If people need to move, going downhill if possible would be easiest in the short term. Provided the mass up the hill doesn't avalanche... Globally, there's certainly been a nice set of trouble leading up to 2012 - financial crisis, Greek debt, Iceland volcano, BP, sinkhole, to mention a few - the end times are giving good value for the hype. These problems are characterized by a lot of hand wringing, lack of instant solutions, and uncertain prognosis. As a software developer, the parallel of harsh test cases that show weaknesses can be drawn: in spite of the ingenuity of man, we have not prepared much for large scale problems, and 2012 may be the wakeup call, at least we hope it is just a warning.
To the spcific problem, what about shoring up the ground underneath? In New York there is subway digging under existing buildings, and in spots where there is too much groundwater, the ground is frozen before the tunnel is made. Also, at the WTC construction site, there is a special wall built as part of the excavation in order to keep the ground from collapsing.
Where I live, the cops can ticket a driver for driving negligently. That should be enough to cover the "too fast but no hard evidence" case
Speaking of no evidence, even if you were stopped for whatever reason and the officer asks "Do you know how fast you are going?" and if you say "No", then you might be charged with negligence.
By the same token if you were stopped for speeding but the officer didn't have any radar, and you say your speed was such and such, then that can get you out. Worked for me.
I once got a speeding ticket for 10mph above 45 limit. The officer had "estimated" my speed. When I challenged him in court, he presented a training certificate, certifying that he could estimate speed with some ridiculous accuracy (forgot the actual number, maybe within 3mph).
This guy is overqualified to be in police work. Think how much he could be making in instrumentation work in an industrial site. That is an invaluable skill, measuring at a distance without equipment.
And speaking of that, a nice present would be an account on a supercomputer for running whatever I want. A Top 5000 would do, presumably.
Hopefully the universe won't mind if we call May June and thereby manipulate Moore's Law in our favor. Year over year if Moore's Law holds while the calendar grows shorter, the light speed barrier shall be overcome.
At any rate, this is the age of the Internet and global news updated by the minute. Supercomputers are expensive to upgrade so keeping a monthly update frequency may be reasonable, at least as far as publishing the theoretical speed is concerned, as running a benchmark every month could be aggravating. Technological improvements take time, but the notion that it takes a supercomputer to improve supercomputing could to be more relevant in that new breakthroughs might be coming faster as more and more clock cycles exist every second, while the law of diminishing returns counters.
It would be inspiring to see that technology is usable to advance the boundaries monthly. Indeed, businesses may feel a greater need to take more risks (not like BP, please) to achieve breakthroughs if computing is seen to be on a good pace for competitors to use in gaining an edge. A real stimulus package would be businesses having more incentive to get their own supercomputers. Personal computers have the speed of past supercomputers but businesses do not tend to think "Let's run this for a couple weeks on this great idea" - programmers, this is your cue to develop software that makes tomorrow's PCs yield answers that rival the $#|+ you can get from hired experts.
Hardware and software has advanced much since the days of the vacuum tube, and with each advance, there is ever greater danger that a disaster can prevent software from running on whatever hardware that survives. Software should be written with versions that are compatible with a practically easily achieved hardware level, without undue performance loss. Versions that are not compatible with older hardware standards might be sold at a lower price, but a version should exist that has some degree of backward compatibility, even if bells and whistles are either disabled or ill performing.
The computer industry naturally wants to force consumers to conform. Costs are minimized if people follow like sheep. Sometimes I wonder what all the fuss is about. I still use much of Windows and Internet Explorer much the same way as I did in the days of Windows 95, even though I am now using Windows 7. Fifteen years ago, the feature set of Windows 95 and the web browsing model of that period have largely held up to this day. Interactivity and multimedia have advanced much since 1995, but these features are not fundamental to operating systems.
The trend to force people to upgrade their Windows to run the latest version of IE seems to be unnecessary, when you consider that IE is merely a web browser. Even before Windows XP, people have installed extremely complex software. The latest Windows make it easier for programmers to include advanced features, but the supporting dlls for these features could be made compatible with older operating systems. It's more expense and less revenue for Microsoft if people don't upgrade - I get this argument, so I think it would be good for a version of Windows that would be compatible with older hardware (as in no loss of functionality for that hardware) to be available, while letting Microsoft sell hardware-demanding versions to the masses.
Unfortunately, the hyper inflated concept of the unflinching, tireless, resolute worker is best left as a relic of the industrial revolution... Expecting an IT professional, a researcher, or an engineer to simply keep producing something measurable with each minute of the day shows a complete lack of understanding of your resources
Or maybe something really is broken.
In the movies, you do see unrelenting brainy types that produce results like clockwork. The education system doesn't really help people live up to their heroes. Is this because teachers themselves lack the ability? Is it because breakneck learning tends to create more accidents than knowledge? Are students uninspired? Do people believe they are fighting the economic law of marginal returns, and therefore will never make a real difference? Are workers uninspired, by having their roles bounded while given access to technology with global reach?
These are easy questions to answer so it won't cost the economy too much for many of you to post your CORRECT responses.
The heart of the problem with backwards incompatibility is this scenario: Come into possession of a massive drive (or whatever future tech) and not have on hand a good enough computer (in spite of it having been faithful for over 10 years already) to achieve basic access.
Hardware designers hear this: Make a thunk, even if it doesn't promise the best feature set or performance. At the very least, please provide enough info for someone to make thunk eventually.
This is more akin to having a car that everybody in the neighborhood shares. Therefore it's always open. Some creep takes the car, gets charged with speeding, and the owner gets jailtime for negligence.
Sharing a car is noble indeed. Cars are expensive and if people shared cars, much personal wealth could be reallocated to other goals. With that out of the way, who would share a car, even if all the users contributed to mundane expenses like repair, fuel, and insurance? The fact that a car can be abused for the purpose of hurting someone makes me require users to sign waivers, assume liability, etc. Instead of sharing, it would be tantamount to renting. The rent mechanism is well known, and for most civilized jurisdictions it's well regulated, for the good of society, and that's just the way we like it. The owner has a duty to maintain the car and the renter is responsible for misbehavior but not for the car breaking down on the route to the mayhem.
And how are they going to raise rates when none of their competitors face a multi-billion dollar charge?
Maybe a price hike isn't imminent but there are other possbile financial sources for BP. Not that I know, but do they have insurance? It isn't thinkable that anyone would go out into the middle of an ocean to work without insurance - so that means we all will face the insurance industry looking for ways to sneak in higher charges. That's the societal cost of having an infrastructure.
Insurance premiums won't just rise enough to cover the costs though - they'll go up and up once they get people to believe that some rise is justifiable. That's what happened to car insurance where I live, and some years later after insurance profit reports got people really angry the rates went back down.
The entire oil industry may be faced with higher insurance premiums, and business in general may be faced with higher insurance premiums. Therefore gas prices go up, and the prices of a lot of other goods and services. Guess that's enough reason to really clamp down on industrial safety violations and call for more safeguards and inspections.
because that production line keeps going. They don't stop a 200 person line so one can take a leak
My Vista is so damned fscked - this must be the reason - the programmers are writing the code in an assembly line. It gives a whole new meaning to assembly programming.
Art of Electronics is a good book. I am an EE and I have it and would replace it if stolen.
I probably wouldn't replace the other one if I owned it and it was stolen.
Thanks. When they said Don't judge a book by its cover, I was totally lost. How would you judge a book? Let someone steal it, and then think about whether you will replace it! Never would have crossed my mind.
Not so hard - I just say "I have to shift", put down the phone, shift, and pick up the phone again. Using a manual transmission forces you to multitask so much that driving with a phone is not much more of a workload.
Of all the things to open source, as in done by the people for the people, what about creating a high speed Internet that anyone can use without charges? In other words, the hotspot brought to every home...
Infrastructure costs billions, and open source has mostly been about the engineering rather than the installation and replication but open source is also about solving problems. Large scale solutions have been available by open source: Wikipedia, file sharing, etc. If there is someone willing to take it on, there has been success - is a mega fast free Internet possible, even if it's just a backbone and not the last mile to every household?
If they create a cloud using their existing hardware, and move their own apps into a priority cloud on that hardware, and sell the excess CPU time, then not only does an attacker need to figure out what VM they are in, and what, if any, vulnerabilities there are in that VM that they can exploit, they have to cause the parent virtual machine (let's face it, there's no reason why a virtual cloud needs to be sitting on physical hardware directly - and, for this purpose, AIX, Sun, and the mainframe are already on virtual machines anyway) to run arbitrary code that would then go and find other virtual machines, find the one of interest, and then cause THAT virtual machine to give up information
The reality that you see might be virtual - this may be more true than it sounds. So it was in the storyline of The Matrix.
The other side of the coin: why all the fuss about the security of the stock market? It's the monkeys that run this zoo. Who was chairman of Nasdaq? Bernie Madoff. All this talk about Dow 11,000 might be just talk - can YOU verify the prices and volumes of trading? Can YOU hack into the electronics and trace all the transactions? Madoff was able to operate for years because no one was able to trace his ass. The entire market can be more insidious. If an individual wants to sell out, but the money isn't there, that can be explained away by a sudden stock drop - good luck verifying it.
The hackers have already positioned themselves on the inside!
A debatable point has been the prevention of crime by identifying people who are prone to commit heinous acts by analyzing genetics. Is it possible to have an evil twin, the diametrically opposite twin? Good and evil twins would serve as a counterexample of the use of genetics to determine whether someone is evil or subject to weaknesses.
I will gladly spend energy on the refrigeration so that the processor won't use so much!
The system works against me though - the processor dissipates massive amounts of energy that requires more energy to remove quickly with cooling.
So what is more efficient in terms of energy consumption? A massive library that millions of people have contributed to over the eons, culminating in all the knowledge that I could ever want, and therefore any computation I need is achieved by a look-up? Or a supercomputer with outrageous power levels but able to give me results in the same amount of time? A deciding question may be whether high-temperature superconductors are possible.
With no mega library in sight, any advancement in processing speed is a good thing, by Jove.
Well, sure, except that this assumes that you are PERFECT in your ability to predict the effect of a bug
That's just it. Keeping software in a controlled environment if there is any risk of it running amok is only prudent. In the enlightened days of Terminator Toyotas a cap on the damage caused by bugs needs to be considered.
Why has it taken so long for the OS designers to get with the program?
Coming up with a new OS paradigm is hard, but doable.
Coming up with a viable new OS that uses that paradigm is much harder; because even once the new OS is working perfectly, you still have to somehow make it compatible with the zillions of existing applications
Sounds obvious, but the OS designers may be ahead of you. An OS designer should throw the problem back to the hardware people: "I don't want to know how the CPU handles the different threads, just put the threads where they would run best, unless I explicitly want control."
After all, why should every hardware advancement require a rework of the software? Come on, Intel, if I just compile a program can you give me the whole CPU, not just one core, even if I don't explicitly code in multithreading????
Please stop the fearmongering, if you want to be taken seriously. And enjoy the wonders of nature
Aside from the domestic dangers, we haven't much else to look forward to.
I'm reminded about the folly of tempting God.
So... we may as well look forward to 1.5 fairly fallow years, and the time to do something. It's a nice span of time for peace and prosperity. Serendipitous indeed.
Slashdot Mirror
probably all downhill
If people need to move, going downhill if possible would be easiest in the short term. Provided the mass up the hill doesn't avalanche... Globally, there's certainly been a nice set of trouble leading up to 2012 - financial crisis, Greek debt, Iceland volcano, BP, sinkhole, to mention a few - the end times are giving good value for the hype. These problems are characterized by a lot of hand wringing, lack of instant solutions, and uncertain prognosis. As a software developer, the parallel of harsh test cases that show weaknesses can be drawn: in spite of the ingenuity of man, we have not prepared much for large scale problems, and 2012 may be the wakeup call, at least we hope it is just a warning.
To the spcific problem, what about shoring up the ground underneath? In New York there is subway digging under existing buildings, and in spots where there is too much groundwater, the ground is frozen before the tunnel is made. Also, at the WTC construction site, there is a special wall built as part of the excavation in order to keep the ground from collapsing.
Where I live, the cops can ticket a driver for driving negligently. That should be enough to cover the "too fast but no hard evidence" case
Speaking of no evidence, even if you were stopped for whatever reason and the officer asks "Do you know how fast you are going?" and if you say "No", then you might be charged with negligence.
By the same token if you were stopped for speeding but the officer didn't have any radar, and you say your speed was such and such, then that can get you out. Worked for me.
I once got a speeding ticket for 10mph above 45 limit. The officer had "estimated" my speed. When I challenged him in court, he presented a training certificate, certifying that he could estimate speed with some ridiculous accuracy (forgot the actual number, maybe within 3mph).
This guy is overqualified to be in police work. Think how much he could be making in instrumentation work in an industrial site. That is an invaluable skill, measuring at a distance without equipment.
It's like an early Christmas ...
And speaking of that, a nice present would be an account on a supercomputer for running whatever I want. A Top 5000 would do, presumably.
Hopefully the universe won't mind if we call May June and thereby manipulate Moore's Law in our favor. Year over year if Moore's Law holds while the calendar grows shorter, the light speed barrier shall be overcome.
At any rate, this is the age of the Internet and global news updated by the minute. Supercomputers are expensive to upgrade so keeping a monthly update frequency may be reasonable, at least as far as publishing the theoretical speed is concerned, as running a benchmark every month could be aggravating. Technological improvements take time, but the notion that it takes a supercomputer to improve supercomputing could to be more relevant in that new breakthroughs might be coming faster as more and more clock cycles exist every second, while the law of diminishing returns counters.
It would be inspiring to see that technology is usable to advance the boundaries monthly. Indeed, businesses may feel a greater need to take more risks (not like BP, please) to achieve breakthroughs if computing is seen to be on a good pace for competitors to use in gaining an edge. A real stimulus package would be businesses having more incentive to get their own supercomputers. Personal computers have the speed of past supercomputers but businesses do not tend to think "Let's run this for a couple weeks on this great idea" - programmers, this is your cue to develop software that makes tomorrow's PCs yield answers that rival the $#|+ you can get from hired experts.
Firefox 4 will work on XP, but
XP is ten years old
Hardware and software has advanced much since the days of the vacuum tube, and with each advance, there is ever greater danger that a disaster can prevent software from running on whatever hardware that survives. Software should be written with versions that are compatible with a practically easily achieved hardware level, without undue performance loss. Versions that are not compatible with older hardware standards might be sold at a lower price, but a version should exist that has some degree of backward compatibility, even if bells and whistles are either disabled or ill performing.
The computer industry naturally wants to force consumers to conform. Costs are minimized if people follow like sheep. Sometimes I wonder what all the fuss is about. I still use much of Windows and Internet Explorer much the same way as I did in the days of Windows 95, even though I am now using Windows 7. Fifteen years ago, the feature set of Windows 95 and the web browsing model of that period have largely held up to this day. Interactivity and multimedia have advanced much since 1995, but these features are not fundamental to operating systems.
The trend to force people to upgrade their Windows to run the latest version of IE seems to be unnecessary, when you consider that IE is merely a web browser. Even before Windows XP, people have installed extremely complex software. The latest Windows make it easier for programmers to include advanced features, but the supporting dlls for these features could be made compatible with older operating systems. It's more expense and less revenue for Microsoft if people don't upgrade - I get this argument, so I think it would be good for a version of Windows that would be compatible with older hardware (as in no loss of functionality for that hardware) to be available, while letting Microsoft sell hardware-demanding versions to the masses.
Unfortunately, the hyper inflated concept of the unflinching, tireless, resolute worker is best left as a relic of the industrial revolution ... Expecting an IT professional, a researcher, or an engineer to simply keep producing something measurable with each minute of the day shows a complete lack of understanding of your resources
Or maybe something really is broken.
In the movies, you do see unrelenting brainy types that produce results like clockwork. The education system doesn't really help people live up to their heroes. Is this because teachers themselves lack the ability? Is it because breakneck learning tends to create more accidents than knowledge? Are students uninspired? Do people believe they are fighting the economic law of marginal returns, and therefore will never make a real difference? Are workers uninspired, by having their roles bounded while given access to technology with global reach?
These are easy questions to answer so it won't cost the economy too much for many of you to post your CORRECT responses.
The heart of the problem with backwards incompatibility is this scenario: Come into possession of a massive drive (or whatever future tech) and not have on hand a good enough computer (in spite of it having been faithful for over 10 years already) to achieve basic access.
Hardware designers hear this: Make a thunk, even if it doesn't promise the best feature set or performance. At the very least, please provide enough info for someone to make thunk eventually.
This is more akin to having a car that everybody in the neighborhood shares. Therefore it's always open. Some creep takes the car, gets charged with speeding, and the owner gets jailtime for negligence.
Sharing a car is noble indeed. Cars are expensive and if people shared cars, much personal wealth could be reallocated to other goals. With that out of the way, who would share a car, even if all the users contributed to mundane expenses like repair, fuel, and insurance? The fact that a car can be abused for the purpose of hurting someone makes me require users to sign waivers, assume liability, etc. Instead of sharing, it would be tantamount to renting. The rent mechanism is well known, and for most civilized jurisdictions it's well regulated, for the good of society, and that's just the way we like it. The owner has a duty to maintain the car and the renter is responsible for misbehavior but not for the car breaking down on the route to the mayhem.
And how are they going to raise rates when none of their competitors face a multi-billion dollar charge?
Maybe a price hike isn't imminent but there are other possbile financial sources for BP. Not that I know, but do they have insurance? It isn't thinkable that anyone would go out into the middle of an ocean to work without insurance - so that means we all will face the insurance industry looking for ways to sneak in higher charges. That's the societal cost of having an infrastructure.
Insurance premiums won't just rise enough to cover the costs though - they'll go up and up once they get people to believe that some rise is justifiable. That's what happened to car insurance where I live, and some years later after insurance profit reports got people really angry the rates went back down.
The entire oil industry may be faced with higher insurance premiums, and business in general may be faced with higher insurance premiums. Therefore gas prices go up, and the prices of a lot of other goods and services. Guess that's enough reason to really clamp down on industrial safety violations and call for more safeguards and inspections.
because that production line keeps going. They don't stop a 200 person line so one can take a leak
My Vista is so damned fscked - this must be the reason - the programmers are writing the code in an assembly line. It gives a whole new meaning to assembly programming.
Art of Electronics is a good book. I am an EE and I have it and would replace it if stolen.
I probably wouldn't replace the other one if I owned it and it was stolen.
Thanks. When they said Don't judge a book by its cover, I was totally lost. How would you judge a book? Let someone steal it, and then think about whether you will replace it! Never would have crossed my mind.
Kite on a wire
Loading a battery with a lump of C4
Third rail urinal
Not so hard - I just say "I have to shift", put down the phone, shift, and pick up the phone again. Using a manual transmission forces you to multitask so much that driving with a phone is not much more of a workload.
Of all the things to open source, as in done by the people for the people, what about creating a high speed Internet that anyone can use without charges? In other words, the hotspot brought to every home...
Infrastructure costs billions, and open source has mostly been about the engineering rather than the installation and replication but open source is also about solving problems. Large scale solutions have been available by open source: Wikipedia, file sharing, etc. If there is someone willing to take it on, there has been success - is a mega fast free Internet possible, even if it's just a backbone and not the last mile to every household?
If they create a cloud using their existing hardware, and move their own apps into a priority cloud on that hardware, and sell the excess CPU time, then not only does an attacker need to figure out what VM they are in, and what, if any, vulnerabilities there are in that VM that they can exploit, they have to cause the parent virtual machine (let's face it, there's no reason why a virtual cloud needs to be sitting on physical hardware directly - and, for this purpose, AIX, Sun, and the mainframe are already on virtual machines anyway) to run arbitrary code that would then go and find other virtual machines, find the one of interest, and then cause THAT virtual machine to give up information
The reality that you see might be virtual - this may be more true than it sounds. So it was in the storyline of The Matrix.
The other side of the coin: why all the fuss about the security of the stock market? It's the monkeys that run this zoo. Who was chairman of Nasdaq? Bernie Madoff. All this talk about Dow 11,000 might be just talk - can YOU verify the prices and volumes of trading? Can YOU hack into the electronics and trace all the transactions? Madoff was able to operate for years because no one was able to trace his ass. The entire market can be more insidious. If an individual wants to sell out, but the money isn't there, that can be explained away by a sudden stock drop - good luck verifying it.
The hackers have already positioned themselves on the inside!
A debatable point has been the prevention of crime by identifying people who are prone to commit heinous acts by analyzing genetics. Is it possible to have an evil twin, the diametrically opposite twin? Good and evil twins would serve as a counterexample of the use of genetics to determine whether someone is evil or subject to weaknesses.
This is a guardian angel - it kicks in when you're exposed to gonorrhea, and you need all the help you can get on this one.
I will gladly spend energy on the refrigeration so that the processor won't use so much!
The system works against me though - the processor dissipates massive amounts of energy that requires more energy to remove quickly with cooling.
So what is more efficient in terms of energy consumption? A massive library that millions of people have contributed to over the eons, culminating in all the knowledge that I could ever want, and therefore any computation I need is achieved by a look-up? Or a supercomputer with outrageous power levels but able to give me results in the same amount of time? A deciding question may be whether high-temperature superconductors are possible.
With no mega library in sight, any advancement in processing speed is a good thing, by Jove.
Well, sure, except that this assumes that you are PERFECT in your ability to predict the effect of a bug
That's just it. Keeping software in a controlled environment if there is any risk of it running amok is only prudent. In the enlightened days of Terminator Toyotas a cap on the damage caused by bugs needs to be considered.
Anyone got any idea how this impacts our estimates of dark matter?
Sure. Guy by the name of Anakin Skywalker - "You underestimate the power of the dark side"
We usually have a 6+ at least once a year.
Yeah? Isn't it ... Time to get out of Dodge!
They say what doesn't kill you makes you stronger, but Russian roulette doesn't really make you stronger.
Nothing to see here. Overheating was normal behavior after I updated the Pr0n article.
Why has it taken so long for the OS designers to get with the program?
Coming up with a new OS paradigm is hard, but doable.
Coming up with a viable new OS that uses that paradigm is much harder; because even once the new OS is working perfectly, you still have to somehow make it compatible with the zillions of existing applications
Sounds obvious, but the OS designers may be ahead of you. An OS designer should throw the problem back to the hardware people: "I don't want to know how the CPU handles the different threads, just put the threads where they would run best, unless I explicitly want control."
After all, why should every hardware advancement require a rework of the software? Come on, Intel, if I just compile a program can you give me the whole CPU, not just one core, even if I don't explicitly code in multithreading????
On the other hand, Virtual PC isn't even a hypervisor; it requires a full OS onderneath it, running itself as just another Windows app
So ... install Virtual PC in a Virtual PC virtual machine.
I haven't tried, as it is slow enough
Please stop the fearmongering, if you want to be taken seriously. And enjoy the wonders of nature
Aside from the domestic dangers, we haven't much else to look forward to.
I'm reminded about the folly of tempting God.
So ... we may as well look forward to 1.5 fairly fallow years, and the time to do something. It's a nice span of time for peace and prosperity. Serendipitous indeed.