I worked with Prolog. You specify the problem as a series of associations and constraints. Then the system would run a brute force scan through all the possible combinations and come up with the possible solutions. Worked great for generating university timetables and solving any combinatoric problem.
Maybe Matlab could be 5GL, since many companies seem to use that to generate algorithms.
SQL was called a 4GL by our database lecturer. The fact that you could write some scripts to process a relational database on the network was a revolution at the time. Spreadsheet scripting came close along with any kind of scripting functionality with an application. No compiling or command prompt commands, just a safe little command line window.
With the Internet Microsoft didn't get in early enough since they weren't in the UNIX server/storage market. ISP's offering home Internet with SLIP/PPP came out in 1993. Trumpet Winsock was the choice for many ISP's, offering PC owners a command prompt text based USENET browser and Email. As the large companies had already abandoned their proprietary network protocols into supporting TCP/IP, they weren't going to just switch over to another standard. So Microsoft just had to adopt TCP/IP in order for PC's to be able to communicate with other Internet servers. They then couldn't dominate the internet, cloud, servers, database markets.
For a while they owned web browsers simply because they bundled Internet Explorer free with Windows and budget PC's. Microsoft made a loss on selling X-Box hardware but makes the profit from game licenses and royalties. The only reason they can dominate a market segment is because they are already there and can scare off investors that would be willing to fund rivals.
Back in 1995, Microsoft had just brought out Windows NT with OpenGL support. UNIX Workstation application vendors could really only afford support development on two or three OS's due to the fact that they had to pay per component for the hardware, the OS, the compilers and documentation, the API dev kits like X-windows/Motif, the number of users, the number of CPU's, separate graphics boards and UNIX priced monitors and cables. Alternatively, they could just buy Windows NT with everything ready to go. Companies like HP, DEC, Digital all caved in. Sun held out with Solaris. Once consumer 3D graphics accelerator boards came out in 2000, Linux really took off, since Microsoft kept insisting that OpenGL was legacy and DirectX was the future for consumer devices.
Giant pringle cans. A basic pringle can can be used to amplify a wifi signal over 3 km. Therefore, to get a signal to cross the Atlantic, we would need pringle cans 300x times the size. Maybe we could stack them vertically.
Human (or just vision in general) is the best example. It accounts for 30% of the brain capacity. At one end, you have the human eye with a retina consisting of 100 million rods and cones. Then just in that space of a 5mm disc, there are seven layers of processing used to do contrast detection between colors and intensity along with edge detection. The optic nerve takes the compressed information from a thousand areas then passes it through to the brain into two paths; one to identify where objects are, the other to determine what the objects are and their orientation. Understanding what just a single region or layer of brain cells does leads to dozens of papers being published and advances in digital photography (image stabilization, motion correction).
With every component attribute that can be measured (amount of memory, CPU throughput, screen size, pixel depth, bus speed, network connection speed), those values have been doubling every two or less years. It is exponential.
Even soft AI has led to riots in the past - The Luddites opposed punched card weavling looms. The Wapping Dispute had thousands of print workers opposing word processors and laser printers. Other disputes involved the introduction of modern practices like automated mining robots. The Post Office has had an uphill struggle trying introduce automated sorting machines for mail, due to the unions wanting compensation for their members.
It would be better if the robot was a real 3D print/plotter system which could do a complete home with all the concave and convex corners that a real home has.
They can't - there's a housing shortage. Giving one group of workers prices the others out of being able to afford a home. Housing quality in many areas is rather grim. There''s not enough space in front of each house for more than one car, roads aren't wide enough for cars to park on either side and have more than a single truck or ambulance get through. Driveways are "shared" between homes so that different garages actually open onto the same driveway. Some homes are only sold as leaseholds (you own the house but lease the land for 99 years, and pay rent each year) rather than freeholds (own both house and land).
In the USA or Canada, the federal government owns all non-developed land, and so they can sell it off as and when needed. In the UK, all the undeveloped land is either owned by private estates or farmers. We have to take land used for food production out of operation in order to build more homes. UK already imports 45% of food. Married couples are being forced to house share with a room each because of the shortage in the South East. There's now the problem of beds-in-sheds-to-rent in back gardens and communal rooms in London.
Probably, they have retired or left California and moved to Colorado or Texas. They saw the H1B replacement program in progress 20 years ago. Housing became so expensive, employers were unwilling to pay jumbo salaries for jumbo rents and mortgages so they figured it's cheaper to hire people who are willing to house-share.
Maybe it varies from region to region, but in some areas, a software engineer/programmer only has a lifespan of six years because the competition is so fierce (entry requirements are having a GPA of 7.5+ from a prestigious university and being a team captain on the school competition teams). Everyone is determined to get the most interesting work in order to beef up their portfolio and get onto even bigger more interesting projects or to get a salary large enough to buy a house. Anyone male or female without that determination gets squashed flat, pushed into bug fixing, maintenance, tech writing, sales or marketing or just leaving.
I remember my Dad trying to teach me to draw regular cube patterns as something to keep me occupied while on a flight. It's that point when I realize that each loop of lines (either a square, vertical or horizontal parallelogram) actually represented a particular direction.
You have all the universities (UCB, Stanford, Caltech, UCLA) as well as a critical mass of tech companies that allows interchange of staff and the creation of a new company overnight. Getting a new job is as easy as going out for lunch. This applies to the East coast as well. Neither area is lumbered with a large unemployed population claiming benefits.
Having so many corporations means that a startup can remain in stealth mode and keep under the radar of politicians and quangocrats. I've known companies to implode because the local government office instructed that they were instructed "not to promote anyone any further but instead to have a fresh talent initiative".
Weather isn't that much of a factor. Even places close to the Arctic circle can have a strong tech base providing the quality of life is high.
We did this in the past. All the soot and ash from steel mills, iron works and coal power stations in Eastern Europe used to create cold winters in the UK and other parts of Europe (as well as acid rain).
The tricky thing is that you need people with knowledge to do the R&D. If you are a startup based on academic research and located in a university area, then that is very easy. to do. The other obstacles are then affordable housing/rentals, short commutes, good schools for families as well as healthy meals for staff.
Given the land mass of Africa, most of it being empty desert, they have infinite potential for solar power (aside from being underneath migratory routes for birds).
99% of Norways coastline is fjords. And they only have 5 million people on a land size that 2.5x times of the UK. Half the population live in Oslo, Stavenger, Bergen and Trondheim.
What if we were to send out a photon beam from a source half-way between Sirius and Earth. We can entangle photons of different frequencies such as X-rays and visible light. If the X-ray photon is absorbed somewhere, the visible light photon disappears. But if there is no intercept, the visible light photon remains. That would seem to suggest you could send two photons in opposite directions. If one is absorbed, then the other disappears. And since the source is halfway between the two destinations, information is transferred twice as fast as it normally would take.
Any UNIX or Linux device that has a microphone, camera, or other sensor and TCP/IP support is going to be able to be tapped. Every device in/dev is a stream input or output device. That data can be read and then sent out to anywhere else in the world using the "sockets" library. That allows everything from VOIP to video-conferencing, instant messaging and group chat.
That was the time Microsoft was in their "UNIX is legacy, Windows NT is the future" mood (mid 1990's). At this time Silicon Valley was dominated by the UNIX workstation companies. One by one they dropped their version of UNIX and adopted Windows NT as Microsoft kept throwing FUD everywhere. Even HP caved in. Commercial UNIX Applications developers were only interested in supporting a couple of platforms. When Windows NT comes along, the vendor with the least market share gets kicked off. Ultimately, it became a battle of Windows NT vs. Solaris and Linux. Enter the SCO vs. IBM (Linux) lawsuit which was the final battle, then Sun gets bought out by Oracle. Now, we're in the situation of Samsung (Android) vs. Appe (iOS) vs. Google
Slashdot Mirror
I worked with Prolog. You specify the problem as a series of associations and constraints. Then the system would run a brute force scan through all the possible combinations and come up with the possible solutions. Worked great for generating university timetables and solving any combinatoric problem.
Maybe Matlab could be 5GL, since many companies seem to use that to generate algorithms.
SQL was called a 4GL by our database lecturer. The fact that you could write some scripts to process a relational database on the network was a revolution at the time. Spreadsheet scripting came close along with any kind of scripting functionality with an application. No compiling or command prompt commands, just a safe little command line window.
With the Internet Microsoft didn't get in early enough since they weren't in the UNIX server/storage market. ISP's offering home Internet with SLIP/PPP came out in 1993. Trumpet Winsock was the choice for many ISP's, offering PC owners a command prompt text based USENET browser and Email. As the large companies had already abandoned their proprietary network protocols into supporting TCP/IP, they weren't going to just switch over to another standard. So Microsoft just had to adopt TCP/IP in order for PC's to be able to communicate with other Internet servers. They then couldn't dominate the internet, cloud, servers, database markets.
For a while they owned web browsers simply because they bundled Internet Explorer free with Windows and budget PC's. Microsoft made a loss on selling X-Box hardware but makes the profit from game licenses and royalties. The only reason they can dominate a market segment is because they are already there and can scare off investors that would be willing to fund rivals.
Back in 1995, Microsoft had just brought out Windows NT with OpenGL support. UNIX Workstation application vendors could really only afford support development on two or three OS's due to the fact that they had to pay per component for the hardware, the OS, the compilers and documentation, the API dev kits like X-windows/Motif, the number of users, the number of CPU's, separate graphics boards and UNIX priced monitors and cables. Alternatively, they could just buy Windows NT with everything ready to go. Companies like HP, DEC, Digital all caved in. Sun held out with Solaris. Once consumer 3D graphics accelerator boards came out in 2000, Linux really took off, since Microsoft kept insisting that OpenGL was legacy and DirectX was the future for consumer devices.
Giant pringle cans. A basic pringle can can be used to amplify a wifi signal over 3 km. Therefore, to get a signal to cross the Atlantic, we would need pringle cans 300x times the size. Maybe we could stack them vertically.
Human (or just vision in general) is the best example. It accounts for 30% of the brain capacity. At one end, you have the human eye with a retina consisting of 100 million rods and cones. Then just in that space of a 5mm disc, there are seven layers of processing used to do contrast detection between colors and intensity along with edge detection. The optic nerve takes the compressed information from a thousand areas then passes it through to the brain into two paths; one to identify where objects are, the other to determine what the objects are and their orientation. Understanding what just a single region or layer of brain cells does leads to dozens of papers being published and advances in digital photography (image stabilization, motion correction).
With every component attribute that can be measured (amount of memory, CPU throughput, screen size, pixel depth, bus speed, network connection speed), those values have been doubling every two or less years. It is exponential.
Even soft AI has led to riots in the past - The Luddites opposed punched card weavling looms. The Wapping Dispute had thousands of print workers opposing word processors and laser printers. Other disputes involved the introduction of modern practices like automated mining robots. The Post Office has had an uphill struggle trying introduce automated sorting machines for mail, due to the unions wanting compensation for their members.
It would be better if the robot was a real 3D print/plotter system which could do a complete home with all the concave and convex corners that a real home has.
They can't - there's a housing shortage. Giving one group of workers prices the others out of being able to afford a home. Housing quality in many areas is rather grim. There''s not enough space in front of each house for more than one car, roads aren't wide enough for cars to park on either side and have more than a single truck or ambulance get through. Driveways are "shared" between homes so that different garages actually open onto the same driveway. Some homes are only sold as leaseholds (you own the house but lease the land for 99 years, and pay rent each year) rather than freeholds (own both house and land).
In the USA or Canada, the federal government owns all non-developed land, and so they can sell it off as and when needed. In the UK, all the undeveloped land is either owned by private estates or farmers. We have to take land used for food production out of operation in order to build more homes. UK already imports 45% of food. Married couples are being forced to house share with a room each because of the shortage in the South East. There's now the problem of beds-in-sheds-to-rent in back gardens and communal rooms in London.
https://www.vice.com/en_uk/art...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/fin...
Probably, they have retired or left California and moved to Colorado or Texas. They saw the H1B replacement program in progress 20 years ago. Housing became so expensive, employers were unwilling to pay jumbo salaries for jumbo rents and mortgages so they figured it's cheaper to hire people who are willing to house-share.
Maybe it varies from region to region, but in some areas, a software engineer/programmer only has a lifespan of six years because the competition is so fierce (entry requirements are having a GPA of 7.5+ from a prestigious university and being a team captain on the school competition teams). Everyone is determined to get the most interesting work in order to beef up their portfolio and get onto even bigger more interesting projects or to get a salary large enough to buy a house. Anyone male or female without that determination gets squashed flat, pushed into bug fixing, maintenance, tech writing, sales or marketing or just leaving.
I like this flying car - shame it's only the shell of a car filled with Helium:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
I remember my Dad trying to teach me to draw regular cube patterns as something to keep me occupied while on a flight. It's that point when I realize that each loop of lines (either a square, vertical or horizontal parallelogram) actually represented a particular direction.
You have all the universities (UCB, Stanford, Caltech, UCLA) as well as a critical mass of tech companies that allows interchange of staff and the creation of a new company overnight. Getting a new job is as easy as going out for lunch. This applies to the East coast as well. Neither area is lumbered with a large unemployed population claiming benefits.
Having so many corporations means that a startup can remain in stealth mode and keep under the radar of politicians and quangocrats. I've known companies to implode because the local government office instructed that they were instructed "not to promote anyone any further but instead to have a fresh talent initiative".
Weather isn't that much of a factor. Even places close to the Arctic circle can have a strong tech base providing the quality of life is high.
We did this in the past. All the soot and ash from steel mills, iron works and coal power stations in Eastern Europe used to create cold winters in the UK and other parts of Europe (as well as acid rain).
UK already has exceeded 25% power generation from renewables
https://www.ft.com/content/30e...
China is moving to 25% renewable energy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/0...
So the argument of the era of cheap energy is over doesn't really hold up.
The next issue will be clean air and unpolluted water and land.
It could archive a specific thread on a board once there has been no activity for over six months.
The tricky thing is that you need people with knowledge to do the R&D. If you are a startup based on academic research and located in a university area, then that is very easy. to do. The other obstacles are then affordable housing/rentals, short commutes, good schools for families as well as healthy meals for staff.
A lot of hotels do that everywhere. They had a anti-theft system that is tied into the internet/cable connection.
Given the land mass of Africa, most of it being empty desert, they have infinite potential for solar power (aside from being underneath migratory routes for birds).
99% of Norways coastline is fjords. And they only have 5 million people on a land size that 2.5x times of the UK. Half the population live in Oslo, Stavenger, Bergen and Trondheim.
What if we were to send out a photon beam from a source half-way between Sirius and Earth. We can entangle photons of different frequencies such as X-rays and visible light. If the X-ray photon is absorbed somewhere, the visible light photon disappears. But if there is no intercept, the visible light photon remains. That would seem to suggest you could send two photons in opposite directions. If one is absorbed, then the other disappears. And since the source is halfway between the two destinations, information is transferred twice as fast as it normally would take.
https://phys.org/news/2014-08-...
Any UNIX or Linux device that has a microphone, camera, or other sensor and TCP/IP support is going to be able to be tapped. Every device in /dev is a stream input or output device. That data can be read and then sent out to anywhere else in the world using the "sockets" library. That allows everything from VOIP to video-conferencing, instant messaging and group chat.
That was the time Microsoft was in their "UNIX is legacy, Windows NT is the future" mood (mid 1990's). At this time Silicon Valley was dominated by the UNIX workstation companies. One by one they dropped their version of UNIX and adopted Windows NT as Microsoft kept throwing FUD everywhere. Even HP caved in. Commercial UNIX Applications developers were only interested in supporting a couple of platforms. When Windows NT comes along, the vendor with the least market share gets kicked off. Ultimately, it became a battle of Windows NT vs. Solaris and Linux. Enter the SCO vs. IBM (Linux) lawsuit which was the final battle, then Sun gets bought out by Oracle. Now, we're in the situation of Samsung (Android) vs. Appe (iOS) vs. Google