if the money is deposited into a bank, the laws governing ECH transactions (Electronic Clearing House) absolutely state that fraudulent transactions can be reversed. PayPal is sort of Bank-like, so I imagine that their terms of service state that unless somebody steals access to your account, you are liable for any activity that takes place in it, including fraud, just like the banks. If it was a real bank account, it would be no different.
Certainly, if you want to fight the dispute, you can duke it out in court... Conversely, if PayPal/the Bank decides the disputer is in the wrong, they can duke it out in court too.
If criminal A breaks into the house of victim B, stashes the stuff in victim C's house before moving it to their own house, victim C's landlord can't just decree that victim C has to pay back victim B for the loss.
If physical goods are involved (a "Shipping Mule"), then you, the middle-man, aren't technically for anything. The tricky part is convincing the cops/jury you are an unwitting dupe, as opposed to somebody that knew what was going on.
They do realize that IBM, from it's lofty perch near the top of the Fortune 500, doesn't take too kindly to patent extortion? Especially pathetic ones like this? The same IBM that is a company that does not manufacture phones of any kind, smart or otherwise? The same IBM that has a larger patent portfolio than the next-highest competitor by a substantial margin? The same company that probably has a patent on breathing and a another patent on filing patent lawsuits? The same IBM with a quite famous, take-no-prisoners legal strategy? The same IBM that just spent more in legal fees fighting SCO than the company was worth?
Methinks a couple of those plaintiffs are going to get dropped from the suit, quite quickly. Unless of course IBM wants to make an example of them (not out of the question), in which case they will have their patent forcibly invalidated, with maybe some Sherman Act sprinkled on top for good measure.
When is the last time IBM produced something good that people wanted to buy?
What planet are you living on? IBM is, and has been since the day it was founded as the Tabulating Machine Company by Herman Hollerith in the 1880's, the largest provider of electronic IT to the businesses of the world.
For the $98.8 Billion they made in revenue last year, somebody must think they have something worth buying; like:
Mainframes: The world's largest IT systems still run on IBM Mainframes because they simply pretty much never break, and they have had continuous, complete, software and hardware backward compatibility for about forty years. (As in, you can theoretically take a functioning punch-card reader from the '70's, a succession of interface adapters, a stack of cards, and use them to boot a mainframe fresh off the assembly line in New York without changing a single line, er... card, of code.) This sort of stuff is important to large businesses, who hate re-writing major, working, systems. I have personally seen an insurance company still using reel-to-reel tape connected to a mainframe only a couple of years old. (They received employee data from the state on the tapes.) Chips: All three major game consoles use IBM processors. Software: Somebody must like Lotus Notes, because a lot of people still use it. IBM also produces the DB2 database, Tivoli management software, WebSphere middleware, Rational dev tools, and a host of other products. Services: IBM is the largest provider of IT services spanning the whole spectrum of services a business might want to provide from hardware field service to management consulting. Servers: They still have the largest market share for servers. OS'es: Plenty of folks still purchase z/OS, i/OS, and AIX. OS/2 was small potatoes in comparison...
Oh, also, the Rational Unified Process is more than just a book with some suggestions in it. There is also a large suite of tools to back it up. And for large I/T projects involving very large teams of programmers, it doesn't pay to just make up a development process on the fly.
Lastly, Google does indeed spend more per employee than this, but all the "scut" work at Google (i.e. Hardware Maint., customer service, etc.) is farmed out to contractors, who don't get Google benefits or Google pay.
Do not concern yourself with learning the language-of-the-month. You are a Computer Science student, and you don't want to end up as somebody who gets their job outsourced to Bangalore when the new fad language comes into vogue.
Start by decided what career path you would like to take. There are two primary ones for CsC students: The Computer Industry or Corporate IT.
You want to work for MS or SAP? Do you want to write code for products that will be sold? You need to know lower-level stuff. You need to know C, C++, and probably Java. Do not worry about all those languages that are primarily used for writing database applications or building websites. Beyond that, take classes in technical topics that interest you.
Do you want to work in Corporate IT? If so, you will never need C, and are unlikely to need C++ (although they wouldn't hurt). Instead, learn everything you can about databases, SQL, and a couple of languages used for DB front-ends.
ASM is nice, in the same way that higher math is nice (stretches your mind), but unless you want to write embedded software, you are unlikely to need ASM.
Beyond that. You MUST have vaguely relevant experience, or you will have a far tougher time getting a job after graduation. Your jobs don't even have to be in your particular specialty, but they MUST be technical and/or involve leadership of some sort. For myself, I managed a retail store at a Cub Scout camp for three years (also in high school), spent one summer in the Pentagon doing help-desk-type work, and spent another summer doing lightweight webmaster and DB front-end work. On top of that, I did help-desk-type work for the school's IT dept.
Slashdot Mirror
After the multi-billion dollar (err... Yen) shellacking that Toshiba just took over HD-DVD, I cannot imagine in their wildest dreams that they would try again. The article notes that this is an unconfirmed rumor, and I fully expect that it is just that, a rumor, and one with absolutely no basis in fact.
SirWired
Excel is indeed slow, and indeed will not teach you algorithms. However, if all you have time for is a few lectures as part of Lab class, or just crammed into some other intro class, Excel is about all you are going to be able to have time for.
As a bad analogy: A single-speed bike with recently removed training wheels isn't used in the Tour de France, but it is what many of us learned to ride on. Yeah, it doesn't teach you how to change gears and is slow, but it is still riding a bike.
SirWired
It depends on what you feel they MUST learn.
Certainly Excel can be a powerful, and useful, tool in data analysis. But I agree, I would never call it programming.
For simulation, however, I would expect you need something a bit more powerful. Perhaps you can teach all the students how to use Excel to analyze experimental data, and design a separate course for simulation design, which would, in turn, use a far more featured language/toolset.
The big danger with trying to teach a "real" language is that you spend the whole semester teaching students with no aptitude for the work the basics of structured programming and they still won't have time for the numerical analysis that is important to them as scientists. Structured programming is as natural as breathing to a geek, but it would be a bit more of a struggle to somebody without the right mindset. I don't see any way of forcing two required semesters of programming on every student. Just not room in the schedule for it.
However, keep in mind that the purpose of college is not to get those students employed, it is to teach them to think. Your brighter students are going to figure out that as a practical skill, most of them will need to know how to program, and would possibly sign up for "Programming for Theoretical Science Majors" as an elective The not-so-bright students... well... they will struggle in the real world, just as they always have.
SirWired
Is popularity == success? Maybe.
If so we can definitely add Fortran to that list. We can also add Basic and maybe even for a time, Pascal. Certainly all are wtf languages that I am glad are out of favor.
All those languages were successful, but not because of their popularity. Although I would certainly say that I know of no popular language that you could consider unsuccessful. I'm not sure you could refer to any of those languages as "WTF" languages... they each served the purpose for which they were designed, and did so well. While most of them are no longer suited for those original tasks, that does nothing to diminish their earlier accomplishments.
FORTRAN was, and remains (unlike the other languages you mentioned), a successful, useful, langage. For scientific computing, it remains a commonly-used language, even for new projects. (FORTRAN was designed for numerical analysis, after all.) It produces very efficient binaries for complex numerical computations. This is important if you are running complicated simulations. The language has changed over the years, but it is still in wide use. (I, for one, will certainly not miss the syntactic quirks of Fortran-77, which I had to program in for my frosh Intro to Engineering... in 1995.)
Pascal was designed to be a teaching language, and for that use, it worked quite well. I cut my teeth on Pascal, and it does a much better job of being an introduction to procedural programming than a more powerful language such as C or Java. (The syntax is far easier.) Is Pascal now obsolete as a teaching language? Yes, as it has no hooks for proper OOP.
You could consider BASIC too, to be a smashing success. It certainly was not a powerful or especially advanced language, even at the peak of its popularity. However, if your design goal is an easy-to-learn interpreted language that will run on the most puny of CPU's, it worked quite well.
COBOL is a successful language because it unlocked the power of computers for the businesses of the world. Certainly it was far more suited to the task than any other language available at the time. Certainly if COBOL was invented today, it would be a joke. A bad one, at that. It would be rightly viewed as a sad attempt to make computer programming "friendly". However, at the time, it was nothing less than a masterstroke. It looks silly now because of the lessons we have learned over the last half-century, not because the language was defective by design.
Before you mock the accomplishments of our predecessors, it is valuable to study their history first.
SirWired
I am completely confused as to how the author can even ask the question "Is COBOL a success?"
Is COBOL old? Certainly.
Is COBOL outdated? Yes.
Has COBOL since been replaced by better languages? Yep.
Would you be insane to start a new, large, application from scratch using COBOL? Of course.
But "Is COBOL a success?" Without doubt, yes. Countless millions (perhaps) billions of lines of production COBOL code are still in use. It is still the core behind many of the applications that run our day-to-day lives. These applications have been running for decades with downtime records that would put an average "Web 2.0" app to shame.
Certainly, IBM deserves a lot of credit for this, maintaining pure 100% backward compatibility for those apps for the last forty years or so, but some credit is due to the language itself.
SirWired
I personally didn't mind Arwen inserted into the movie that much. Did she have much of a role in the original book? No, of course not. But adding her into the movie added some additional depth to Elrond's charachter, and added some complications to the relationship between Eowyn and Aragorn. (I'm glad however, that P.J. scrapped the original idea to have her show up and kick ass at Helm's Deep.)
While Tolkien may have stated Frodo was a middle-aged, upper-class guy, they did not read that way (at least when I read the books). I pictured Frodo (well before the movies came out) much as how they appeared in the movie. The "fish out of water" aspect was not really stressed in the books.
SirWired
I NEVER said that the wiretap requests were NOT illegal. Nor did I say that all subpeonas, etc. were legal and not overly broad. I am saying that it is simply not the telco's job to evaluate the legality of the requests. Would it be nice if they had? Sure. But should they be liable for complying with a request (later turning out to be illegal) coming from an authority that is supposed to know what they are doing and not issue the illegal requests? No.
The real folks that should be sued here are the feds that made the illegal requests, but a bizarre chain of legal rulings has put them out of reach.
SirWired
I do have quite a bit of sympathy for the telcos here. Yes, they were in many cases paid to do the wiretapping, but I do not blame them in the least for assuming that the requests from the govt. agency were legal. It is not the telco's job to evaluate the constitutionality of requests from a government agency.
OTOH, NOT granting them immunity is the only way we are ever going to get to the bottom of the wiretapping scandal, since suits against the govt. have been dismissed for lack of standing. (Lack of standing has been ruled, because the plaintiff's have not been allowed to collect or present evidence that the wiretapping took place at all. A stupid Catch-22.)
SirWired
Yes, any time you want to access the data is random access... But, is a 30-60 second delay that it takes to spool a tape vs. however long it takes to align and spool this beast worth the disadvantages?
"Long-term archival" is a time measured in years. For most users, a few extra seconds to access data they haven't had to look at in a year or two is not a big deal.
SirWired
This has got to be about the sixth time this company has gotten astroturfed onto Slashdot, always with a product "just around the corner." I'll believe it when I see one on a data floor.
In any case, it is a whole big pile of useless. Let's go over the flaws, keeping in mind the alleged target market for long-term archive storage. (As opposed to their last "target market" of near-line storage. Since it's only WORM, that kind of shot that down. Whoops!) In this market, the competition is tape, NOT hard drives. (Hard drives suck for long-term archival, for reasons mostly having to do with fragility and stuck bearings.)
1) The only product even promised for sale in the near future has a puny 20MB/sec data rate. We are talking five years or so behind tape in this regard. Given their schedule track record, don't hold your breath waiting for the later generations.
2) This is a compnay with a ZERO track record of shipping product. Why on earth should we believe their longevity claims?
3) How does this compete at all with old-fashioned analog storage? If I really want to archive visual media until the end of time, nothing beats old fashioned film. It degrades gracefully and has a century-long track record. (Not that that track record is universally good, but it has much improved over the years, and is well-understood.) Long-term storage of audio is trivial, as pressed CD's don't have the long-term issues that CD-R's do.
4) The capacity is a joke. 300GB? Is that the best they can do? How long have they been promising this? Current LTO is 800GB, and it actully is shipping, from companies that have a long history of generally knowing what they are doing.
Whoops! Looking at their "Markets" page, looks like they haven't given up the long-term data storage market! Yeah, they are not going to sell a single one to that market. Why?
1) They mistakenly assume that companies actually WANT to read data a decade down the road for regulatory compliance purposes... They don't! They just want the regulator to be satisfied they made a good-faith effort to do so.
2) Not doing compression on the drive makes it a non-starter here. Business records are VERY compressible. Enterprise tape drives have always compressed data. Not doing so either kills CPU or sucks media.
3) Check out that chart showing the "advantages" of this crap. Let's pick out the lies:
A) "Capacity Roadmap" - The LTO roadmap goes considerably beyond the next capacity bump to 1.6TB, and it is at 800GB NOW. The InPhase roadmap stops at 1.6TB, and they are only at a puny 300GB right now.
B) "Transfer Rate Roadmap" - Pretty much the same problem. They are comparing their theoretical roadmap with what tape is shipping today.
C) "Media Archive Life" - 50 yrs? Based on what? LTO's spec is 30 years (not a measly 10), which isn't bad, and I am more likely to believe LTO's promises than these guys.
D) "Media Price" - Tape is $.25 - $1.00 a Gig? Um no. Not even close. A Gen 4 cartridge can be bought for about $.10 - $.12 a Gig. Their prices, on the other hand, are at the max end of their range. (How can a company with only one product have a range of media prices? The mind boggles.)
E) "Media Handling Issues" - While I suppose this could be a theoretical advantage for offices, it's not for studios. They already have oodles of low temp and humidity storage for their film.
F) "Physical WORM" - Businesses don't care. They are just trying to satisfy regulators, for which WORM on the drive is good enough. This is just a nice way for InPhase to say that their media is not reusable.
G) "Random Access" - What a joke. If your target market is long-term archival, why on earth would you need that?
H) "HW Security Features" - Err... LTO tape encryption? Did they not get that memo? What on earth is "Optical Encryption" anyway? Unless there is some kind of key exchange with the host, that is not encryption at all.
4) They talk about using it for near-line storage, but it is a WORM technology rig
Yes, we have laws that require businesses to make "reasonable accommodations" to the disabled. Reserved parking places and entry ramps are but a few. (Are lever doorknobs that big of a deal? I prefer them myself...) Now, the ADA is not perfect, and "reasonable" is certainly open to interpretation, which is why we have courts.
Why do we have such a law at all?
Because, as a country, have decided that people that are disabled, (usually through no fault of their own) deserve an opportunity to meaningfully participate in society, even if that participation exacts nominal costs from those that provide public accommodations that make up society.
Yep, ADA compliance costs money, in some cases quite a bit of money. Without the ADA, those that chose to accommodate the disabled would be at a competitive disadvantage, due to increased costs not borne by those that did not choose to accommodate. That leads to either no accommodations, or higher-priced stores being the only ones accessible to the disabled. The ADA spreads those costs out so that they do not have to be absorbed only by the disabled.
All the increased costs aren't good for business. Without the ADA, those required curb cut-outs or reserved parking places likely would not exist. Why would any business choose to voluntarily put those in?
If you were blind, would you be perfectly content to simply have huge swaths of the internet closed off to you, despite the fact that opening them up requires nothing more than nominal expense and some thought put into the web design? If you were in a wheelchair, would you be content to be essentially forced to never leave the house, due to a lack of curb cut-outs, ramps, or doors a chair could fit through?
SirWired
There is no law that that says that the Rx companies can't pay somebody to blog on their behalf. Would it be kind of scummy? Sure. Would it be something you could sue somebody else over? No. Not inherently. Now, it would certainly be possible for her blog to contain legally actionable material, but that is a separate matter.
SirWired
There are indeed many algorithms that run well in a parallelized environment. IBM even makes the world's fastest supercomputers that take advantage of this fact.
However, there are many other tasks fit for computers that do not parallelize well. In addition, writing massively parallelized software is often quite HARD. It is far easier to design software for a single CPU running very quickly, than a whole boatload of CPU's running slower. There have in fact been quite a few articles in CS journals lately wondering how on earth software is going to be written for all these new bunch-o-cores CPUs. While it can be done, it is tedious, expensive, and error-prone for all but the most trivial tasks.
SirWired
Has anybody ever noticed that the bulk of the FTC settlements pretty much state: "so-and-so is prohibited from doing things in the future that they never should have done anyway. They must pay $xM dollars, which they don't have, so they are really going to pay $5."
No criminal charges for fraud referred to DOJ, etc.
Is the lesson here: "You can scam folks as much as you want, and only have to stop once the FTC catches you and all of your profits are secreted away in offshore accounts?"
SirWired
When you delete e-mails (even if you hit "Delete Forever"), GMail does not actually delete your e-mails right away. All that happens is you can't see them any more. Google has been rather forthright about this from day 1 of the Beta; it raised a big furor when GMail was first released.
From the GMail Privacy Policy: (which is blessedly short, and in English)
"You may organize or delete your messages through your Gmail account or terminate your account through the Google Account section of Gmail settings. Such deletions or terminations will take immediate effect in your account view. Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems."
SirWired
Another element of a contract it the "meeting of the minds". Where one party clearly makes an unreasonable pricing mistake, contract law allows the contract to be repudiated. For this same reason, if you bid 10x too much on eBay for a easily priced item, eBay will allow you to withdraw your bid with no repercussions.
In this case, the advertised price was far lower than the item sold for elsewhere... so much so, that it was clearly not just some kind of special promotion.
Amazon clearly did not mean to charge so little, so they quite properly have cancelled the orders. Certainly charging the correct amount without authorization would be improper, but in this case, no harm, no foul.
SirWired
It isn't the smaller process that increases yields, it is the fact that the ensuing smaller die takes up less space on the wafer. Less wafer real-estate == less chance that a defect in the wafer will occupy the space of a particular chip.
For instance, say one 300mm wafer has 50 defects evenly distributed over it's surface, and one wafer can hold 100 chips with the old process, 200 with the new. The 10 defects result in a 50% yield with the old process, a 75% yield with the new process.
That said, yes, almost all new processes take a little while to work out the bugs. But after the bugs are worked out, you can achieve much higher yields...
SirWired
The wiimote has factory set calibrations, it doesn't recalibrate itself on-the-fly. The only thing IR is used for is limited yaw calculations, depth (distance from the sensor bar) estimation, and calculating the X,Y position you are pointing at on the screen. For these the sensor bar is used as a primary sensor because that's the only point of reference that can be used to get that information
What do you mean the "only thing IR is used for is yaw, depth... X, Y position?" What else is there besides X, Y, and Z acceleration, which of course is done by the accelerometers? When I said that the IR bar was used for "calibration" I meant re-setting the reference point and correcting for drift in the accelerometers. I did not mean "re-calibrating" as in the sort of thing like setting the accelerometer sensitivity that would be done with factory test equipment. I would think it could guess delta in yaw by putting an accelerometer at each end, but I admit I haven't taken one apart to check it out.
What the IR cam does is give the software a "starting point" to figure out what the data from the accelerometers means for actual remote position. As in, the camera sees the IR bar, and notes that the Remote is currently pointed 20-degrees "up" from horizontal. Somebody then walks in front of the remote... while the signal is blocked, the user points it a further 10 degrees up, according to the accelerometers; the software then knows to send a 30-degree Y signal to the console. The interloper then stops blocking the camera, and it the remote discovers that it was really 31-degrees, it uses this new information to correct the signal and compensate for the drift.
I remember reading articles about the Wii Remote, and the engineers stating that the remote drifted far too much relying on accelerometers alone, and that the IR cam was the best solution they could come up with; adding parts to the remote was certainly not their first choice. Combining the two senor systems in my mind was a stroke of genius. They avoid the gameplay issues that come with relying on line-of-sight, but prevent the inevitable drift that would come with only using accelerometers.
SirWired
The Wii Remote tracks its position via an infrared sensor that users must attach to their televisions.
Firstly, while it is called the "sensor bar", it isn't a sensor at all, it is just a row of IR emitters. There is no receiver on the bar. Instead, there is an infrared camera in the Wii Remote that takes a "picture" of the bar to figure out which way the remote is pointed.
Also, the IR system is only used as as calibration for the accelerometers. The accelerometers in the Wii Remote still do the bulk of the work. If the Wii Remote relied on the IR camera as the primary sensor, it would be useless every time line of sight to the sensor bar was lost. What the Wii Remote does is keep rough track of remote position using the accelerometers, and then when the camera is pointed at the sensor bar, it re-calculates the starting point for the motion tracking to start from.
As far as this outfit using the fact that golf on the Wii leads to bad golf habits in real life: Duh! The Wii is a toy; it is not meant to be an accurate golfing simulator.
I can fully understand Nintendo not putting gyro's in the Wii Remote. It would have driven up the cost, reduced battery life, and introduced a moving part just begging to break.
SirWired
Except for the building itself, which just doesn't cost that particularly much (not that much more than any other industrial building) pretty much none of the money ends up in the local economy. If you build a data center in BFE, none of the infrastructure bits of the data center, such as the cooling, power, cabling, etc., can be locally sourced, as Random Rural County simply does not have vendors to do the work. Local firms can lay the pad, put up the walls, build the floor, provide the mains power, and build the small parking lot. After that, it is all specialty work that will have to be brought in from somewhere else.
Here in NC, the western part of the state (where the data center is being built) is currently undergoing a massive drought. The water required for large-scale chiller systems would be a fairly decent drain on the supply, if it were in place now. Even though they pay for it, that does not mean that there is no impact to them using it.
Local governments are stupid. They see "Google", and visions of their own little budding Silicon Valley dance through their heads. They just completely ignore the fact that there are pretty much no local benefits to such a facility. All they get is one more industrial building, a tiny handful of high-paying jobs (none of which will come from the local labor pool) and a slightly larger handful of decent jobs (also many of which will not come from local labor). Most communities would be better served by a corporate branch office of even a moderate size, or a smallish factory.
A $600M dollar facility WOULD trigger a decent tax infusion, if Google actually ever paid taxes on these facilities. They don't, as taxes are usually the first thing the governments waive to try and lure it there.
SirWired
I live in North Carolina and all this has come up recently with one they are building here. Basically, these are very poor tools for job creation. Only a very few employees of the data centers are highly paid engineers; most of the employees do relatively low-paying (for the IT industry, anyway) jobs of HW maintenance and site maintenance. Even if the jobs were halfway decent, even those huge data centers just don't need very many people to run them. In a shop like Google's, where the servers consist of rack after rack of the exact same thing, there just isn't much of the high change-ticket volume that drives the work at most corporate data centers.
Personally, I disagree very strongly with the sweetheart deal that they were handed here in NC. They are getting more-or-less complete freedom from taxes for a great many years on the facility, while sucking fairly large amounts of power out of the local grid, using not-plentiful water for cooling, and creating very few jobs. Little to none of the high-paying jobs will come out of the local labor pool.
SirWired
If someone breaks into my house, steals my stuff, and puts it in their house, I am not allowed to just go into the thief's house and steal it back. I am required to give them the due process of law, file criminal charges, provide evidence to the prosecution, and let the jury decide.
Ah, but if the money is deposited into a bank, the laws governing ECH transactions (Electronic Clearing House) absolutely state that fraudulent transactions can be reversed. PayPal is sort of Bank-like, so I imagine that their terms of service state that unless somebody steals access to your account, you are liable for any activity that takes place in it, including fraud, just like the banks. If it was a real bank account, it would be no different.
Certainly, if you want to fight the dispute, you can duke it out in court... Conversely, if PayPal/the Bank decides the disputer is in the wrong, they can duke it out in court too.
If criminal A breaks into the house of victim B, stashes the stuff in victim C's house before moving it to their own house, victim C's landlord can't just decree that victim C has to pay back victim B for the loss.
If physical goods are involved (a "Shipping Mule"), then you, the middle-man, aren't technically for anything. The tricky part is convincing the cops/jury you are an unwitting dupe, as opposed to somebody that knew what was going on.
SirWired
They do realize that IBM, from it's lofty perch near the top of the Fortune 500, doesn't take too kindly to patent extortion? Especially pathetic ones like this? The same IBM that is a company that does not manufacture phones of any kind, smart or otherwise? The same IBM that has a larger patent portfolio than the next-highest competitor by a substantial margin? The same company that probably has a patent on breathing and a another patent on filing patent lawsuits? The same IBM with a quite famous, take-no-prisoners legal strategy? The same IBM that just spent more in legal fees fighting SCO than the company was worth?
Methinks a couple of those plaintiffs are going to get dropped from the suit, quite quickly. Unless of course IBM wants to make an example of them (not out of the question), in which case they will have their patent forcibly invalidated, with maybe some Sherman Act sprinkled on top for good measure.
SirWired
When is the last time IBM produced something good that people wanted to buy?
What planet are you living on? IBM is, and has been since the day it was founded as the Tabulating Machine Company by Herman Hollerith in the 1880's, the largest provider of electronic IT to the businesses of the world.
For the $98.8 Billion they made in revenue last year, somebody must think they have something worth buying; like:
Mainframes: The world's largest IT systems still run on IBM Mainframes because they simply pretty much never break, and they have had continuous, complete, software and hardware backward compatibility for about forty years. (As in, you can theoretically take a functioning punch-card reader from the '70's, a succession of interface adapters, a stack of cards, and use them to boot a mainframe fresh off the assembly line in New York without changing a single line, er... card, of code.) This sort of stuff is important to large businesses, who hate re-writing major, working, systems. I have personally seen an insurance company still using reel-to-reel tape connected to a mainframe only a couple of years old. (They received employee data from the state on the tapes.)
Chips: All three major game consoles use IBM processors.
Software: Somebody must like Lotus Notes, because a lot of people still use it. IBM also produces the DB2 database, Tivoli management software, WebSphere middleware, Rational dev tools, and a host of other products.
Services: IBM is the largest provider of IT services spanning the whole spectrum of services a business might want to provide from hardware field service to management consulting.
Servers: They still have the largest market share for servers.
OS'es: Plenty of folks still purchase z/OS, i/OS, and AIX. OS/2 was small potatoes in comparison...
Oh, also, the Rational Unified Process is more than just a book with some suggestions in it. There is also a large suite of tools to back it up. And for large I/T projects involving very large teams of programmers, it doesn't pay to just make up a development process on the fly.
Lastly, Google does indeed spend more per employee than this, but all the "scut" work at Google (i.e. Hardware Maint., customer service, etc.) is farmed out to contractors, who don't get Google benefits or Google pay.
SirWired
Do not concern yourself with learning the language-of-the-month. You are a Computer Science student, and you don't want to end up as somebody who gets their job outsourced to Bangalore when the new fad language comes into vogue.
Start by decided what career path you would like to take. There are two primary ones for CsC students: The Computer Industry or Corporate IT.
You want to work for MS or SAP? Do you want to write code for products that will be sold? You need to know lower-level stuff. You need to know C, C++, and probably Java. Do not worry about all those languages that are primarily used for writing database applications or building websites. Beyond that, take classes in technical topics that interest you.
Do you want to work in Corporate IT? If so, you will never need C, and are unlikely to need C++ (although they wouldn't hurt). Instead, learn everything you can about databases, SQL, and a couple of languages used for DB front-ends.
ASM is nice, in the same way that higher math is nice (stretches your mind), but unless you want to write embedded software, you are unlikely to need ASM.
Beyond that. You MUST have vaguely relevant experience, or you will have a far tougher time getting a job after graduation. Your jobs don't even have to be in your particular specialty, but they MUST be technical and/or involve leadership of some sort. For myself, I managed a retail store at a Cub Scout camp for three years (also in high school), spent one summer in the Pentagon doing help-desk-type work, and spent another summer doing lightweight webmaster and DB front-end work. On top of that, I did help-desk-type work for the school's IT dept.
SirWired