The sabotage was in fact organised by the SOE(Special Operation Executive) and an an agent called Anthony Brookes(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Brooks). He organized the replacement of a carborundum mixture in the axles of railways flat cars which were to be used to transport a panzer division to Normandy, so bringing the entire railway network to a halt.
Not as romantic as a french girl on a bike, but just as effective
There was a device shown in the UK on a program called dragons den which basically allows aspiring inventors to bid for funding.
It was very simple in its concept. Basically it was a rechargeable battery with some control circuitry inline with the power input. Basically when activated this circuit switched the power off the main device and the only current it drew was that required to keep the battery charged, which was basically nil. Another aspect of the device was that you could program it to respond to a certain remote control signal, so if put in a power strip could be retro-fitted to older standby devices.
It was very neat idea and hopefully will be in the shops soon or even better fitted as standard to devices.
This is not a surprise really. VxWorks the other big embedded OS opened it source a couple of years ago. This was not long after listening to the CEO of Vxworks telling us the vxworks source code was the crown jewels. Well some crown jewels that was.
The truth is all embedded OS have been forced to do this by the rise of linux in the embedded world. Also believe me the difference is huge when you have the source. Wierd behavior and unexplained bugs suddenly become transparent when you can dig into the source. In the end though it doesn't really hurt the vendor since you still pay them for support and development tools.
Nice idea in theory, but there's always a push to allow such systems to be accessed remotely for example performance monitoring. By saying never you are ignoring commercial imperatives. It is better by acknowledging it will happen and put in the infrastructure and practices which will make it as safe as possible.
For example we deal with ship control systems, which you may think are about as isolated as you can get. But there is a big push to allow remote access for such things as predictive maintenance, performance monitoring, fault diagnosis(difficult to send an engineer to a platform a 1000 miles from land). Therefore we have been as paranoid as possible when designing the access, but its a tough job to second guess hackers(in the evil sense of the word)
I agree. One of the issues with extending a copyright term is by increasing the value of the copyright you increase the incentive of record companies to get artists to sign over there copyright rights at the the start of there careers.
Such a move is more likely to help large record companies than artists in the long run. If there was some guarantee that artists were likely to benefit, then I would be more amenable, However record companies have very good lawyers so I doubt there is a way to do this.
Wrong, actually. The machine that was built at the end of the 20'th century was built with the precision and tolerances of the 19'th century. Deliberately, to show that it was possible. There was no doubt that the capabilities to make precision devices were available at the time of Babbage. However these devices were hand crafted, bespoke items. What Babbage machine required was precision designed machinery on an industrial scale(Note the difference engine required 25,000 parts, compare that to the average part count of a watch). That had never been attempted before and could not be achieved within any reasonable timescales using the hand crafted techniques of watchmakers and the like.
Babbage couldn't be even arsed to finish the first one The reason Babbage had problems completing the project was that it required precision and standardization unparalleled in any previous project. The design and concept was there, the production capabilities lagged severely behind. Even so, one of the offshoots of the project was the development of techniques and procedures for the production and reproduction of standard components, one of the cornerstone of modern mass produced industry.
So even though the computer was never completed, as with other fundamental research there were other benefits which came about just because they tried to push the boundaries of what was possible.
Remember we are taliing parallel programming here. History and experience has shown that OOP/procedural are not the best way to write such applications. There are just to many ways to go wrong and when they do it is incredibly difficult to debug.
You do maintian state with functional programs, but instead of storing is in a variable you pass it between functions. This makes it thread and process safe.
Erlang is used all over the place. Especially in applications which involve large numbers of low cost threads such as telecoms.
Most of the problems of parallel programming were solved decades ago. Unfortunately the industry can be very conservative with new programming methods and tends to shoe horn the tried and trusted on to new problems.
The truth is languages such as C/C++ and Java(to lesser extent) are not good languages to write parallel code in. They do not have the constructs built in such as process communication links, mutexes, semaphores that parallel programs rely on. You end up writing aracne code to get this sort of functionality.
The other problem is that the debugging tools make montoring multiple parallel programs difficult.
20 years ago I was using a language called Occam that made writing multiple parallel programs a breeze, 10 years ago I was using erlang which again allowed us to easily generate thousands of lightweight threads.
Today I am still struggling to write the same things in C++ using the standard windows process constructs.
Brought up programming C and Fortran I struggled for a long time with recursion. When I moved on to using functional languages(erlang to be specific) because recursion is integral(no loop construct) I eventually became quite comfortable with it.
It goes to show to become a better programmer investigate as many programming paradigms as possible.
Back to pure functional language, lets look at the paradigm, everything is a function, what do you get, nothing except a normal programming language which is stripped down to its core, with procedures removed, namespaces and objects. This screams for a mess in itself, because there are no ways to structure your code decently once a system becomes bigger. One of the advantages of functional languages is that a lot of the constructs which are inherent in C type languages are not required since the language itself maps more closely to the problem domain. You suggest that simplicity is some sort of disadvantage. However actually it is its strength since we can spend more time solving the application problem rather than dealing with the inconsistencies caused by the language itself. For example in most languages I have to concern myself with data types so I can tell the computer how to store my data. However the only reason I have to do that is because the language is requiring me to make design decisions due to the underlying platform(The computer). Functional languages abstract me from that, so allow me to be far more productive. As for scalability, experience has show that such languages are very scalable and because of the code simplicity it is is far easier to maintain.
Ok I do not know Erlang, I do not know if this language provides the basic structures for code organization, most academic functional languages do not have One of the reasons I like Erlang so much was that it was a language designed to adress real project issues and not academic niceties. In some ways it puts a lie to my arguments because it is not a "pure" functional language such as haskell. The reason for this is that the designers made comprimises when language "purity" got in the way of usefulness. However in doing so it makes it all the more powerful.
You have a point that the reason functional languages are not popular is that they go against the standard language paradigms that most people are familiar with. However I contest your claim that function programs do not scale well. As mentioned previously Erlang has been used in projects consisting of million of lines. In fact one of the reasons that Erlang was developed was the total failure of a previous project to scale using C++ and OO techniques.
The problems with programming is despite 40 years of experience the same problems keep occurring in terms of developing projects. Many answers are put forward including new development methods such as Agile, XP, better design methodologies such as UML but we never seem to progress very far. Maybe the issue is that the most common languages still use a syntax that was developed when 20 lines of code was considered significant. One of the major advantages of functional programming is its runtime consistency. If it fails it will always fail in the same way. Compare this to C/C++. This makes testing large projects much easier. So when you talk about programming you must consider the whole package . Design, Developement, Testing, deployment and maintenance. In my experience functional programs are much better espicially in the Testing, deployment and maintenance phases.
When it comes to parallelism again the runtime consistency is a great advantage over non-functional languages where parallelism has to be shoe horned onto the language. It is very easy to write safe multi-task programs in a functional language without having to resort to such artificial mechanisms such as semaphores and critical regions.
Actually I thought ever since MS was found to be a de-facto monopoly they did in fact have a legal requirement to help there competitors. For example anti-virus firms, even though MS has its own MS product,
Another good reason that IT should work with users is that often in Hi Tech companies the users know more than the IT about current trends. The applications they are using now will probably become the buisness essential app in the future so knowing about it early means you are ahead of the game.
10 years ago company wide internet access and email was unusual. Now its essential(just try taking it away) Once we had google groups blocked for 2 weeks by an over eager internet filter. Development almost came to a stop.
IT have a difficult job, but they are a facilitator not the police. If they make blanket restrictions, they will be circumvented especially if people see it is making there job harder(also development teams often know more than their IT dept.). However if they allow and encourage dialog security and accessibility can be maintained to the IT and users satisfaction
I agree that it did not have the scale and depth of something like Redemption Ark, but I guess thats why I could see it easily made into a film(More Michael Crichton than anything else). His other books are very good, but not really filmable.
When I read Century Rain by Alistair Reynolds, I just could'nt get it out of my head what a great film it would make. It would be a bit like the Matrix admittedly, but with a alternative history France(One which did not lose the 2nd world war and was a far-right as the defeated Nazi state).
Unfortunately with Hollywoods tendency only to follow trends it is probably to late since it would be two Matrix like, but I would love to see it if it was done well(Mr Cameron are you listening?).
Yep, when he writes about physics he's very good. However I do worry when he writes about producing stable societies via psychological monitoring and manipulation(Therapied?). It smacks a bit of eugenics. In fact one of the most interesing threads of "Moving Mars" is the paranoia between the "Therapied" Earth and the the still wild and anarchic Mars.
However generally there is no right answer, only the one best for you. For example it depend how much load you want your browser to take compared to your server. Our servers are embedded devices, so it makes sense to send the raw data(in JSON or XML) and let the javascript on the broswer create the page. On the other hand some times its better to as you say just send raw HTML(Tables especially can be a nightmare, I always seem to end up losing memory when deleting and creating table rows)
I wonder whether the people complaining about IP infingement have ever seen youtube. We are not talking watching the latest movie on HD TV here. If there is IP infringment it is done in such a way to be of little value to the the infringer.
It comes down again to those companies who embrace and understand the future and those who are scared of it because they realise they will be losing some of their control. For example while some companies such as universal are threating lawsuits others are making deals to use this new outlet. For example the makers of lost have used channels like this to maintain interest between seasons. Has this hurt lost viewing figures?
If I was a record company boss rather than complaining about infringement I would make a deal with google to download every music video we have sitting on our dusty shelves onto youtube then make sure that they are combined with adverts and clicks to a distribution channel such as amazon.
And if i was google I make sure that any request to remove copyrighted material was carried out promptly. And in a year time when they come back asking for it to be put back on because they were missing out on all this free publicity I would charge them triple.
Slashdot Mirror
...It's dead Jim
Right method, wrong story.
The sabotage was in fact organised by the SOE(Special Operation Executive) and an an agent called Anthony Brookes(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Brooks). He organized the replacement of a carborundum mixture in the axles of railways flat cars which were to be used to transport a panzer division to Normandy, so bringing the entire railway network to a halt.
Not as romantic as a french girl on a bike, but just as effective
Strange then taht I've just bought my latest Dell Home PC with windows XP Pro.
Actually something like this http://www.standby-saver.co.uk/standby_saver_benefits.htm
There was a device shown in the UK on a program called dragons den which basically allows aspiring inventors to bid for funding.
It was very simple in its concept. Basically it was a rechargeable battery with some control circuitry inline with the power input. Basically when activated this circuit switched the power off the main device and the only current it drew was that required to keep the battery charged, which was basically nil. Another aspect of the device was that you could program it to respond to a certain remote control signal, so if put in a power strip could be retro-fitted to older standby devices.
It was very neat idea and hopefully will be in the shops soon or even better fitted as standard to devices.
This is not a surprise really. VxWorks the other big embedded OS opened it source a couple of years ago. This was not long after listening to the CEO of Vxworks telling us the vxworks source code was the crown jewels. Well some crown jewels that was.
The truth is all embedded OS have been forced to do this by the rise of linux in the embedded world. Also believe me the difference is huge when you have the source. Wierd behavior and unexplained bugs suddenly become transparent when you can dig into the source. In the end though it doesn't really hurt the vendor since you still pay them for support and development tools.
Nice idea in theory, but there's always a push to allow such systems to be accessed remotely for example performance monitoring. By saying never you are ignoring commercial imperatives. It is better by acknowledging it will happen and put in the infrastructure and practices which will make it as safe as possible.
For example we deal with ship control systems, which you may think are about as isolated as you can get. But there is a big push to allow remote access for such things as predictive maintenance, performance monitoring, fault diagnosis(difficult to send an engineer to a platform a 1000 miles from land). Therefore we have been as paranoid as possible when designing the access, but its a tough job to second guess hackers(in the evil sense of the word)
I agree. One of the issues with extending a copyright term is by increasing the value of the copyright you increase the incentive of record companies to get artists to sign over there copyright rights at the the start of there careers.
Such a move is more likely to help large record companies than artists in the long run. If there was some guarantee that artists were likely to benefit, then I would be more amenable, However record companies have very good lawyers so I doubt there is a way to do this.
However the lesson learned allowed engineers such as Joseph_Clement(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josep
So even though the computer was never completed, as with other fundamental research there were other benefits which came about just because they tried to push the boundaries of what was possible.
Wrong,Wrong and Wrong again.
Remember we are taliing parallel programming here. History and experience has shown that OOP/procedural are not the best way to write such applications. There are just to many ways to go wrong and when they do it is incredibly difficult to debug.
You do maintian state with functional programs, but instead of storing is in a variable you pass it between functions. This makes it thread and process safe.
Erlang is used all over the place. Especially in applications which involve large numbers of low cost threads such as telecoms.
Most of the problems of parallel programming were solved decades ago. Unfortunately the industry can be very conservative with new programming methods and tends to shoe horn the tried and trusted on to new problems.
The truth is languages such as C/C++ and Java(to lesser extent) are not good languages to write parallel code in. They do not have the constructs built in such as process communication links, mutexes, semaphores that parallel programs rely on. You end up writing aracne code to get this sort of functionality.
The other problem is that the debugging tools make montoring multiple parallel programs difficult.
20 years ago I was using a language called Occam that made writing multiple parallel programs a breeze, 10 years ago I was using erlang which again allowed us to easily generate thousands of lightweight threads.
Today I am still struggling to write the same things in C++ using the standard windows process constructs.
Brought up programming C and Fortran I struggled for a long time with recursion. When I moved on to using functional languages(erlang to be specific) because recursion is integral(no loop construct) I eventually became quite comfortable with it.
It goes to show to become a better programmer investigate as many programming paradigms as possible.
Should'nt he had seen it coming and sued before it got to youTube. Or better still use them to wipe it off the servers
You have a point that the reason functional languages are not popular is that they go against the standard language paradigms that most people are familiar with. However I contest your claim that function programs do not scale well. As mentioned previously Erlang has been used in projects consisting of million of lines. In fact one of the reasons that Erlang was developed was the total failure of a previous project to scale using C++ and OO techniques.
The problems with programming is despite 40 years of experience the same problems keep occurring in terms of developing projects. Many answers are put forward including new development methods such as Agile, XP, better design methodologies such as UML but we never seem to progress very far. Maybe the issue is that the most common languages still use a syntax that was developed when 20 lines of code was considered significant. One of the major advantages of functional programming is its runtime consistency. If it fails it will always fail in the same way. Compare this to C/C++. This makes testing large projects much easier. So when you talk about programming you must consider the whole package . Design, Developement, Testing, deployment and maintenance. In my experience functional programs are much better espicially in the Testing, deployment and maintenance phases.
When it comes to parallelism again the runtime consistency is a great advantage over non-functional languages where parallelism has to be shoe horned onto the language. It is very easy to write safe multi-task programs in a functional language without having to resort to such artificial mechanisms such as semaphores and critical regions.
Actually I thought ever since MS was found to be a de-facto monopoly they did in fact have a legal requirement to help there competitors. For example anti-virus firms, even though MS has its own MS product,
Another good reason that IT should work with users is that often in Hi Tech companies the users know more than the IT about current trends. The applications they are using now will probably become the buisness essential app in the future so knowing about it early means you are ahead of the game.
10 years ago company wide internet access and email was unusual. Now its essential(just try taking it away) Once we had google groups blocked for 2 weeks by an over eager internet filter. Development almost came to a stop.
IT have a difficult job, but they are a facilitator not the police. If they make blanket restrictions, they will be circumvented especially if people see it is making there job harder(also development teams often know more than their IT dept.). However if they allow and encourage dialog security and accessibility can be maintained to the IT and users satisfaction
I agree that it did not have the scale and depth of something like Redemption Ark, but I guess thats why I could see it easily made into a film(More Michael Crichton than anything else). His other books are very good, but not really filmable.
When I read Century Rain by Alistair Reynolds, I just could'nt get it out of my head what a great film it would make. It would be a bit like the Matrix admittedly, but with a alternative history France(One which did not lose the 2nd world war and was a far-right as the defeated Nazi state).
Unfortunately with Hollywoods tendency only to follow trends it is probably to late since it would be two Matrix like, but I would love to see it if it was done well(Mr Cameron are you listening?).
Yep, when he writes about physics he's very good. However I do worry when he writes about producing stable societies via psychological monitoring and manipulation(Therapied?). It smacks a bit of eugenics. In fact one of the most interesing threads of "Moving Mars" is the paranoia between the "Therapied" Earth and the the still wild and anarchic Mars.
It definately has its place.
However generally there is no right answer, only the one best for you. For example it depend how much load you want your browser to take compared to your server. Our servers are embedded devices, so it makes sense to send the raw data(in JSON or XML) and let the javascript on the broswer create the page. On the other hand some times its better to as you say just send raw HTML(Tables especially can be a nightmare, I always seem to end up losing memory when deleting and creating table rows)
I wonder whether the people complaining about IP infingement have ever seen youtube. We are not talking watching the latest movie on HD TV here. If there is IP infringment it is done in such a way to be of little value to the the infringer.
It comes down again to those companies who embrace and understand the future and those who are scared of it because they realise they will be losing some of their control. For example while some companies such as universal are threating lawsuits others are making deals to use this new outlet. For example the makers of lost have used channels like this to maintain interest between seasons. Has this hurt lost viewing figures?
If I was a record company boss rather than complaining about infringement I would make a deal with google to download every music video we have sitting on our dusty shelves onto youtube then make sure that they are combined with adverts and clicks to a distribution channel such as amazon.
And if i was google I make sure that any request to remove copyrighted material was carried out promptly. And in a year time when they come back asking for it to be put back on because they were missing out on all this free publicity I would charge them triple.
That and the fact you need 2 people to transfer. If all your friends have iPods and you have a zune, wireless is worth diddly squat.