Regarding the Discovery - they actually knowingly made this unrealistic. It was (in the book - I can't remember if it was specified in the film) powered by a nuclear reactor ion-drive (not 100% on the ion drive, but it was definitely nuclear). One of the early models of the discovery had large radiant surfaces to act as a cooler for the reactor. However Kubrick and Clarke decided that these looked like wings and instead of dealing with the "Why does the Discovery have wings?" questions they just got rid of them, resulting in a ship that looked right but wasn't.
Re:I'm sorry, were you expecting better?
on
XP2 Spotted In The Wild
·
· Score: 1, Informative
First of all, the update was NOT anywhere near 400mb.
Erm - the version that I downloaded from MSDN is 498,436,096 bytes. This is the ISO image version (which was the only one that was available at that time).
the heroes I prefer are those which put their life on the line in pursuit of a goal
Stage 15 last year - the one I was talking about - started with a minute's silence for the cyclist Lauri Aus, an Estonian professional cyclist who died the previous day in a training accident (he was hit by a truck).
All professional cyclists are acutely aware that their lives are on the line, especially during training.
Just one minor argument, however. I think that if you lose 1/3 of your body mass in water, you're dead. Usually if you lose just 3-4% of your bodyweight in water, you lose the ability to move effectively. 33% is just fatal:)
Too right at 33%. I remember this and it was something like 10lb he lost - about 7% body mass.
That stage was declared an epic for good reason. It makes me feel good to watch a man triumph over adversity - to rise above all that fate and his competitors can throw at him, to overcome all, and join the pantheon of sporting legends.
You, however, may prefer the heros in comic books.
Ah - you missed out the moutain stage - stage 15 - where he effectively won the race. He was going up this HC climb (really steep and long) with Jan Ullrich and Tyler Hamilton in his group - the leader of the stage being about a minute a head.
Lance attacked and was starting to pull away when his handlebar got caught on a spectator's bag and he crashed to the ground most spectacularly. Jan's and Tyler's group went by him and slowed to wait - tradition demands you beat the yellow jersey, not take advantage of misfortune.
Lance climbed back on his bike and immediately the chain slipped and he went groin first into the top-bar - eyewatering stuff. He got his rhythm again, caught up with the group. And kept going - straight through them. Tyler and Jan just could not respond and Lance went on to win the stage by 40 seconds. This gave him enough margin to eliminate any possible challenge in the last time trial.
Tyler Hamilton, incidently, broke his collar-bone on stage one. He still went on to win a stage and finish overall fourth last year. True "Clash of the Titans" stuff. And people think a quiz-show compares?
Some moron brought his laptop in from home and plugged it in. 20 minutes later 400 computers were infected. Luckily I run the Linux and had a good laugh altough it cost our company 400 man days of work.
Hmm - this moron was running a server operating system on his laptop with IIS installed, and everyone else was running server operating systems with IIS install? Nah - I call shennanigans on this particular story.
Your right - A single Colossus was not TC. However, ten of them working together would have been (search for 04T-68-2 for the details). By coincidence there were 10 at BP.
No quite. Colossus is considered as the first Turing-complete computer, which isn't quite the same as programmable.
The Z3 was considered as an advanced programmable device, but not Turing complete. However, in 1998 it was proved that it was, in fact, Turing complete. Zuse did think that it was, being of the opinion that if expanded using the same principles of operation it could calculate anything that could be calculated. He was right.
Some complain that Colossus is not really a universal computer (even though it fufilled the CS defintion), having being designed for a specific purpose - breaking Tunny, or to be precise, working out some of the settings of the German encyption device. After the war, before the Colossi were decommissioned, the bright people who had been using them took them a little bit further. Firstly they adapted them to crack all of Tunny, and then later almost getting it to multiply in base ten (the Colossi were decommissioned - with prejudice - before such playing really got to grips with them).
I wouldn't pay much attention to the "electonic" part of the equation. I think this is only thrown in to make sure that nobody mentions Babbage's Analytical Engine (which now it has been built is Turing complete).
Two things - the Colossi were definitely programmable. I haven't got the reference handy, but there is an account of it in "Codebreakers: the Inside Story of Bletchly Park", where in the period between the end of the war and the decommisioning of BP some of the staff had fun programming the Colossi to do other computation tasks (such as print out the ten times table IIRC).
Secondly, nobody realised (or, rather, proved) that the Z3 were Turing complete until 1998. Zuse had suspected it, but wasn't sure.
Re:The Atanasoff-Berry Computer is slighted again
on
Colossus has been Rebuilt
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Here we go again. There are four contenders in this race "First {suitably qualified} Computer":
The ABC was not Turing complete (and, indeed, not programmable), and was probably beaten into production by the Z3 anyway . The other three are Turing complete. The Z3 was the first to be Turing complete, but it was only realised in 1998 that this was true. Colossus was Turing complete (and this was known at the time - Turing worked next door after all), but was classified top secret. Eniac was Turing complete too, but was definitely last.
So, depending on your definition of computer and how "electronic" you insist on it being, you can pick any of them. But in my opinion the ABC has probably the narrowest of claims, with Colossus the best claim. Eniac definitely had the greatest influence.
The "electronic" part of this argument is in my opinion a complete red herring. Imagine in a few (?) years time when (if) nano-technology comes of age and instead of electronic switches we go back to nano-mechanical switches. Are these computers somehow inferior to the ABC just because they are once more electromechanical like the Zuse Z3 (albeit with switches a billion times smaller)? No, I don't think so.
This is not to criticise the ABC though - it was an impressive acheivement in its own right. But too much is claimed for it: for example it was not the first to use binary as is claimed - the Z1 used binary.
(no, I'm not implying that these photographs are resolved to somthing on the same order as the wavelengths of the light being recorded, I'm just saying thery're out there in the same freaky territory).
Actually, it's not. The effective sensor size is about ~7umx7um, which is very like the 8umx8um of top range digital SLRs. So not much gain in resolution here (resolution is number of pixels per mm, not number of pixels per frame). And then he throws away a lot of the colour information and reproduces it from memory (!).
Then you have the problems of dust on the negative, aliasing of the scanning process, what I imaging are long exposure times (as the film speed is ASA 40), diffration effects, optical imperfection in the lens, and you start to wonder why.
The list of MSDN products that require activation are:
FrontPage Professional 2003 Office 2000 Premium (Brazil & Chinese Versions) Office 2003 Proofing Tools Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003 Office XP Suite (Retail) OneNote 2003 Project Professional 2002 Project Professional 2003 Project Standard 2003 Publisher 2002 Publisher 2003 Small Business Server 2003 Visio 2002 Professional Visio 2002 Professional (Chinese Versions) Visio Professional 2003 Windows "Longhorn" Client Preview Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (64 bit) Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition Windows Server 2003 Web Edition Windows XP Home Edition (Retail, MSDN) Windows XP Media Center Edition Windows XP Professional (64 bit) Windows XP Professional (Retail, MSDN) Windows XP Tablet PC Edition MSDN
BTW - retail just means you can use the product for real, and not just for test purposes (this comes with the MSDN universal licence). You are limited to an initial 10 installations (but you don't have to activate every install - 60 days for OS and 50 users for office products). If you use up your 10 uses you can get more activations (I believe - I've not actually tried this).
For about 5 years after we were married my wife kept her orignal password in her maiden name, and we carried the marriage certificate as "proof of name change". Only once in all the times that we travelled did anybody notice that the airline tickets were not in the same name as her passport. The single time that it was noticed we just produced the marriage certificate (which is a single sheet of paper) and everything was alright. This was the third time that the passport had been asked for that flight (check-in, and departure hall being the first two - this was at the gate).
So I have a severe doubts about how well the checkers actually check.
It is pretty arbritary. You can easily get species (gulls, for example) where population A can breed with popuulation B, and B can breed with C, but A can't breed with C. Are gulls a single species or not?
Then you get the problem of animals that only mate (with viable offspring) with human intervention - zoos and painting the animals. Are these single species or multiple species?
And what about organisms that reproduce asexually? These would each be in their own species (or outwith the definition).
And then you get micro-organisms...
Generally it doesn't matter because when it is used in a technial sense the odd cases don't matter.
Slashdot Mirror
Nope - Hopkins's is perfectly acceptable (and preferred by many). See The Economist Style Guide for example.
Erm - "John Hopkins" (for that was his name) is singular. It forms its possessive by adding "'s" - first rule on your referenced web page.
and that unique does not take a qualifier, because there's only one of anything that's really unique.
You were saying?
And that made it okay to jump his ass about it?
Hell no. Getting things wrong is OK. Trying to say you got things right when you got them wrong is dumb.
He got it wrong. He tried to say he got it right. He's dumb.
Let's have a quick rewind:
They claimed that 2000 server had an uptime of 99.99999%. (5 nines, that was one of their slogans.)
"five nines" is 99.999%. He is wrong - plain and simple.
Regarding the Discovery - they actually knowingly made this unrealistic. It was (in the book - I can't remember if it was specified in the film) powered by a nuclear reactor ion-drive (not 100% on the ion drive, but it was definitely nuclear). One of the early models of the discovery had large radiant surfaces to act as a cooler for the reactor. However Kubrick and Clarke decided that these looked like wings and instead of dealing with the "Why does the Discovery have wings?" questions they just got rid of them, resulting in a ship that looked right but wasn't.
First of all, the update was NOT anywhere near 400mb.
Erm - the version that I downloaded from MSDN is 498,436,096 bytes. This is the ISO image version (which was the only one that was available at that time).
cawa aaaw
caaw
caaaw
caaaaw
caaaaaw
caaaaaaw
caaa
Crows with very large lungs can count higher.
A man, a plan...a canal, Panama
/I'll get my coat
Shouldn't that last word be goatse?
Peter F. Hamilton's stuff is all also very very worth reading.
No, no, no, no. No. No! Never, ever, read "Misspent Youth" - it is dreadful.
The rest are good to excellent (although "The Naked God" was a bit of a poor ending to the great series).
the heroes I prefer are those which put their life on the line in pursuit of a goal
Stage 15 last year - the one I was talking about - started with a minute's silence for the cyclist Lauri Aus, an Estonian professional cyclist who died the previous day in a training accident (he was hit by a truck).
All professional cyclists are acutely aware that their lives are on the line, especially during training.
Just one minor argument, however. I think that if you lose 1/3 of your body mass in water, you're dead. Usually if you lose just 3-4% of your bodyweight in water, you lose the ability to move effectively. 33% is just fatal :)
Too right at 33%. I remember this and it was something like 10lb he lost - about 7% body mass.
That stage was declared an epic for good reason.
It makes me feel good to watch a man triumph over adversity - to rise above all that fate and his competitors can throw at him, to overcome all, and join the pantheon of sporting legends.
You, however, may prefer the heros in comic books.
Ah - you missed out the moutain stage - stage 15 - where he effectively won the race. He was going up this HC climb (really steep and long) with Jan Ullrich and Tyler Hamilton in his group - the leader of the stage being about a minute a head.
Lance attacked and was starting to pull away when his handlebar got caught on a spectator's bag and he crashed to the ground most spectacularly. Jan's and Tyler's group went by him and slowed to wait - tradition demands you beat the yellow jersey, not take advantage of misfortune.
Lance climbed back on his bike and immediately the chain slipped and he went groin first into the top-bar - eyewatering stuff. He got his rhythm again, caught up with the group. And kept going - straight through them. Tyler and Jan just could not respond and Lance went on to win the stage by 40 seconds. This gave him enough margin to eliminate any possible challenge in the last time trial.
Tyler Hamilton, incidently, broke his collar-bone on stage one. He still went on to win a stage and finish overall fourth last year. True "Clash of the Titans" stuff. And people think a quiz-show compares?
Some moron brought his laptop in from home and plugged it in. 20 minutes later 400 computers were infected. Luckily I run the Linux and had a good laugh altough it cost our company 400 man days of work.
Hmm - this moron was running a server operating system on his laptop with IIS installed, and everyone else was running server operating systems with IIS install? Nah - I call shennanigans on this particular story.
Your right - A single Colossus was not TC. However, ten of them working together would have been (search for 04T-68-2 for the details). By coincidence there were 10 at BP.
ABC - it introduced the ideas of binary arithmetic
No it didn't. The Z1 (1936) used binary representations of numbers.
No quite. Colossus is considered as the first Turing-complete computer, which isn't quite the same as programmable.
The Z3 was considered as an advanced programmable device, but not Turing complete. However, in 1998 it was proved that it was, in fact, Turing complete. Zuse did think that it was, being of the opinion that if expanded using the same principles of operation it could calculate anything that could be calculated. He was right.
Some complain that Colossus is not really a universal computer (even though it fufilled the CS defintion), having being designed for a specific purpose - breaking Tunny, or to be precise, working out some of the settings of the German encyption device. After the war, before the Colossi were decommissioned, the bright people who had been using them took them a little bit further. Firstly they adapted them to crack all of Tunny, and then later almost getting it to multiply in base ten (the Colossi were decommissioned - with prejudice - before such playing really got to grips with them).
I wouldn't pay much attention to the "electonic" part of the equation. I think this is only thrown in to make sure that nobody mentions Babbage's Analytical Engine (which now it has been built is Turing complete).
But all e-mail addresses are, by definition, unique.
I'll get my coat.
Two things - the Colossi were definitely programmable. I haven't got the reference handy, but there is an account of it in "Codebreakers: the Inside Story of Bletchly Park", where in the period between the end of the war and the decommisioning of BP some of the staff had fun programming the Colossi to do other computation tasks (such as print out the ten times table IIRC).
Secondly, nobody realised (or, rather, proved) that the Z3 were Turing complete until 1998. Zuse had suspected it, but wasn't sure.
Here we go again. There are four contenders in this race "First {suitably qualified} Computer":
The Zuse Zn (Z1 - 1938, Z2 - 1939, Z3 - 1941)
Colossus (1944)
ABC (between 1938 and 1942)
Eniac (1946)
The ABC was not Turing complete (and, indeed, not programmable), and was probably beaten into production by the Z3 anyway . The other three are Turing complete. The Z3 was the first to be Turing complete, but it was only realised in 1998 that this was true. Colossus was Turing complete (and this was known at the time - Turing worked next door after all), but was classified top secret. Eniac was Turing complete too, but was definitely last.
So, depending on your definition of computer and how "electronic" you insist on it being, you can pick any of them. But in my opinion the ABC has probably the narrowest of claims, with Colossus the best claim. Eniac definitely had the greatest influence.
The "electronic" part of this argument is in my opinion a complete red herring. Imagine in a few (?) years time when (if) nano-technology comes of age and instead of electronic switches we go back to nano-mechanical switches. Are these computers somehow inferior to the ABC just because they are once more electromechanical like the Zuse Z3 (albeit with switches a billion times smaller)? No, I don't think so.
This is not to criticise the ABC though - it was an impressive acheivement in its own right. But too much is claimed for it: for example it was not the first to use binary as is claimed - the Z1 used binary.
(no, I'm not implying that these photographs are resolved to somthing on the same order as the wavelengths of the light being recorded, I'm just saying thery're out there in the same freaky territory).
Actually, it's not. The effective sensor size is about ~7umx7um, which is very like the 8umx8um of top range digital SLRs. So not much gain in resolution here (resolution is number of pixels per mm, not number of pixels per frame). And then he throws away a lot of the colour information and reproduces it from memory (!).
Then you have the problems of dust on the negative, aliasing of the scanning process, what I imaging are long exposure times (as the film speed is ASA 40), diffration effects, optical imperfection in the lens, and you start to wonder why.
The list of MSDN products that require activation are:
FrontPage Professional 2003
Office 2000 Premium (Brazil & Chinese Versions)
Office 2003 Proofing Tools
Office Professional Enterprise Edition 2003
Office XP Suite (Retail)
OneNote 2003
Project Professional 2002
Project Professional 2003
Project Standard 2003
Publisher 2002
Publisher 2003
Small Business Server 2003
Visio 2002 Professional
Visio 2002 Professional (Chinese Versions)
Visio Professional 2003
Windows "Longhorn" Client Preview
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition
Windows Server 2003 Enterprise Edition (64 bit)
Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition
Windows Server 2003 Web Edition
Windows XP Home Edition (Retail, MSDN)
Windows XP Media Center Edition
Windows XP Professional (64 bit)
Windows XP Professional (Retail, MSDN)
Windows XP Tablet PC Edition MSDN
BTW - retail just means you can use the product for real, and not just for test purposes (this comes with the MSDN universal licence). You are limited to an initial 10 installations (but you don't have to activate every install - 60 days for OS and 50 users for office products). If you use up your 10 uses you can get more activations (I believe - I've not actually tried this).
For about 5 years after we were married my wife kept her orignal password in her maiden name, and we carried the marriage certificate as "proof of name change". Only once in all the times that we travelled did anybody notice that the airline tickets were not in the same name as her passport. The single time that it was noticed we just produced the marriage certificate (which is a single sheet of paper) and everything was alright. This was the third time that the passport had been asked for that flight (check-in, and departure hall being the first two - this was at the gate).
So I have a severe doubts about how well the checkers actually check.
It is pretty arbritary. You can easily get species (gulls, for example) where population A can breed with popuulation B, and B can breed with C, but A can't breed with C. Are gulls a single species or not?
Then you get the problem of animals that only mate (with viable offspring) with human intervention - zoos and painting the animals. Are these single species or multiple species?
And what about organisms that reproduce asexually? These would each be in their own species (or outwith the definition).
And then you get micro-organisms...
Generally it doesn't matter because when it is used in a technial sense the odd cases don't matter.