Unix time is seconds since 1970. Multics time was microseconds since 1900 (stored in a fixed bin(71)).
However, neither approach copes well (oh, OK, at all) with leap-seconds, meaning that intervals have indeterminate length. Unix and Multics (and, I think, almost everything apart from some versions of *BSD) treat leap seconds as corrections, not part of the timescale.
Sure. And that's why programmers need adult supervision. Checking the GPG signature as a prerequistite for software installation simply isn't practical. I doubt there are a hundred people who have done it for firefox.
And remember, this is the technology that will
be built on for long-duration missions to Mars.
Remind us how they'll top up the food supplies
for that?
Manned space travel is useless showboating.
People should read Feynmann's put-down of the
shuttle: ``I didn't pay any attention, because
they said there was science being done but I never
saw any of it in the journals I read''. That's
from memory, but it's not far off.
One of the funniest replies I've read in this thread claimed that researchers cannot get funding unless they shout "Doomsday is coming". Not even the most imaginary hypothetical example is cited
The standard example of that is the BSE debacle in
the UK. Fantastic claims were made as to the
projected death rate from CJD, which have simply
not materialised. The purported vCJD, claimed
to come from exposure to BSE, has risen amongst
people with little exposure, while remaining as
rare a being struck by lightening (and at levels
consistent over the past few decades) in groups
who _are_ exposed. In fact, allowing for the fact
that CJD is now more accurately diagnosed due to
far greater awareness of the condition and better
diagnostic tests, it's possible the rate is actually
falling.
This didn't of course stop people from claiming that
we would all be dead by next wednesday, and could
they have some research funding please? They are
now reduced to claiming longer and longer incubation
periods, which unless the condition has no left
tail on the incubation are simply implausible.
End of world not round corner.
In the case of `Global Warming', the claim that
researchers have no axe to grind is laughable.
There's no news in no news, and just as with CJD
a researcher can make a good career out of
arguing for the world ending soon.
Let the DoE go ahead and do its skeptical measurements and the let private sector do what it does best -- take risks and compete -- peacefully -- while we still can compete peacefully.
Who's stopping them? Japanese companies with bottomless pockets funded F&P in the 90s, and as `cold fusion' doesn't require exotic equipment, the large engineering of a tokamak, massive shielding or much that isn't commonplace in a research context beyond some paladium and some deuterium, any company with more than a few hundred employees could easily fund a research programme. The prize is to hold the key to mankind's future energy needs, which should be enough to be going along with.
And yet, most of the bodies funding CF research walked away. You can claim `the hot fusion mafia' all you like, but speculative private sector enterprises just gave up. That's because, of course, it doesn't work. And the ludicrous behaviour of F&P at the time makde the whole thing stick of snake oil and fraud anyway: anyone heard much from the NCFI in Utah lately?
we all look back at einstein, heisenberg, etc. as geniuses now, but they were considered quacks by many in their day
They sure as hell weren't considered quacks by
anyone who mattered. By 1940, Einstein putting
his weight behind the practicality of a fission
weapon was one of the things that swung the US
into funding the Manhatten project. Although it
was only indirectly his field, he carried enough
reputational clout to win over FDR. Heisenberg
didn't have quite the same success with Hitler,
but (a) his heart may not have been in it
(but the jury is still on that) and (b) by virtue
of miscalculating the critical mass his project
was far less practical than the US one.
It's a common claim to point some spurned by mainstream
science and say ``they spurned Einstein (or Newton
or Farraday)''. In fact, they largely didn't.
Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Fission, Calculus all moved
from obscure papers to real things that could
be unambiguously measured within a decade or so,
and that when the general pace of societal change
was far lower. Cold Fusion is in the same state
as it was in 1989 for the simple reason that it
doesn't exist outside the delusions of people who
Want To Believe.
US citizens in principle need to pay for treatment in the NHS unless they hold dual nationality (and there are, from memory, some requirements to be vaguely connected to the social security system in that case). How far that is enforced is a bit of a lottery, and you might get away with it. But ``health tourism'' is becoming a bit of a right- wing flag waver at the moment. If you don't hold either UK citizenship or an E111 (which is a pan-EU document which proves you are entitled to be treated in countries of the EU as though you were a citizen of that country) then you may be refused non-emergency treatment, and billed for emergency treatment.
[[ slightly related note: a British citizen in Germany gets treatment on the same financial basis as a German citizen, not a British citizen in Britain. As most non-UK EU countries have an element of insurance to their health funding, travelling outside the UK with just an E111 is not a wise move. ]]
ian
Re:Dixons stopped VHS because of profits.
on
The VHS is Dead
·
· Score: 1
Its not that no-one is buying VCRs, but that the margins are miniscule
That was my immediate reaction, but I can't believe
that the margins on DVD players are exactly PROFIT!
I suspect the problem is that most people have got
a VCR, so new sales are small, they're physically
bulky on the shelves and they aren't being
bought by the ABC1 space that Dixons is trying
to position itself to (your first point, which
is a good one).
As the sainted Lindsay Marshall pointed out to ESR at a conference some years ago, cathedrals (which we know a bit about in Europe) weren't built like ESR thinks. They were built over the course of generations, by a sequence of random people, and if you had the money to put up (say) a side-chapel for your recently deceased son, you could do so. In that sense, they are precisely like Linux: a set of guiding lights, an overall architecture, and a framework into which anyone with time and money can put their additions. If you go to one of the larger, more complex cathedrals in Europe you'll see they changed massively in plan and intent over the some hundreds of years they took to build.
That's because the vast majority of the target audience want to believe the SS were elite troops. Holocaust denial comes in many forms, and the vast majority of WW2 wargaming just does it subtly.
ian
Re:Comparing UML to N1 Grid Containers? Ridiculous
on
Sun-isms Debunked
·
· Score: 1
You don't need to use a processor set in order to use the fair share scheduler. You can indeed just bind the zone to a processor pool, but it's cleaner to just put it under FSS and give it a fixed number of shares. It makes far more sense to have two zones, each with one share, than to bind each one to half of the processors.
Indeed. I've got a complete joint venture my employer is involved in running on Solaris 10 build 63, and binary compatibility for drivers is key to it: it allowed us to install a jukebox controlled by Legato, even though Legato don't support 10. They provide a user-space SCSI driver for Solaris, and it just dropped into 10 and worked, even though it was from a CD that was cut eighteen months ago.
Actually, the more dramatic scam involved `midnight lines'. Once upon a time, BT (or probably British Telecom, or even the GPO) would sell you a phone
line with which you could make unlimited calls between midnight and six in the morning. Combined with a premium rate number you could get very rich.
ian
It would be interesting to know quite where a satellite, or indeed _anyone_ would get random numbers at a rate which cannot be practically stored. Gigabytes per second of randomness would be a hard problem, to put it mildly.
I've had my mailbox on a ZFS partition for some months. It's using ancient hardware (an E450 and a pair of A5000en I bought nth-hand) and runs very, very fast.
The problem IPv6 has, confirmed by its enthusiastic reception by the EU, is that is the OSI of the 21st century (following on from ATM, the OSI of the 1990s). IPv6 solves a problem of 1992 --- proliferation of subnets, exhaustion of v4 space --- while other, incremental, changes did the job just as well. NAT and DHCP mean that huge ISPs don't need huge blocks, and the falling price of RAM means that large routing tables just aren't the problem they were. The Internet simply isn't a bunch of LSI-11s linked by 56K lines anymore, and I recall ``look, doing that will mean every router has to have a megabyte of RAM'' being used as an argument-ender.
To compound things, IPv6 suffered from feature creep (see also: ATM, X.400, Modula 2 standards) and tried to solve a bunch of other problems as well, such as QoS. But _those_ were being solved in v4 land, too, with RSVP, and it's compatible and interworking with existing code. Those over 35 should compare the complex ``look, we need multi-part mail'' solution proposed by the X.400 lobby, which requires MTA support all the way, with MIME, which will pass transparently through any MTA.
The final nail in v6's coffin is that, largely, it's not had the attention of the A team inside vendors, and has been seen as another add-on protocol, like OSI, ATM, etc.
I think Vernon Shryver said a few years ago that he didn't expect universal IPv6 in his working lifetime. I don't (I'm 37), anymore than I ever expected my email address to because/O=...
Slashdot Mirror
Unix time is seconds since 1970. Multics time
was microseconds since 1900 (stored in a
fixed bin(71)).
However, neither approach copes well (oh, OK,
at all) with leap-seconds, meaning that
intervals have indeterminate length. Unix and
Multics (and, I think, almost everything apart
from some versions of *BSD) treat leap seconds
as corrections, not part of the timescale.
ian
And where did you get the MD5 verifier from?
And how do you know it's honest?
ian
Sure. And that's why programmers need
adult supervision. Checking the GPG signature
as a prerequistite for software installation
simply isn't practical. I doubt there are
a hundred people who have done it for firefox.
ian
Presumably Microsoft learnt from Lockheed.
But Holland didn't.
ian
Manned space travel is useless showboating. People should read Feynmann's put-down of the shuttle: ``I didn't pay any attention, because they said there was science being done but I never saw any of it in the journals I read''. That's from memory, but it's not far off.
ian
The standard example of that is the BSE debacle in the UK. Fantastic claims were made as to the projected death rate from CJD, which have simply not materialised. The purported vCJD, claimed to come from exposure to BSE, has risen amongst people with little exposure, while remaining as rare a being struck by lightening (and at levels consistent over the past few decades) in groups who _are_ exposed. In fact, allowing for the fact that CJD is now more accurately diagnosed due to far greater awareness of the condition and better diagnostic tests, it's possible the rate is actually falling.
This didn't of course stop people from claiming that we would all be dead by next wednesday, and could they have some research funding please? They are now reduced to claiming longer and longer incubation periods, which unless the condition has no left tail on the incubation are simply implausible. End of world not round corner.
In the case of `Global Warming', the claim that researchers have no axe to grind is laughable. There's no news in no news, and just as with CJD a researcher can make a good career out of arguing for the world ending soon.
ian
Who's stopping them? Japanese companies with
bottomless pockets funded F&P in the 90s, and
as `cold fusion' doesn't require exotic equipment,
the large engineering of a tokamak, massive shielding
or much that isn't commonplace in a research
context beyond some paladium and some deuterium,
any company with more than a few hundred
employees could easily fund a research programme.
The prize is to hold the key to mankind's future
energy needs, which should be enough to be going
along with.
And yet, most of the bodies funding CF research
walked away. You can claim `the hot fusion mafia'
all you like, but speculative private sector
enterprises just gave up. That's because, of course,
it doesn't work. And the ludicrous behaviour of
F&P at the time makde the whole thing stick of
snake oil and fraud anyway: anyone heard much from
the NCFI in Utah lately?
ian
They sure as hell weren't considered quacks by anyone who mattered. By 1940, Einstein putting his weight behind the practicality of a fission weapon was one of the things that swung the US into funding the Manhatten project. Although it was only indirectly his field, he carried enough reputational clout to win over FDR. Heisenberg didn't have quite the same success with Hitler, but (a) his heart may not have been in it (but the jury is still on that) and (b) by virtue of miscalculating the critical mass his project was far less practical than the US one.
It's a common claim to point some spurned by mainstream science and say ``they spurned Einstein (or Newton or Farraday)''. In fact, they largely didn't. Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Fission, Calculus all moved from obscure papers to real things that could be unambiguously measured within a decade or so, and that when the general pace of societal change was far lower. Cold Fusion is in the same state as it was in 1989 for the simple reason that it doesn't exist outside the delusions of people who Want To Believe.
ian
US citizens in principle need to pay for treatment
in the NHS unless they hold dual nationality (and
there are, from memory, some requirements to be
vaguely connected to the social security system
in that case). How far that is enforced is a bit
of a lottery, and you might get away with it. But
``health tourism'' is becoming a bit of a right-
wing flag waver at the moment. If you don't hold
either UK citizenship or an E111 (which is a
pan-EU document which proves you are entitled to
be treated in countries of the EU as though you
were a citizen of that country) then you may
be refused non-emergency treatment, and billed
for emergency treatment.
[[ slightly related note: a British citizen in
Germany gets treatment on the same financial
basis as a German citizen, not a British citizen
in Britain. As most non-UK EU countries have an
element of insurance to their health funding,
travelling outside the UK with just an E111 is
not a wise move. ]]
ian
ian
As the sainted Lindsay Marshall pointed out to ESR
at a conference some years ago, cathedrals (which
we know a bit about in Europe) weren't built like
ESR thinks. They were built over the course of
generations, by a sequence of random people, and
if you had the money to put up (say) a side-chapel
for your recently deceased son, you could do so.
In that sense, they are precisely like Linux: a
set of guiding lights, an overall architecture,
and a framework into which anyone with time and
money can put their additions. If you go to one
of the larger, more complex cathedrals in Europe
you'll see they changed massively in plan and
intent over the some hundreds of years they took
to build.
ian
That's because the vast majority of the target
audience want to believe the SS were elite troops.
Holocaust denial comes in many forms, and the vast
majority of WW2 wargaming just does it subtly.
ian
You don't need to use a processor set in order to
use the fair share scheduler. You can indeed just
bind the zone to a processor pool, but it's
cleaner to just put it under FSS and give it
a fixed number of shares. It makes far more sense
to have two zones, each with one share, than to
bind each one to half of the processors.
ian
Indeed. I've got a complete joint venture my employer is involved in running on Solaris 10
build 63, and binary compatibility for drivers
is key to it: it allowed us to install a jukebox
controlled by Legato, even though Legato don't
support 10. They provide a user-space SCSI
driver for Solaris, and it just dropped into 10
and worked, even though it was from a CD that was
cut eighteen months ago.
Actually, the more dramatic scam involved `midnight lines'. Once upon a time, BT (or probably British Telecom, or even the GPO) would sell you a phone line with which you could make unlimited calls between midnight and six in the morning. Combined with a premium rate number you could get very rich. ian
It would be interesting to know quite where a
satellite, or indeed _anyone_ would get random
numbers at a rate which cannot be practically
stored. Gigabytes per second of randomness would
be a hard problem, to put it mildly.
ian
I've had my mailbox on a ZFS partition for some months.
It's using ancient hardware (an E450 and a pair
of A5000en I bought nth-hand) and runs very, very
fast.
ian
The problem IPv6 has, confirmed by its enthusiastic reception by the EU, is that is
/O=...
the OSI of the 21st century (following on from
ATM, the OSI of the 1990s). IPv6 solves a
problem of 1992 --- proliferation of subnets,
exhaustion of v4 space --- while other, incremental, changes did the job just as well.
NAT and DHCP mean that huge ISPs don't need
huge blocks, and the falling price of RAM means
that large routing tables just aren't the problem
they were. The Internet simply isn't a bunch
of LSI-11s linked by 56K lines anymore, and I
recall ``look, doing that will mean every router
has to have a megabyte of RAM'' being used as
an argument-ender.
To compound things, IPv6 suffered from feature
creep (see also: ATM, X.400, Modula 2 standards)
and tried to solve a bunch of other problems as
well, such as QoS. But _those_ were being
solved in v4 land, too, with RSVP, and it's
compatible and interworking with existing
code. Those over 35 should compare the complex
``look, we need multi-part mail'' solution
proposed by the X.400 lobby, which requires MTA
support all the way, with MIME, which will pass
transparently through any MTA.
The final nail in v6's coffin is that, largely,
it's not had the attention of the A team inside
vendors, and has been seen as another add-on
protocol, like OSI, ATM, etc.
I think Vernon Shryver said a few years ago that
he didn't expect universal IPv6 in his working
lifetime. I don't (I'm 37), anymore than I ever
expected my email address to because
ian
It runs very nicely on their Biblo range of
1kg laptops, with sound, apm, IrDA and so on
all working fine.
ian